Holiness Here

Karen Stiller is a writer to trust with talk about holiness

As paid subscribers know, I’ve been reading the late Eugene Peterson’s Practice Resurrection in this season of Eastertide. It’s a book-length reflection on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, which opens with a reminder that we’ve been called into a life of holiness.

If you know holy people (and I have been blessed to know more than a few), you know something about the ordinary beauty of holiness. It doesn’t trumpet or parade its achievements. And achievement isn’t even the right word—because holiness begs the virtue of humility. There’s subtlety, dare I say secrecy to holiness.

I absolutely loved Canadian writer Karen Stiller’s new book, Holiness Here: Searching for God in the Events of Everyday Life, and I confess to gushing a little in my endorsement:

Holiness is and holiness does. This is the simple yet profound message of this lovely book. With warmth and wit, Stiller assures us that holiness is not just for the starched and neatly pressed saints. Holiness is for the saints who sleep late, stand in the back of the sanctuary, even weep in the valley of the shadow of death. There are few people I'd trust to tell the down-to-earth truth about holiness—and Karen Stiller is one. I recommend this book highly.”

I asked Karen if I could interview her about Holiness Here, which releases tomorrow, and she graciously agreed! (And don’t forget how important pre-orders are for a new book release! You can do that today, wherever books are sold!)

---

By way of introduction, Karen, tell us something about yourself that we couldn’t learn from the internet.

I’m a voracious reader. Reading helps me so much in so many ways. I’ve been thinking more and more about the role of spiritual reading in my life. I’ve been impacted deeply by authors who explore spiritual things in their work. I always have a fiction and a non-fiction (or more) books on the go at the same time. I write non-fiction but it’s fiction that most often moves me to awe and wonder. I’m never not reading for more than a day or so. I also love to cook. I love to sit around a big table with some friends and talk. I love to play games and do things like go bowling and most recently, line dancing class with a few other friends who don’t mind looking silly and laughing at ourselves. I’m also a dog lover, although without one of my own at the moment.

This is a surprisingly challenging question to answer. I guess we really do have a lot of things about ourselves online these days!

Your first book, The Minister’s Wife, was one of my favorite memoirs from 2020. Why a book on holiness as your second project? 

First of all, thank you for saying that. I have a chapter on holiness in The Minister’s Wife, and it’s always intrigued me, maybe especially as someone married to a pastor. What does it mean to be holy? I was always aware that some people thought we were holier and more together in lots of ways than they were, because we were clergy and spouse. That always interested, and sometimes amused me. I used to think the same thing about people in ministry (before I knew better). I thought that they were particularly and especially holy, and probably not much fun. So, holiness confused me a little bit. I had a question I wanted to explore. What does it mean to lead a holy life? That’s the question that stuck with me.

I’m also very interested in how we change over time. Because I think we do change. And I think we should change, and we should know we can change, if we really believe that the Holy Spirit is at work in our lives and that the things we do can impact who we are. Also, I guess I like a gigantic writing challenge.

What misgivings or misunderstandings about holiness did you feel the need to address in Holiness Here?

I think holiness is almost a bad word in some circles. People have images of someone who is judgemental and boring, and very nosey about what other people are doing all the time so they can set them straight. And to think of ourselves as holy feels like we’re thinking too highly of ourselves.

What would it be like to think of holiness as a warm invitation from God, who loves us and delights in us and wants us to lead an adventurous life of faith, which will involve loving other people as well as we can? When we can more comfortably think of ourselves as holy – because God has said that we are – we could be a little bit curious about that that could mean for our daily lives. I believe it can mean good, warm, wonderful things for our lives, and for the lives of people who interact with us. I wondered also (and still do), is the holy thing always the hard thing? And the hard thing always the holy thing? I think it has that reputation, of always being hard and super sacrificial. I do think that is sometimes true, but holiness can also be experienced within the love of our family, in art, in beauty and music and in making lovely things. That’s holy too. I wanted to dig around in that a little bit too.

I like to think of spiritual transformation in terms of both conditions and choices. In your view, what are the conditions that make for growth in holiness? What are the choices?

