Holiness is not a hot topic in contemporary culture. “Holiness has a public relations problem, even within the church,” writes Karen Stiller, a minister’s widow. “Being holy is deeply associated in our culture with being a pain in the butt rather than a balm to the soul.”

God calls his followers to be holy as he is holy (Lev. 19:2; 1 Pet. 1:16). We are changed by the new life bestowed upon us by Jesus, and we are changing. Although most of us would prefer mountaintop experiences, Stiller points out that holiness “is often ordinary and right there in front of us. Holiness can have a touch of the monotonous.”

Stiller focuses on several words — fruit, body, money, hospitality, humility, beauty, church, remembering, and sorrow — to explain how holiness might become real in our lives.

Stiller is courageous and even blunt in her chapter on money. Most of us, including in church circles, are uncomfortable talking about money. She cites an online article “about how money quietly poisons our faith,” and further says that “one of the problems with our preoccupation with money is that money creates a false sense of security.”

Stiller admits that money has been a difficult area in her spiritual life and that she has often been “a grouchy, reluctant giver.” Some people, particularly parishioners, often believe clergy and their spouses are above such worldly struggles. It’s refreshing and encouraging to find that almost everyone struggles with this area of holiness.

Stiller brings a similar focus to humility: “Sometimes we learn humility because we seek it. More often, it finds us sitting around thinking we are a little bit fabulous.” Humility seems to be sorely lacking among many Christian leaders in a world that values celebrity above all else.

In contrast, Stiller writes about how holiness might play out: “We can be the people who don’t suck up all the oxygen in the room, but instead carry the light of Jesus in front of us like a tiny lit candle. This is very hard, until it somehow and at some time gets easier.” Our attempts at selflessness highlight our need of God’s grace, and true humility can acknowledge our lack of answers. After all, “A belief in our own spiritual knowingness is unpleasant for ourselves and others.”

A chapter on church might have been upbeat to the point of pollyannaish or so brutally honest that all hope would be abandoned. Stiller found the truth in the middle: “When leaders fall and pastors fail in the spectacular ways they sometimes do, a thick fog sinks over the church. … They do such damage.”

In the same chapter, Stiller writes how much we Christians need the church: “We now belong to something so much bigger and more beautiful than our own individual lives. We grow best when we are together and turned toward Jesus, no matter how annoying it can all be.”

Stiller almost makes a case for the Daily Examen in “Remembering.” She writes, “We will need to remember when we saw God so closely or felt him like the gentlest of breezes, because there will be so many times when we feel like God is distant.” Or in Ignatian terms, consolation helps us live through desolation. Stiller further explains, “Remembering is not going backward, but actually a way we can move forward. Our memories of encounters with God’s holiness can sustain us for our own journey deeper in and further out, into our own holy callings in the world.”

Stiller’s penultimate chapter, “Sorrow,” is her most poignant. Her husband, Brent, died suddenly, and she tells the story in a loving and respectful manner that acknowledges that while all will encounter sorrow in their Christian journeys, a loving God will be there with them.

“I came to understand early on that God’s comfort can arrive most obviously, for me at least, in the shape of other people,” she writes. “The church, family, friends, neighbors, the guy who shovels our driveway — they all emerged from the valley sides carrying tiny bits of light. The Shepherd was present.”

The faith that her husband had proclaimed in his ministry and their family had lived carried them in their time of need. Stiller does not resort to easy answers or trite spiritual slogans as she recalls the story of Jesus, the sisters Mary and Martha, and their brother, Lazarus: “There were no answers to the why, just the reminder of Jesus who cried with his friends who grieved.”

Holiness Here is worthwhile because Jesus’ modern-day disciples are shaped most often by following leaders who freely admit their fallenness while seeking holiness in their everyday lives.

A few weeks ago my husband, Tom, and I were in South Africa helping to train indigenous youth leaders from Eswatini, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Part of our assignment was to teach listening to others. I always begin by asking, “How many of you have enough people in your life to listen to you?” I was shocked and saddened when none of the 60 people present answered in the affirmative.

We first began thinking about listening as a spiritual discipline over 25 years ago, when the Rev. Anne Long spoke at the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham. Anne Long was the first woman ordained deacon in the Church of England and began a listening ministry in Whitehall that is still active today. In her book Listening, she recounts having a vision of Jesus with withered ears while she prayed about beginning a healing ministry.

