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I sat with a group of Eastern and Western monastics at an international meeting recently, fascinated by
their apparent sameness and acutely aware of the differences among them at the same time. They all
wore long robes. (But no, come to think about it, they didn’t. I didn’t, for instance.) They all wore
some identifying mark, at least—beads or pins, or crosses, or colors of robes or shawls or cinctures.
The swamis came in wearing orange robes but soon began to appear in small wool caps—a grey one
here, a white one there. The Buddhists wore sandals, some with socks, some without them. The
Western monastics wore robes or pants, simple street clothes or long burka-like dresses.

All of them, almost every one of them, in other words, deviated at least a bit from the norms of even
their own groups. Who was the perfect monastic, then? Who was the one who lived the monastic ideal
most truly? And did it matter? Did it really affect the degree to which they lived the real monastic ideal?
What was truth here, where, even among those most intent on putting down all the nonessentials of
life, no absolute norm seemed to apply.

Then, all of a sudden, I began to wonder if the real question might now be, Is uniformity really a
measure of anything, including holiness? Maybe it is we who have the great need to reduce sanctity to
some kind of spiritual sameness. Maybe those who are truly simple and open to the workings of God in
life are the ones who know best that it is very easy to make a god even out of devotion, even out of
detachment, even out of self-effacement.

Strands of the problem emerge in the definition of sainthood from one century to the next. In almost
every case, great people have been identified by some as saints and by others, good people themselves,
just as certainly, as sinners. Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, Thomas Merton, Mother Teresa of
Calcutta, John XXIII—Jesus—were all a sign of truth to some, a sign of contradiction to others. So how
do we know where truth lies?

The real truth is that God is too great to be lost in the smallness of any single sliver of life. Truth is
One, yes, but truth is many at the same time.

The greatest danger of them all may be in buying into too small a part of the truth. When that happens,
change, growth, repentance, and development are impossible. We find ourselves frozen in the shards of
yesterday.

Truth is not any one truth, not any one institution, not any one way. Nor can we truly bend ourselves
to all of them. Instead, each of us must live our own singular piece of the truth with love. What else
can possibly be the final test of what is truly true?

— from Welcome to the Wisdom of the World by Joan Chittister (Eerdmans)