A Reflection on All Saints’ Day

This short excerpt is from Holiness Here: Searching for God in the Ordinary Events of Everyday Life by Karen Stiller. Author and speaker Jen Pollock Michel says, “There are few people I’d trust to tell the down-to-earth truth about holiness—and Karen Stiller is one. I recommend this book highly.”

“You are royal priests, a holy nation, God’s very own possession,” writes Peter in the first of his letters, to people no better than us, no less ordinary and no more extraordinary, who needed to be reminded. “As a result you can show others the goodness of God, for he called you out of the darkness into his wonderful light.”

God is holy. I am holy. You are holy. It feels scandalous to write that, let alone believe it. Accepting ourselves as holy feels like the most bold and audacious thing we could do. But it can change a life and how it is lived.

Every All Saints’ Day, my pastor husband Brent stood in front of the congregation and said: “You are a saint. I am a saint. We are all saints.” This was always followed by a ripple of awkward laughter. The “She’s a saint, he’s a saint, you’re a saint” bit was never not shocking. We are accustomed to thinking of saints as extremists of the faith, women and men who give up everything. Saints live brave lives and die horrible deaths. They are the martyrs who are also amazingly super nice and generous people, a little show-offy with how good they are, although they would never mean to show off— because they are saints! We think saints excel at the life of faith. They will give you the shirt off their back before you ask for it. You want them on a sinking ship with you because they will let you into the lifeboat first. They seem a tiny bit boring, but you don’t want to be the one to say that out loud. They provide a hero’s story that we can keep at arm’s length while we live our more ordinary and realistic Christian lives.

We want what is holy to be staggering in proportion and awe-inspiring in height and space—to be other than we are ourselves—because that’s easier, and we know our insides so well. We believe that we are not holy, even though Scripture has repeatedly told us we are holy. We have stubborn ears that do not like to hear. We know our struggles, and we see down into the deep well of our deficits. We live with ourselves, after all, first and most and last. It’s difficult for us to believe that we are holy, because we are so ordinary. We need to be told we are holy so we can start to believe it. Our ordinariness does not mean we are not holy; it means we are eligible.

Ordinary things become holy, and ordinary people like us become holy. An Old Testament tent was just goatskins until God dwelled in it, and then it became a holy place. What could be more ordinary than a smelly tent that is too warm when the sun shines down on it in the fullness of the day? With God present, it is holy. In a little corner of Zechariah 14, after you read past the unfortunate section about walking corpses with rotting eyes, there is a more hopeful part of the prophet’s vision. He writes that someday even the harness bells of the horses will be inscribed, “Holy to the Lord,” and even the pots used for cooking will be holy. If we can hear it in the bells and see it in the pots, maybe we can also see it in ourselves.

Karen Stiller’s beautiful, poignant writing prompts you to reflect on your life and a most-holy God. Here are a few quotes from her book. Read the first chapter of Holiness Here. Or click on a quote to buy the book.