In our ministry at The Abbey on Lovers Lane, including my work as a spiritual director, I find over and over the healing power of listening. Several months ago, a directee told me about his child who was in constant pain and had endured a great number of surgeries. Until then, I didn’t realize the extent of his son’s impairment, and I was stunned. I was only able to say, “Wow! That’s a lot,” to which my directee responded, “Thank you! No one will let me say that.” This is a powerful reminder of how deeply our hearts yearn to be heard and the scriptural truth that “when I am weak, he is strong” (2 Cor. 12:10).

I also see more and more the importance of listening in my family. My mother recently died and my 97-year-old father desperately misses her. When he calls to tell me that he’s lonely and he’s sad, all I can do is tell him, “I know you miss Mom. So do I. I am sorry that’s so hard.” A few years ago a dear friend told me, “All unsolicited advice is taken as criticism.” I have tried to make that my mantra with my adult sons. Most of the time they simply want someone who cares to hear them. I call this incarnational listening — my presence and attention shows them there is a relational God who knows them and never tires of hearing them.

Of course everyone suffers. In South Africa the youth leaders we worked with are facing enormous struggles: staggering poverty and unemployment rates, backgrounds of terrible abuse, fathers refusing to acknowledge them, high mortality rates, and hopelessness and despair. It’s easy to say listening isn’t enough, but maybe it is the place to start. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said in Life Together, “The first service one owes to others in a community involves listening to them. Just as our love for God begins with listening to God’s Word, the beginning of love for others is learning to listen to them.”

About 18 months ago my mother had a stroke. Nana, her “grandmother name,” was already in poor health and confined to a wheelchair, but the stroke necessitated a move for both of my parents to an assisted living facility. Nana, who turned 90 last August, continued to decline after the stroke, became bedridden, and hospice was called in around Thanksgiving. Mercifully, she departed this life on January 12.

During the past 18 months, I have flown from my home (Dallas, Texas) to my parents’ home (Memphis, Tennessee) so many times that after one medical crisis I couldn’t remember which way I was flying while I was actually on the plane. Anyone who has cared for a sick loved one knows the tremendous physical, emotional, and spiritual toll it takes on caregivers. On Ash Wednesday I heartily agree that I am dust and to dust I shall return. But it was difficult to understand why my elderly and infirm mother kept hanging on. I prayed every day that she would die and go mercifully into the arms of Jesus. Her dying was painfully slow and I questioned how God could let her linger. Still, when death finally came, I couldn’t believe how teary I became. As my brother says, “Our mommy died,” which of course is true, even though we are both in our 60s.

There have been so many things to be thankful for during this difficult journey. My parents’ Baptist church has truly been a spiritual home to them, their pastor has been attentive and responsive, my brother and I have not had one disagreement or unkind word between us, the hospice nurses and aides have been wonderful, Nana’s friend Barbara came to sit with her every day, and our Christian hope of eternal life in God’s loving arms has been reassuring and real.

Still, saying goodbye to my mother is complicated. During my 60 plus years with her, she has been difficult at times and loving at others. Nana was imperfect, as was I, and sometimes those flawed worlds collided. But the memories that are precious include her teaching me “Silent Night” and “Away in a Manger,” and never letting a day go by without kissing and hugging me and telling me how much she loved me. I guess part of the grief includes mourning the difficulties as well as the joys, and knowing that even those we love the most come to us as mixed bags.

Losing a parent also brings crashing home one’s own mortality. It doesn’t seem possible that my two little boys are both grown men, and I am now “Grammy” to the next generation. My husband and I are thinking of downsizing and what retirement will look like for us. I am trying to stop accumulating so my children won’t have so much to purge when I die. And I talk often with God about how I want the last part of my life on earth look.

Lent is a season of conversion. For me, the conversion involves letting go as I say goodbye to Nana. Thank you for your love and care and for being a wonderful grandmother. You believed for me when I was too young to believe for myself, and now I have a relationship with God all my own. I am grateful for this and so many other things. “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us” (Heb. 12:1).

Marcia Hotchkiss is a spiritual director, retreat leader, and cofounder of The Abbey on Lovers Lane (abbeyonlovers.org). Marcia recently coauthored Hope-Peace-Love-Joy: An Advent Devotional. She is a member of Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Dallas.

Be Still and Know is a rare thing: a devotional written by a woman from the Global South but published in the Global North. It includes section introductions by four clergymen — a bishop and a canon from the Anglican Diocese of the North Eastern Caribbean and Aruba and two Moravian clerics from the West Indies.

