Are You Whole-y?

The Oxford English Dictionary keeps a quiet record of how the word holy began. It is a near-cousin of whole — as in intact, undivided — and of healthy, and of an older English word, hale, meaning strong. (We still hear it in hale and hearty.) Holiday, then, is simply a compound: holy + day.

Originally, a holy day was a day set aside — a festival, a vow, a deliberate stepping out of the usual current. In time, especially in the West, the word loosened into something more like a vacation: chiefly, a day off. Even the religious holidays now often retain only a thin shadow of their first intent.

A whole life

The bhakti tradition would say that holiness is less a calendar event than a quality of attention. To chant the holy names, to hear from Srimad-Bhagavatam, to give some small fruit of one's day toward something larger than oneself — this, in the old sense of the word, is a kind of being whole. Healthy, hale, satisfied, holy. The same single root.

Adapted from a reflection by Vaisesika Dasa.