What does it mean for something to be holy? As part of an inductive exercise meant to answer the question, a professor of mine asked the class to picture the holiest person they knew, and to describe how holiness was made present in them. I have been incredibly fortunate to have met many saintly people, but there was one who came to mind before all the others.

How was holiness made present in this person—that is, aside from the black habit? What first came to mind was a sort of lightness that he had. When you spoke with him, he had a kind of joy and gentleness that made him easy to speak to. He was a good listener, and a great confessor. He spoke honestly and openly with the kind of humility that I’ve rarely encountered. When I asked about how he discerned his monastic vocation, he simply said, “Dieu est beau” (trans. “God is beautiful”). His mind was always on God, he once said, and I believed him. I never once heard him speak ill of anyone, nor did I ever feel judged by him.

And yet, I know he was flawed. Without divulging too much, I will say that he told me about times he experienced incredibly vengeful, angry thoughts; but he was able to step back, and examine what led him to feel that way. He told me that he didn’t always feel like living his vocation, that some days he would be tired with it all, but would crack on anyway.

No, he wasn’t all perfect, but he was someone committed to and persistent in continuous self-improvement. By my impression, he has lived and continues to live out the words written by St Paul:

I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 3:14

My professor asked a follow-up question: what do you think made him this way? “Prayer,” I said, “and lots of it.” However, I don’t believe this tells the whole story.

When I was going through a particularly difficult time in my life, my spiritual director asked me, “What do you think made you go on?”

“God’s grace,” I reckoned, although I knew it was an incomplete answer.

“Yes,” she told me, “that may be a factor. But what was it in you that drove you to persist even when times were bad?”

In the end, I wasn’t able to answer her: I had absolutely no idea what it was. That was around three months ago now, so I’ve had some more time to think a bit more about her question, and my working answer is that there was a deep sense of a raison d’être, whether I knew what it was or not.

When you think about it, this sense of purpose is what drives every human being. Even if we don’t know what our purpose is, we intuit that we do have one, and we search for it. One might not take the name of Christian, but this search suggests a profound trust in the order of the cosmos: a trust that there is a why, that our lives do have meaning, that we are not here for nothing.

So, to answer my professor’s question, if I had to guess, what made him that way was his immense faith in God’s plan for our lives. He must have leaned right into it, as we all do when life looks bleak. From faith comes hope, and because of hope, we might have cause for joy. When we have that, it is all the more easier to love, as we are all called to do.