Holiness seems a concept as eccentric as lost in the course of history, and yet we are surrounded by saints who step aside: it is their way of renouncing the dictates of this world of ours, and ‘challenge them. In no way does it mean that they fold their arms and disconnect from reality, rather they have freed themselves from the shackles that prevented them from finding meaning in life. They flee from the harmfulness of social contracts, those that reduce and debase us, and seek the spirit: the deep, the mysterious, the sensitive, practicing a kind of secular mysticism.
Sanctity (in Hebrew, literally, “coming out of the world”) emerges in the first centuries of our era, in which a revolution of human affairs takes place. It was remembered by the intellectuals Ignacio Echevarría and Andreu Jaume, authors of a series about modernity’s obsession with lay saints, sponsored by the Institut d’Humanitats de Barcelona. “A collection of characters who aspired to a private utopia in which the tensions of a world progressively stripped of wisdom and spirituality are evident”, they stated in the presentation of the course.
Courage, generosity, virtue, and the rescue of perverted humanity… their greatness is linked to the notion of sanctity enthroned by the Catholic religion, which has constituted a memorial, model and magical genre. Also anachronistic. Echevarría and Jaume delve into how art, after romanticism, becomes a new religion, and at the same time a form of holiness. They stop at the figure of Kafka, and highlight that sentence he shares with Max Brod: “There is a lot of hope in the world but it is not for us”.
They also include Tolstoy, in the character of Bartleby the writer, Laurence of Arabia or Simone Weil, who absorbs compassion in such an extreme way that, with tuberculosis, she lets herself die of hunger during the Second World War in solidarity with the soldiers on the fronts .
But who are the modern saints, once religion and art have been replaced by technology at the altar of the zeitgeist? Are they the ones who turn the ordinary into exceptional by avoiding notoriety, self-interest and constant judgment? The ones who feed the hungry and save the castaways in the sea of ??all and none? Are José Andrés, Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg or Òscar Camps the Francis of Assisi and Teresa of Calcutta of our time? Sacrifice, surrender, renunciation and love of neighbor represent some of the values ??implicit in holiness. And wouldn’t they all be traceable to Rosalía, the saint we would like to sing to us in order to activate the ring of purity and joy?
Far from vehemently replicating other people’s opinions and even more from trying to impose their own vision, the anonymous saints waste no time getting angry, one of the most annoying tasks that beset us mortals. Their smile betrays that they have since regretted their lives. They have internalized the silence, oblivious to that constant churning of ashes from which nothing springs or lasts.
Their testimony intimidates, and we even laugh to lose their fear; but there is no doubt that the impoverishment of living conditions has enlarged the quota of contemporary sanctity. There are all those who resist, those who get up with a smile and avoid complaining. In addition to being inhabited by a quality that should be the first word in an article about saints: goodness.
