What Do We Mean When We Say "Holy"?

Join Bishop DeDe and Adam as they explore the idea of holiness. This episode delves into the meaning of holiness, its roots, and how it manifests in our daily lives. Discover how holiness is not just a religious term but a call to wholeness and completeness in our personal and communal lives.

Take a listen and then reflect on your own experiences of holiness and how they have contributed to your sense of wholeness. Share your thoughts and continue the conversation with us.

AI Disclosure: To support our staff in their limited time, many of our episode summaries are first generated by AI and then edited by the Communications Director to accurately reflect and preview our podcast episodes.

Transcript

Bishop DeDe (00:02.585)
Hey friends, welcome to the podcast, Speaking of Faith. This podcast is not about having all the answers, it is about having questions. It's about talking about, it's about seeking to understand, listening and engaging with and speaking our faith. I think a lot of us struggle with how to articulate what we believe most deeply. And so my invitation to you in this podcast is for all of us to practice and to work and to seek to learn and understand

so that we can speak more effectively what we believe. My name is DeDe Duncan-Probe. I am the Episcopal Bishop of Central New York. I'm joined by Adam Eichelberger, who is our Director of Communications. And today we're gonna talk about something that is so foundational to our faith that often we don't realize we don't really know what it means, which is holiness. What is holiness and what is holy? And how do we know when we see it or know it or understand it?

I thought it was interesting at first that our word holy comes from a proto-Germanic word, high lodge, which actually means whole or complete or without flaw or a higher purpose. It's a word that kind of is fraught with history and import. We often say, holy, holy, holy about God, meaning God is complete, perfect, unblemished without any...

sort of failing. And so for us when we talk about holiness and holiness in our living, we're talking about our lives being whole, us feeling like we are complete and that we are healing to holiness, if you will. And so it's an intrinsic part of our faith to talk about what is holy and right and good.

I think we can often know when something is holy for us because it helps us feel more whole. helps us to feel better. And we know those things too, that may be a habit or an addiction or an issue that when we're engaged in that behavior, we feel less than we feel not quite as whole. We feel like we're oddly harmed and

Bishop DeDe (02:26.401)
It can be as tempting as it is devastating to us. And so when we talk about holiness in our lives and the holiness of our living, we're talking about including in our lives those things that help us to be stronger. Those things that help us to feel more whole as a person. Those aspects of life that when we engage in them, we feel hopeful.

We talked about hope in a previous podcast and about it being a belief system and understanding. So when we're engaged with holiness, it means that we feel more hope and more joy, more peace and more love that those things in our lives that help us to feel hope, love and peace are in themselves, things that draw us toward holiness.

And so in your life and in our life when we're talking about our faith, to be able to talk about those things that help us and maybe those things that harm us. And we have so much that we can do with our day. And sometimes it can be very confusing to think about what draws us to holiness. The silence, we've talked about rest this summer. I think today's podcast is a little bit of a culmination.

of some of the good conversations we've been having about resting, about tending to our souls, about doing those things that help us, about ensuring that the way we are spending our time is helping us to live our best life, our most holy life. In an upcoming podcast, I wanna talk about sexuality and how our sexuality may or may not help us to be more whole as a person.

to talk about how relationships can bring wholeness to us. It is confusing at times, I think, when we talk about our faith, because we often want to separate our faith out into a separate topic, as if what we believe is not the same as what our job is or our relationships or where we live. And we kind of want to compartmentalize our lives. But part of holy living,

Bishop DeDe (04:49.153)
is to bring it all together, that it be complete and that we're seeing our lives as really synthesized. How we feel inside is how we are an employee or a boss or a worker. How we feel inside is often how we relate to our partners or family members because we bring those feelings out. They're gonna happen, whether bidden or unbidden.

there we're going to bring those feelings to bear. So how are we part of, in our lives, building up wholeness within ourselves? But then interestingly, we cannot be whole as individual people if we are not encouraging wholeness in those around us. And that may mean that we are inconvenienced. Holiness is not about getting everything we want. Holiness is not about everything going our way.

It is about wholeness, a whole connected way of being with ourselves and with the world.