That’s really helpful to think about it in terms of conditions and choices. I like that. I’d say conditions for holiness are first and most importantly, saying yes to Jesus. When we accept that love and forgiveness – all that grace! – our faith teaches us we have been made holy. This might feel hard to believe about us. After all, we know ourselves so well! We see all our own imperfections. But holiness is not about perfection, of course. So, believing that we are holy is also a helpful condition, I think. I would add that community would be another nurturing atmosphere for a life of intentional living out of our holiness. We can’t do it alone. Church is the most convenient community for discovering and nurturing a life of living out of our holiness well. Even though it can be so hard sometimes.

Choices are baked into the conditions, it feels like. We choose to believe these things are true. We choose to participate in our own transformation. We choose to go to church and be in a community supportive of our holiness and that continually points to God’s holiness.

Holiness is not just soaking in the holy rays and growing spiritually. We do have to try to live out of it. As we choose to live out of our holiness, we will learn lots of things about ourselves that will also help us grow. As I try to be patient, I see my impatience. Instead of hiding from myself I can be curious about it, say I’m sorry and try again. That’s part of being holy too.

Your life was horrifically turned upside down in the middle of writing this book, when your husband suddenly died. How did you keep at the work in the midst of your grief?

Sometimes, I’m not sure how I did it. Weeks after Brent died my agent called to gently tell me that if I felt like it, we could keep to the original publishing schedule, but there was no pressure. I was about eight rough first draft chapters in when Brent had entered the hospital, and I hadn’t looked at it since. I decided to try.

I discovered it helped me. For a couple of hours, a couple of days a week, I had something for my mind to focus on, and something good for my hands to do. The book was a symbol of hope for me, that maybe there was something left in life that could be good and maybe even beautiful. Our kids encouraged me. They were glad I was trying and that helped me. Brent called himself my “number one fan” and was my greatest cheerleader in the writing life. His love formed me in so many ways and gave me such confidence. I knew he would want me to continue. I don’t think people get mad in heaven, but if they do, he would have been mad at me for walking away from this project. He was present in what I had already written and so I chose also to write about his death. That was very difficult, but I believed it was necessary. I kept my lens in tightly on the theme of holiness, which helped me, I think, because to write you need to dig deeply and allow yourself to be surprised by what you find. That happened in that new chapter, which is called Sorrow.

It is good to have good work to do. Good work helps us. I knew that if I did the work then, I would be glad I did it now. And I am glad.

Between the time of finishing the book and now releasing it, what new insight(s) have you gained about holiness that you’d want to share with readers?

That is such a good, thoughtful question. (You’re really good at this!). I believe more than ever how important actual church is, because actual church has been very hard for me since my husband died. It’s a painful experience because Brent was also my priest. I took communion from his hands for so many years and listened to him preach week after week. Going to church still makes me very sad. What I’m seeing now though, is the cost of not going. I miss it, but I can also see how that lack of routine can become the new routine. I feel the lack of the regular hearing of the Word, the partaking of communion, the fellowship of the saints, and I can also feel myself getting a bit lazy. I need to figure that out. (He’d be mad at me about that too).

I think I’ve also seen, since I finished the book, more than ever, that we do need each other. I’ve seen how so much of our holiness is lived out between ourselves and someone else. Holiness is our own, and also deeply relational. We grow best together.

Another insight I’d like to share, which might not be that helpful actually, is that there is so much we don’t know. There is so much mystery. To accept all we do not know, and to accept that we are part of something mysterious and beautiful, and to believe that someday we will know fully, is really quite something.

Karen Stiller is author of Holiness Here: Finding God in the Ordinary Events of Everyday Life (NavPress, 2024), The Minister’s Wife (Tyndale House, 2020), and co-author of Craft, Cost & Call: How to build a life as a Christian Writer along with several other books about the Church in North America and around the world. Stiller is a senior editor of Faith Today magazine, a host of the Faith Today Podcast and writes frequently for magazines like Reader's Digest, Ekstasis, In Trust, and other publications across North America. Stiller is a three-time recipient of the A.C. Forrest Memorial Award from the Canadian Church Press for excellence in socially conscious religious journalism. Stiller lives in Ottawa and has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Non-Fiction from University of King’s College (2018). www.karenstiller.com