Holiness...

"Holiness is not an achievement, it is Grace. A Grace called Awareness,
a grace called Looking, Observing, Understanding. If you would only
switch on the light of awareness and observe yourself and everything
around you throughout the day, if you would see yourself reflected in
the mirror of awareness the way you see your face reflected in a looking
glass, that is, accurately, clearly, exactly as it is without the
slightest distortion or addition, and if you observed this reflection
without any judgment or condemnation, you would experience all sorts of
marvelous changes coming about in you. . . ."

". . . You will then understand that awareness involves as much effort
as a lover makes to go to his beloved, or a hungry man makes to eat his
food . . . . In other words, awareness is an effortless activity!"

"Will awareness bring you to the holiness you desire? Yes and no. The
fact is you will never know. For true holiness, the type that is not
achieved through techniques and efforts and repression, true holiness is
completely unselfconscious. You wouldn't have the slightest awareness
of its existence in you. Besides you will not care, for even the
ambition to be holy will have dropped as you live from moment to moment
a life made full and happy and transparent through awareness. It is
enough for you to be watchful and awake. For in this state your eyes
will see the Savior. Nothing else, but absolutely nothing else. Not
security, not love, not belonging, not beauty, not power, not holiness
-- nothing else will matter anymore."

Anthony DeMello
The Way of Love, Image Pocket Classics (Doubleday)
from the essay, Be Ready, at p. 191