In the face of the obsession with perfection and false enlightened ones, the wonderful freedom of knowing ourselves imperfect but loved.
We have grown accustomed to a window-display holiness. For a long time, we have placed saints on silver altars, made them of clean marble and painted halos so bright that, in the end, they dazzled us. We look at their images in churches with a mixture of admiration and relief: “They are perfect and play in another league; mine is simply getting to the end of the month.” And so, almost without realizing it, we turned Jesus’s path into a museum piece, into something sacred but distant, incapable of getting its hands dirty with the mud of our daily lives.
But holiness, if faithful to Galilee, cannot smell of closedness. It has to smell of the street, of fresh bread, of a field hospital and of laundry hanging out to dry. In this twenty-first century of lit screens and extinguished hearts, of haste and shared difficulties, it is urgent to rescue holiness from the obsession with perfection. Jesus of Nazareth was not a bureaucrat of virtue nor a theorist of isolation; he was a profoundly human man who wore out his sandals healing broken lives, bypassing the customs of official religion and complicating his existence with those whom society had already written off. There, on the reverse side of history, is where holiness still pulses today.
The labyrinth of perfection: A mandate or a neurosis?
To make this human turn in holiness, the first wall we must tear down is that of a misunderstanding of Scripture. For generations, that phrase of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew has haunted us like a heavy burden: “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5, 48). Read from our current mentality, obsessed with performance, absolute control and success, the word “perfection” has become an endless source of anxiety and spiritual guilt.
But Jesus was neither a quality auditor nor a self-help professor. Experts say that the word used in the original Greek text is teleios. And in that world, teleios does not mean “absence of defects”—that is a factory or aesthetic concept—but rather “to reach the goal,” “to be finished,” “to be full.” God’s perfection is not that he makes no mistakes, but rather understanding that his love is not fragmented; He (and not so much I) loves to the depths, without conditions, under the sun and under the rain. In fact, the parallel passage in the Gospel of Luke reveals the true face of this commandment: “Be merciful as your Father is merciful” (Lk 6, 36). For Jesus, then, the perfection he asks of us is not an exercise in individual moral cleansing, but rather an invitation to enlarge our hearts so that everyone fits inside.
The value of utopia and the mystique of soiled hands
We are intrinsically imperfect beings, limited, vulnerable, and always unfinished. To seek psychological or moral perfection is an illusion that only leads to frustration or the hypocrisy of appearances. Why, then, does Jesus set such a high horizon before us? This is where the value of utopia shines, understood not as an impossible dream that paralyzes us, but as the art of making the possible real while walking toward the impossible.
Faith moves in that tension. We know we cannot erase all selfishness or all the world’s problems (the impossible), but we know that today we can relieve the loneliness or hunger of the one walking at our side (the possible).
Pope Francis gave us a precious idea when he spoke of “saints from next door.” They are those men and women who will never appear in newspapers or in Church history books, but who sustain the world with discrete and constant tenderness, with open eyes and soiled hands:
· He is holy, that father of a family who returns with a broken body after a day of precarious work and, instead of shutting himself in his exhaustion, musters the strength to listen to the complicated silence of his adolescent son.
· She is holy, the woman who daily cares for her husband consumed by Alzheimer’s; a woman who watches the memories of their shared life fade away, yet continues to rescue him each morning with the tenderness of her hands and the dignity of her love.
· He is holy, the young man who decides to rebel against the screen, turns off his phone for a few hours a week and goes to the periphery of his neighborhood to accompany a lonely elderly man.
These are the mirrors in which we need to see ourselves. They do not dazzle us with spectacular miracles, but with the daily miracle of kindness in a world wounded by indifference.
Mental health: Saints of flesh and bone versus “enlightened ones”
When the ideal of holiness is poorly digested, it transforms into a poison for mental health. The Church has sometimes been a breeding ground for scrupulous perfectionism, an obsession with rules and punishment that resembles more an obsessive disorder than the experience of the God of Grace. The obsessive lives under the tyranny of “should,” with a paralyzing fear of making mistakes, transforming faith into a cage.
At the opposite extreme we find today another psychological breakdown: the pathology of the “enlightened one.” People who, forgetting the limits of their own humanity, believe themselves to be direct channels of God, possessors of absolute truth, immune to error and with messianic missions. That is not holiness; it is often an inflated ego or emotional instability.
Saints of the twenty-first century are not superheroes; they are people profoundly aware of their cracks. A very clear example is that of young Carlo Acutis. His beatification broke the mold because he did not need a convent to touch heaven: his sneakers, his sweatshirt, his computer and an overflowing love for the Eucharist and the discarded of his city were enough. He showed us that one can use the internet without losing one’s soul on the net. Carlo was an echo of what Jesus asked us to be: salt. And salt is not there to gaze at itself in a jar, but to dissolve and give flavor to the food of others. True holiness does not produce rigidity, but rather freedom, lightness and good humor.
The “acid test”: Whose war is this?
How can we know, then, if our search for holiness is healthy or merely a projection of our own shortcomings and personal struggles? How do we distinguish between ego disguised as religion and the action of the Spirit? The great “acid test” consists in asking ourselves an honest question: Is this war I am waging mine or God’s?
When we turn faith into our own war, we become obsessed with results, the success of our projects, what people will say, and the need to be right. This generates anxiety in us, harsh judgment toward those who do not think as we do, and finally a bitter spiritual exhaustion. Feeling ourselves the saviors of the world, we load ourselves with a burden that is not ours.
When we understand that history is “God’s war” (taking the expression in its most tender and liberating sense), we surrender to the daily and leave the fruits in His hands. This certainty generates deep peace, the ability to rest without guilt, patience with the rhythms of others, and genuine joy. We discover that we are only imperfect tools, useless servants, but happy ones, pencils in the hands of the only Artist.
Let us not seek, then, holiness in complicated spiritual formulas or in distant cathedrals. God is still passing through our lives today dressed as a commoner, crossing paths with us in the subway, in the office or in the pain of our neighbor across the way. He is inviting us to live with our hearts ablaze and our feet on the ground. Let us take off our shoes, because twenty-first-century holiness consists in the wonderful freedom of knowing ourselves profoundly imperfect, but infinitely loved in the simple soil of the everyday.
Jesús Lozano Pino