What is family? What is holiness?

There is a T.S. Eliot quote our pastor shared at a homily recently that stuck with me.

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

There are a lot of ways to define what a family is. One is this: family are the people to whom you do not need to prove that you are important.

This touches on a fear that undergirds how I show up as a father. I fear losing a son to suicide—that they’ll feel their life is unimportant. The pressures of being kid today, that are beyond what I ever carried, rattle me. I want them to know that they matter to me, that I love and value their mere existence, without condition, without pretense.

To embrace someone as important, without requiring them to prove or justify it, takes a kind of moral strength. It’s easier—though not trivial—to love your spouse and children this way. But what about friends? Neighbors and colleagues? Strangers? Enemies? What about those who try to violently hurt, exploit, and abuse us? What about them?

To value and love them is harder. To embrace them in a way where they do not have to prove and justify their importance? I think that’s a way of defining another elusive concept: holiness. To embrace, wholly, those people who are not already part of your community, and that may even try to destroy it? To see the value and human dignity in them? Without condition or pretense?

That’s holiness.

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With all this, I wonder.

How much of injustice, of violence, perhaps of senseless suffering even, disappears. Just disappears, if those who yearn to be seen and valued feel important. Without condition and without pretense.

How much of that disappears with holiness?