"...handsome ain't gonna get me to heaven..."

If God be Beauty, ever so ancient, ever so new; could the path of beauty be considered a quest for holiness?

   The Hebrew Old Testament word for holiness is 'qodesh,' the New Testament Greek equivalent is 'hagiasmos,' each signifying separation. In secular terminology, we conjure images of holiness as clean, pure, perhaps, a bit unattainable. In Biblical times, lepers, Samaritans, tax collectors, Gentiles, even someone with an impure spirit could be seen as suspect. Neither beauty nor holy is possible. Somewhere deep on a subconscious level, 'ugly ain't holy.' Holy has to be beautiful. The via pulchritudinis gifts us with a love that can only come from God who according to St. Peter, 'shows no partiality.' Indeed, we can all become holy if we choose to grow inwardly beautiful. That path to beauty, in my opinion, is a similar journey to becoming holy.

   Morris was dying of cancer. A naturally rugged 'John-Wayne' was reduced to a lesser image of himself. This cowboy taught me something about holiness earlier in my pastoral ministry. Holiness is not inaccessible. God, he said to me, is the one who communicates holiness to us. Morris never considered himself holy; handsome, yes; but, holy, never! Yet as he suffered and pained; the 'fighter-in-him' knew he couldn't simply give up. Losing was, therefore, not an option. "Teach me how to be holy, young man. I already know handsome an' it ain't gonna get me to heaven."

   Roles soon reversed in that process of pain many years ago. I became the student; he, the teacher. We don't give up in the face of adversity. We keep on running the race. We choose not to be bitter. Disease and suffering ought not to conquer the beauty-in-us, our spirit. Keep one's zest for life even if one is dying! So how did I discover his holiness? In his absolute confidence, even when I felt I was losing a friend. The ugly disease did not diminish the beauty of his spirit. "Beauty," Thomas Aquinas wrote, "is a kind of good appealing to the mind, will and emotions." The inward beauty of holiness is not only virtue but appeals to our senses. And in my thinking, is therefore 'a kind of good.'

   Away from my learned books and monastic experience on the via pulchritudinis that Easter, on the arid soil of the Prairies, in a home surrounded by love, a rugged dying cowboy taught me a lesson on God. As we run or walk the way from the humdrum of our lives; not judging others by their looks, external/internal, we can find "holy... handsome ain't gonna get us to heaven!"  

   In memoriam +Morris H. Sr., friend.