Holy

Every once in a while I start blog posts off with the musing “I wonder who reads this anymore?” I usually wonder this when my blogging has tapered way off. As it has.

I wonder who reads this anymore?

I was looking through my Church Talk File for something specific and came across this one from summer 2020. I’ve been thinking about holiness for a few years now. Enjoy. (If you are a religious person. :)

Several years ago I was talking with my brother-in-law Bruce about some commotion that was happening at the time with our church, which was in the news and was pretty public. He mentioned the push for “keeping the Sabbath day holy,” which you may remember was a part of a LOT of church lessons and meetings about 6-7 years ago, like a LOT. Like enough that we joked about it, “ANOTHER lesson about the Sabbath day?!” 

He said, “I could not understand why, when all of this other stuff was happening, that we kept getting this message to keep the Sabbath day holy. I thought about it and thought about it, and then I realized… of course. Of course this is the message. Recognizing holiness is the message, and not becoming casual is the message. We need to have conversations about the other stuff too, but this might be the most important thing we need to remember, right now.”

I have thought about that conversation dozens of times since then. I feel pretty confident about my ability to keep the Sabbath day holy. It’s a fairly fluid commandment, we aren’t given super specific instructions about it, and every family observes it as they see fit. Maybe I’m more or less orthodox than you are, it’s not a curve that we’ll all be graded on. But learning to keep something holy is actually a foundational tenet. I noticed that of the 10 commandments, it’s one of only two that doesn’t begin with “Thou shalt.” Instead, it says, “Remember.” Which President Kimball said was the most important word in the dictionary. “Our greatest need is to remember.”

I have also been thinking about how I actually have felt closest to God at times when I was working my hardest. When I was giving birth or when I was running a really hard race. James E. Faust said that “holiness is the strength of the soul.” Physical strength only comes after really hard work, when you’ve pushed your body to its limits again and again, and spiritual strength also comes through work. Pushing your soul until you think your heart might break. And eventually maybe it will break. President Faust said that holiness “comes by faith and through obedience to God’s laws and ordinances… Holiness speaks when there is silence, encouraging that which is good or reproving that which is wrong.”

I would venture that experiencing and recognizing holiness can’t quite be prescribed perfectly for every person, just like keeping the Sabbath day holy can’t be prescribed perfectly for every person. We learn to consistently recognize holiness in ourselves and in our environment when we have worked hard to get there.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when God spoke to Moses through a burning bush, or when He delivered the 10 commandments, that Moses had just climbed a mountain. I haven’t been to Mount Sinai but its elevation is 7,000 feet up. For comparison, Old Rag in Shenandoah is 3,000 feet up. Moses was a shepherd so he was in pretty good shape, and he was very familiar with those mountains, but I bet he was sweating a little.

The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote that “Earth’s crammed with heaven / And every common bush afire with God; / But only he who sees takes off his shoes.” I think we’re more likely to see these “bushes on fire” if we are out there in the world working hard, and deliberately looking for holiness and heaven around us. We will find them if we look for them. We will find our Heavenly Parents if we look for them. We will find our Savior if we look for Him. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.