“Holy” | Reflection by Rich Walser

“Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”

This line from Leviticus 19 suggests to us that ‘holiness’ is not an attribute bestowed by God or nature onto something, but rather a practice. We are to practice ‘holiness.’ The ‘Holy Land’ isn’t holy because it has been deemed so by God, but rather it is the place where holiness is practiced by the people there.  

But what does the word ‘holy’ actually mean? Wendell Berry reminds us in his groundbreaking work on the ‘Unsettling of America,’ and I am paraphrasing, that the word ‘holy’ belongs to a family of words that include heal, whole, wholesome, hale, and hallow. In that sense, it is very practical. It really has nothing to do with piety, and everything to do with living a good healthy life on Earth, with God, with nature, and with other human beings. If God is Holy, then following God’s example will naturally lead us to a whole, wholesome, healthy and hallowed life, individually and collectively.  

The commandment to ‘be holy’ in Leviticus, in fact, is followed by a dozen or so seemingly random examples of what ‘being holy’ actually looks like on the ground, but together they cover a spectrum of human activity and morality that provides for us a cadence of what God means by holiness. Written as they are, they seem not to be directives to follow, but examples to guide us in developing the appropriate habits of mind and heart and soul so that we can correctly decide for ourselves when an action is holy and when it is not. You know it when you see it, and you know it when you don’t.

And so I encourage you to be holy and to spread that holiness to others, and with it the peace and good living that it will bring into the world.