So Adam, I'm gonna bring you into this conversation as we're talking about holiness and what is holy and how we kind of understand or can identify things that are holy for us that help us to feel more complete and things that may not be holy for us that that tear us down. And I guess I did leave out in Corinthians, Paul talks very much about there may be things that for us aren't that big a deal, but for the people around us are.

and cause them to not feel whole. And so out of our communal understanding of holiness, that we are beholden to one another to build up completeness in ourselves and in our neighbor.

Adam Eichelberger (06:42.552)
Hmm. that's really good. And I guess the first thing that kind of comes to my mind, and I don't know, listener, if you're anything like me, when I think about that word, holy, I think that maybe if anyone who's listening to someone like me, something like me, maybe they kind of have some negative connotations with it because it kind of gets lumped into like so much of church culture. But I think the things for me, I'm going to speak for myself. Like I tagged the word holy as like a, like a clarifier onto

Bishop DeDe (07:05.157)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (07:12.49)
something. So like it's Holy Communion. It's the Holy Rosary. It's Holy Water. You know what I mean? And so I guess the first thing that kind of comes up for me is like, is holiness or things that are holy? Is that something that is just reserved for things that are sacred or set apart? Or is it something that we are called to like encounter in our everyday living?

Bishop DeDe (07:18.095)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (07:40.133)
Now, well, listener, you may have a different opinion than mine. This is where we all are speaking of our faith, and part of speaking of our faith is that we aren't inherently always right. We may be thinking, saying what we feel or believe, but then we learn as we say it out loud and realize, wait. For me, holiness is not reserved for only those things that are determined sacred. Like I saying a minute ago, we compartmentalize it as if

Holy only happens within a church building. But when you've had a conversation with someone at the grocery store, let's say you're checking out and the person behind the counter, you make a comment to them, and then they share something intimate with you, and you stop and you have a moment where you can say, I really care about you as a person. I'll be praying for you. And the person says thank you or is gratified.

Adam Eichelberger (08:10.636)
Right.

Bishop DeDe (08:35.897)
Those can be holy moments of encounter. And you never know when you're going to encounter a moment that actually helps both people be more holy, who they are and who they're called to be. And so holy is all things. It's how we are in each stage of our life. And when we reserve it only for things that happen in a church, we're gonna miss those things that are holy, complete.

sacred outside. And so it can be really anything that is unifying and edifying and strengthens our who we are and who other people are.

Adam Eichelberger (09:19.17)
yeah, and it also drums up the question in me. So like we have these things that we typically classify as holy, but then you just, mean, like obviously we have these. These moments of ordinary these unordinary these things are not that are not ordinary for us to become holy. You you talked about these connections that we have in our lives like I think about things like when I have a disagreement with somebody that I care about.

Bishop DeDe (09:41.829)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (09:46.99)
and it leads to a fight and then we manage to reconcile and come back together. Like I see that as something that is holy. Like that's a holy moment for me. My another big question I have is like how do we reconcile holiness with imperfection? Especially when we look at the world and we see that like people can be imperfect. Institutions can be imperfect. We ourselves are imperfect. So how do we

How do we square away that holiness does not necessarily equal perfection?

Bishop DeDe (10:22.595)
Well, good question. And listener, I always invite you to think about how you'd answer this question, because this is about speaking of our faith. You know, we all are people on a journey, and we're walking with God into the best of our ability, trying to live our lives with integrity or authenticity, or just trying to make it through or do whatever we might say our priorities are. And so holiness is not about an idealized goal.

We are not waiting for us to be perfect, to be holy, but we're recognizing that in the midst of being failed people or people who are blow it daily, that God's grace meets us and can build into us a holiness that is not of our own. And what I mean by that, it's a little bit churchy language, but when you say you have the conflict with a friend and reconciliation,

is really a God thing. Because when we think of, whether it's Jesus on the cross, or we think of prayer, or we think of our relationships with one another, that when we engage in our world with forgiveness and restoration and value relationship over division, that's a holy step. And I don't know about you listener, but sometimes when I've had a real

conflict with somebody and then it is resolved. Our relationship is deepened, is made better because conflict is an opportunity to learn more about one another and to build up one another. We often approach conflict as if it's going to, it's going to tear us apart and that does happen. It can, but conflict can also give us an opportunity to exercise forgiveness, to exercise love over hate, to exercise our

desire that another person be valued. And so it becomes holy, it becomes a holy moment in our imperfection. And God's grace makes us holy. And love is what restores and makes all of us unified.

