Holiness seems such an eccentric concept as lost in the course of history, and yet, we are surrounded by saints and saints who step aside: it is their way of renouncing the dictates of this world of ours, and of challenging them. In no way does it mean that they cross their arms and disconnect from reality, rather they have freed themselves from the shackles that prevented them from finding meaning in life. They escape from the harmfulness of social contracts, those that reduce and degrade us, and seek the spirit: the deep, the mysterious, the sensitive, practicing a kind of secular mysticism.
Holiness (in Hebrew, literally, "getting out of the world") emerges in the first centuries of our era, in which a human revolution takes place. He was remembered by the intellectuals Ignacio Echevarría and Andreu Jaume, authors of a cycle on modernity's obsession with secular saints, sponsored by the Institut d'Humanitats de Barcelona. “A saint list of characters who aspired to a private utopia in which the tensions of a world progressively stripped of wisdom and spirituality are evident”, they said when presenting the course.
Courage, generosity, virtue, and the rescue of perverted humanity... its greatness is linked to the notion of holiness enthroned by the Catholic religion, which has constituted a memorial, exemplary and magical genre. Also anachronistic. Echevarría and Jaume delve into how art, after Romanticism, became a new religion, and at the same time a form of holiness. They stop at the figure of Kafka, and highlight that phrase that he shares with Max Brod: “in the world there is a lot of hope but it is not for us”.
They also include Tolstoy, in the character of Bartleby the clerk, Laurence of Arabia or Simone Weil, who absorbs compassion in such an extreme way that, suffering from tuberculosis, she starves to death during World War II out of solidarity with the soldiers of the fronts.
But who are the modern saints, once religion and art have been replaced by technology on the altar of the zeitgeist? Are they the ones who turn the ordinary into the exceptional, shying away from notoriety, their own benefit and constant judgement? Those who feed those who are hungry and save the shipwrecked in the sea of everyone and no one?
Are José Andrés, Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg or Òscar Camps the Francis of Assisi and Teresa of Calcutta of our times? Sacrifice, dedication, renunciation and love for one's neighbor represent some of the values implicit in holiness. And wouldn't all of them be traceable in Rosalía, the saint we would like to sing to us in order to activate the timbre of purity and joy?
Far from vehemently replicating other people's opinions and even more from trying to impose their own vision, anonymous saints don't waste time getting angry, one of the most annoying tasks that surrounds us mortals. Their smile betrays that they have released the reproach of their lives. They have internalized silence, oblivious to that constant anger from whose ashes nothing sprouts or remains.
Their testimony is intimidating, and we even giggle to lose our fear of them; but there is no doubt that the impoverishment of living conditions has increased the quota of contemporary holiness. There are all those who resist, get up with a smile and avoid complaining. In addition to being inhabited by a quality that should have been the first word in an article about saints: kindness.
