Daily Meditation: Wednesday, September 3, 2025

Holiness - it is a quality of light

09/03/2025

In Revelation, St John describes the Seraphim as four living creatures, full of eyes in front and back, who stand night and day before the throne of God singing, ‘Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come.’ This means that ‘holy’ is the one word that best expresses the essence of the Deity. Unfortunately, the word has been used so often to describe men and women who have manifested a certain degree of patience, kindness or compassion that it has lost its true meaning. If we want to understand what holiness is, we have to refer to the Slavic languages. In Bulgarian, for instance, the words holy (svet) and holiness (svetost) have the same root as the word for light, ‘svetlina’. So holiness is a quality of light. In this sense we can say that only God is truly holy, because He is pure light. This is what the Seraphim are saying, and this is why the word holiness is an integral part of their name: Hayoth haKadesch, creatures of holiness.*