Adam Eichelberger (12:36.278)
So I think the last thing that kind of came to my mind is we kind of land the plane on our conversation about what we're talking about when we talk about things that are holy. And I think that this is good for all of us because like you say, Bishop, this is us learning how to speak about our faith. And part about speaking about our faith is how to share things that are meaningful when it comes to our faith life. And you've kind of talked about one or two of these before, but as you know, obviously, and listeners, if you don't,

Bishop DeDe (12:42.169)
Uh-huh.

Bishop DeDe (12:51.758)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (13:05.9)
you, your ministry career, I mean, as an ordained minister, I mean, as, as a clergy person is over 20 years and it stretches well before that. So you've got this wealth of experience that I would love if you could share. Right. I would love, and I think that maybe it'd be really helpful for us as an audience. like, is there a moment or some place or something?

Bishop DeDe (13:19.237)
I started when I was 13. No, I'm kidding.

Adam Eichelberger (13:35.426)
that you encountered that really stands out to you about that was holy and like, and why was it such a holy thing for you?

Bishop DeDe (13:45.381)
Wow, that's such a good question. And listener, again, I hope that you think about in your own life a moment that was holy or where you just were so aware of God's grace. One that comes to mind pretty readily is there was a friend of mine, we're both in ordained ministry. We had talked for years, probably eight to 10 years about, gosh, we should do a retreat together sometime. And...

We live in different cities. so there was a time in my life when I really wanted to go to the Holy Land and there's a lot to it, but I felt inspired to go to the Holy Land. it really was a, Lent had started and I was praying and I thought, I just feel called to do this now. I had to do it right now. And so I...

looked up and I signed up for a retreat in Jerusalem to go on a pilgrimage. And three weeks later got on a plane and went. And it was very quick. was very interesting because when I went to get the plane ticket, it was ridiculously inexpensive. So I flew there, I arrived. When I got there, was really, it was at night that I arrived in Tel Aviv.

This taxi driver, drove for an hour or so. We get to this gate there at St. George's in Jerusalem and there was no light anywhere. And I pushed this button and the gate just opened, you know, like from a haunted movie, but nobody was there. so I'm going through, the, exactly. And the taxi driver left and I'm thinking, here I am, you know, this is insanity. And so I walked in.

and I get to the entryway of this building. Nobody's there, it's just me. And then this guy comes out and he goes, they're over in the chapel. Just, it's right around the corner. I'm like, okay. So I leave my bags there and I go around and of course, walking around this corner, it's all dark and I got kind of lost and I go into this chapel and I walk in and the first person I saw is this friend of mine.

Bishop DeDe (16:03.245)
And we both looked at each other and I said, what are you doing here? And she said, what are you doing here? And I said, I'm going on this pilgrimage. And she said, I'm on that pilgrimage. That for me stands head and shoulders above because yes, there's so many other times where I've encountered God, but that was so holy to walk into that chapel and see her face. I was just stunned.

Adam Eichelberger (16:12.474)
Ha

Bishop DeDe (16:30.725)
And I was so aware that God had shown up in that moment because you just can't plan that. It was just so, you know, happenstance. And, you know, and then of course there have been moments of holiness where in conversations with someone where they had mentioned something and then, know, you just all of sudden you feel better. And when we talk about holiness as completeness or as wholeness,

that in that moment you feel like something that was missing is found. You feel like that your life now has taken on greater meaning because there's a wholeness to it. And then in those little ways, I think all of us have moments where we experience the gift of being alive and in relationship that is edifying and that builds up our faith in God.

Bishop DeDe (17:32.569)
Well, friends, I'm going to ask you the question that Adam asked me. When have you experienced holiness and how did you know it? In what way did it help you become more whole, more who you are, more who you feel God is calling you to be? And in what way might we tune our ears to what God is doing to be that person for someone else? So I'm kicking the conversation over to you. What does holiness mean to you?

In what way are you drawn to wholeness and how might your faith help you feel and experience and share your wholeness with one another? So may God bless you and keep you. May you be a blessing to others and until we speak again, let's speak of our faith. I'll see you soon.