The Wonderful Thing about Holiness

The wonderful thing about holiness, when you really encounter it, is that it testifies to itself. This is not to say one can never be deceived; it’s easy to mistake personal charisma for genuine grace, or to be misled by plausible charlatans—until, that is, one comes across the real thing, at a moment when one is open to it. Then one knows it for what it is: a quality of such lucid and incandescent simplicity and of such moral beauty that one feels simultaneously deeply happy in its presence and ashamed of one’s own failure to have realized it within oneself.

—David Bentley Hart, "The Abbot and Aunt Susie" (December 2010)