In our culture it is the fate of holiness to be banalized. Holiness is reduced to blandness, the specialty of sectarian groups who reduce life to behaviors and cliches that can be certified as safe; goodness in a straightjacket, truth drained of mystery, beauty emasculated into ceramic knickknacks. Whenever I run up against this, I remember Eileen Glasgow's wonderful line in her autobiography. Of her father, a Presbyterian elder full of rectitude and rigid with duty, she wrote, "He was entirely unselfish, and in his long life never committed a pleasure."
But holiness is in wild and furious opposition to all such banality and blandness. The God-life cannot be domesticated or used- it can only be entered into on its own terms. Holiness does not make God smaller so that he can be used in convenient and manageable projects; it makes us larger so that God can give out life through us, extravagantly, spontaneously. The holy is an interior fire, a passion for living in and for God, a capacity for exuberance in the presence of God. There are springs deep within and around us from which we can drink and sing God.
Eugene Peterson- The Jesus Way, page 128
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