Piety and holiness

What?

I know this is a blog about politics, sex, and religion. But after a few posts on male/male eros, you post on piety and holiness? What could you possibly know about that?

Well, I have a rich (aka, checkered) past.

Example of the difference between piety and holiness.

Father A., a man of advanced years and the well-honed carapace of monastic style --slight unconvincing smile, eyes largely downcast, body contained but not tense-- was a long-time resident of a house I was visiting and I was assigned a seat in the refectory next to him.

I was informed informally, sub rosa and sotto voce, that it was my job to make sure that he ate enough. Here's why. Father A. had let it slip somewhere that he had made a private promise never to ask for seconds. He would eat what was presented to him but not ask for seconds. However, if seconds were offered to him --a sign of Divine Providence-- he would humbly and graciously accept.
And accept.

So the other brothers in the house, when seated by him, had to make sure that he was offered seconds and that the pious old man had enough to eat. Even then, my eventual fall from grace was beginning to show, when after a few months of this charade, I may even have "forgotten" to offer seconds to Father A and, I blush to admit it, may even have enjoyed watching the subtle signs of consternation on his benign face when the accustomed offer failed to materialize at lunch. My internal dialogue may have been something like, "Get your own damn food, for Christ's sake, you old pain in the ass." Mea culpa. Sorta.

(For an amazingly insightful celebration of the obsessive pettiness of monastic life*, check out The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, by a man who never spent a day in a monastery, Robert Browning. As a study of shadow projection and hypocrisy, applicable to any situation, it is pretty damn good.) *or a bad marriage or dysfunctional workplace, etc.

What sparked this post is a word that I see a lot lately in conservative writing to describe the behavior of the currently ascendant left: preening. It certainly paints a vivid picture of the kind of moralism that I have found so irritating in liberals --although I find it irritating in anyone--, that disconnected-from-outcome and often disconnected-from-self-criticism high-mindedness.

My current beef is the paroxysms of appallment about Gitmo and waterboarding and torture.
In order to preen, one's own countrymen can be betrayed and one's own country's security can be threatened. Just to show how moral "we" are. Yeah, right.

Holiness --back to the title topic-- is another matter. I admit that I have less experience of holiness than I do of piety, but I think I can tell the difference . So I'll have to go away and think about it some more.

___________________________