Mrs. Simon and I are both clergy spouses, and I found many of her daily entries honest and compelling. She reminds us of the wisdom found in Matthew 5:22-24 (“If your brother or sister has something against you … first be reconciled … and then come and offer your gift”), and confesses that sometimes she feels God’s call to reconciliation can be “a huge sacrifice,” especially when she is not the wrongdoer.

In another entry she says that when her son was small, she created a private, invisible record in her mind and named it the “hypocrite file.”  Mrs. Simon purposedly noted every time she found herself correcting her son when she struggled with the same issue. Now that her son is older, he readily points out any of his mother’s double standards. Most parents know that our children are often those who most powerfully show us our flaws.

Simon provides daily readings as well as a short reflection, a prayer starter, a short phrase or two that she labels as “Today’s Thought,” and a couple of additional Bible verses to allow the reader to go deeper. I especially liked the prayer starters. Simon has a knack for clearly stating the human needs highlighted by each devotional entry. In an entry titled “Choose Life!” she thanks God for the Holy Spirit, who “leads and guides me into all truth.” We liturgical sorts can easily forget that the Spirit brings more transformation than our own efforts do.

Simon says in her introduction to this 40-day devotional that “life is demanding,” so she’s made all of the “devotions concise and to the point.” She adds that this makes the book usable during all seasons of the year. I see her point, but on the back cover, we’re told that in five minutes or less per day, “you can connect with your Father and discover who He is, feed on His Word and keep growing spiritually, learn to see yourself as God sees you, and take away some nugget for reflection and refreshment.”

That’s an astounding claim even for coming to know another human being, let alone the God of the universe.

Those familiar with the late Howard Thurman know that he was considered the spiritual director of the civil rights movement and that Martin Luther King Jr. carried Jesus and the Disinherited in his coat pocket while marching for social change. “Part of Howard Thurman’s response to God was to provide the spiritual and philosophical underpinnings for the work that calls people to action,” Lerita Coleman Brown writes.

While Thurman did not march, he knew that without spiritual grounding, social activism was too difficult to sustain peacefully. Besides King, Thurman mentored and inspired Jesse Jackson, Bayard Rustin, Marian Wright Edelman, Vernon Jordan, and many others. Thurman and his wife were among the earliest activists to travel to India and meet with Gandhi. They brought back Gandhi’s doctrine of nonviolence that King adopted.

What Makes You Come Alive is composed of ten chapters on different topics that identify Thurman’s significance in the 20th-century American church, contemplative spirituality, and the civil rights movement.

Coleman Brown relates how racism was a very real presence throughout Thurman’s life, but through the spiritual nurturing of his mother and grandmother, a former slave who could not read, he learned to know the Creator of the universe by reading Scripture and by being in nature. As a young boy he found that silence and solitude were important spiritual disciplines that enabled him to “center down” and commune with the Transcendent. Coleman Brown relates how her introduction to this important figure legitimized her questions about the lack of Black and Brown voices in the contemplative stream of Christianity.

Thurman observed that Jesus was a contemplative, as he often prayed alone in the early morning or late in the day after the crowds had gone away: “This was the time for the long breath, when all the fragments left by the commonplace, when all the hurts and the big aches could be absorbed, and the mind could be freed of the immediate demand, when voices that had been quieted by the long day’s work could once more be heard, when there could be the deep sharing of the innermost secrets and the laying bare of the heart and mind.” Thurman’s words are seamlessly woven into the text throughout the book.

Each chapter discusses an aspect of Thurman’s core beliefs, and relates them to Coleman Brown’s experiences of living as a Black woman in the United States. Coleman Brown relates the importance of Thurman’s beliefs to everyday spiritual seekers. She teaches that deep connection with the living God is not just for monks, but for everyone. Thurman’s belief that everyone is a holy child of God, spiritually and psychologically, anchors us in all areas of life. She expands on this theme: “Inner Authority does not emerge from us, but from Spirit within,” and “beneath all our ego desires — for importance, fortune, power, and possessions — is a hunger for our Creator.”

Each chapter ends with reflection questions and spiritual steps, which would be very useful in an individual or group study. This book taught me more about Thurman, one of the most important and yet less-known leaders of the 20th-century American church. But more than that, it made me think and feel deeply about the different aspects of Thurman’s doctrine, and how being a holy child of God plays out in my life. I hope many read this book and have the same experience.

Marcia Hotchkiss is program director for the Abbey on Lovers Lane, Dallas (abbeyonlovers.org).