Holiness Here
Holiness Here (NavPress) by Karen Stiller is a gentle, earthy book about holy living—a life both amiable and attainable, nothing whatsoever to do with being holier-than-thou. Holiness, Stiller writes, has an everydayness to it. It’s relational and embodied. It’s a gift we receive from God, something we offer to others in turn.
In a chapter on hospitality—one of those embodied, relational practices of holiness—Stiller recalls a time when her family decided to invite neighbors over for an open house during Advent. They went to the trouble of making invitations, leaving them at doors and in mailboxes. And then they waited to see if anyone would show up.
“Hospitality always carries with it the risk of humiliation,” she writes, “which helps with humility, which is another holy thing.”
An assemblage of neighbors did show up, including a couple they didn’t know but who had always waved to Stiller when she was out walking the dog. So insistent and eager was their waving that she had sometimes taken a different route home, just to avoid their apparent eagerness and, she admits, “what I sensed was a deep loneliness.”
As they got to know each other, there at that Advent party, the couple shared about losing two children long ago, one to a hit-and-run and the other to an asthma attack. “Their losses reminded me that such losses are possible,” Stiller writes, “and my impulse was to avoid them. That’s what non-grieving people often do with grieving people. Blessed are the people who have really sad people over for a cheese ball.”
Blessed indeed. And maybe just a bit holy too.
Little by little at that Advent gathering, neighbor after neighbor spoke of the griefs they were carrying. One man (“a tough guy”) began to cry, his tears surprising everyone—including himself. A little later, as Stiller’s pastor husband sang “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” another neighbor walked over to the tough guy, who continued to weep. “She put her arms around him and rocked him back and forth. She murmured to him as a mother does. We sang on . . . a slightly off-key soundtrack to a small healing.”
Holiness, friends, isn’t smug or self-righteous. It isn’t combative or highfalutin. Holiness weeps. Holiness heals.
