Читать книгу Living on the Border of the Holy - L. William Countryman - Страница 10

It might appear, at first sight, as if a book about the life of the church ought to begin with the church itself or, at least, with what is distinctive to the Christian tradition—with Jesus, perhaps, or the Bible. But we can never truly understand what is distinctively Christian without placing it in the broader context of human existence itself. The gospel was not spoken (and cannot be spoken) in a timeless or abstract way. It is always spoken to specific people, who hear it with human ears and human minds. The news GOD speaks to human beings can only be good news if it addresses and affirms our humanness, the very humanness with which GOD first endowed us in creation. There is no contradiction between gospel and creation. The gospel takes what is already intrinsic to us and fills and enhances and clarifies it. We cannot explore the life of the church, then, or the meaning of priesthood in and for the church without, at the same time, exploring the meaning of priesthood to us as human beings.

The first thing to say in our exploration of priesthood, then, is that priesthood is a fundamental and inescapable part of being human. All human beings, knowingly or not, minister as priests to one another. All of us, knowingly or not, receive priestly ministrations from one another. This is the first thing to say about priesthood because it is the most basic. Because it is basic, it is also fundamental and therefore useful. Unless we begin here, we are not likely to understand the confusions, uncertainties, and opportunities we have been encountering in the life of the church itself in recent years. We shall be in danger, in fact, of creating makeshift solutions to half-understood problems, easy answers to misleading questions, and temporary bandages for institutions that need to be healed from the ground up.

What, then, is priestly ministry? It is the ministry that introduces us to arcana—hidden things, secrets. In one sense, priestly ministry is the most ordinary thing imaginable. All our lives, we are repeatedly in the position of finding, revealing, explaining, and teaching—or, conversely, of being led, taught, and illuminated. Everyone is the priest of a mystery that someone else does not know: how to construct a budget, how to maneuver through the politics of the workplace, how to roast a turkey, how to win the affections of the girl or boy to whom one is attracted. The experience is so common that much of the time we do not notice it at all. We are all constantly serving others as priests of mysteries known to us and not to them. And we are constantly being served by those who know what we do not.

Some human work is priestly in a very obvious way: teaching, parenting, mentoring, coaching, the performing arts, the arts of statecraft. These make use of what we know to sustain human life or to initiate the young into adulthood or to hand on our cultural traditions. Other tasks involve a voyage into the unknown in order to bring back news for priestly use. Prayer is like this—the prayer of quiet listening and reflection. Scientific research is a journey into the unknown. So is the work of creative artists and all serious thinkers. But even in the most daily of our daily routines, the process of priestly service never ceases. It belongs to the very fabric of ordinary human interactions. We are constantly standing alongside someone else, giving or receiving some new understanding of the world before us, whether through direct interchange or through the more remote means of communication made possible by technology. To be human means to be engaged in priestly discourse—the unveiling of secrets.

These secrets are not, for the most part, kept hidden on purpose or as a way of excluding ordinary folk. Deliberately held secrets—the secrets of governments, of corporations, of cliques—are usually trivial in the long run. We keep such secrets mainly in order to present ourselves to the world as “insiders,” and we reveal them for the same purpose or because they will gain us some immediate advantage. This kind of secrecy has little to do with priesthood. Insofar as it is priestly, it tends to manifest a malformed and misleading priesthood. A fascination with being an insider actually impedes the ministry of true priesthood, which is as much about revealing as about finding.¹

The deepest arcana are secret because they are hard to know, hard to reveal, hard to learn. They can be known only by experiencing them. ² Anything that can be fully conveyed in language, without remainder, is probably not of ultimate importance. The truly human knowledge is that which is obtained through living. If experience is passed on through language, the language is at most a map, a directional sign, a helpful guide to the experience itself. These arcana are secret, then, because they concern dimensions of human experience where language fails (or, often, where language multiplies to the point of becoming useless). Some things are known only through our direct involvement. You cannot know what it is to be in love until it happens to you. You cannot know what it is to stand, unprotected, in GOD’S presence until you are there.

The deepest arcana take us beyond the realm of everyday things. There are secrets that are sufficiently rare, sufficiently difficult to grasp in our experience, that we barely have language to talk about them. When we speak of “the HOLY,” for example, we have no way of being sure that all of us mean the same thing. All we can do is pay attention to one another, listen for the implications of what the other person is saying, and try to match the other’s words with our own experience to see if they overlap. Some things—many things, actually—are secret by their very nature. They can be revealed only indirectly and partially. When our language about such things puts on an appearance of solidity and complete specificity, like that of words used for common daily objects, the language misleads us. It is when we stand in the very presence of this HOLY that cannot be clearly or simply expressed that we most truly recognize our priesthood for what it is.³

This priesthood belongs to everyone. Every human being has some access to arcana that is given to no one else—at least, not in quite the same way. Every human being has a unique privilege of encounter with these arcana and therefore a unique priesthood. Everyone has a vocation leading them into a deeper acquaintance with GOD and so bringing them home to our true humanity in GOD’S presence. Grounded in this experience, we find our priestly interactions flowering and bearing fruit in often unexpected ways.

“But wait!” someone may say. “Isn’t this making it all too easy? Hasn’t priesthood always been difficult? Haven’t the religions taught us that priesthood is remote and inaccessible to the ordinary person, that only the privileged few can know what is hidden and show it to the many? Isn’t GOD revealed only to the elect? Isn’t this remote GOD to be known only through the long study of scripture and theology, of halakah and midrash, or through ascetic renunciation and mystical contemplation?” Without denying that such pursuits have their legitimate uses and that one may grow in wisdom and discernment with their help, we must still answer “No.”

The encounter with the HIDDEN is a kind of fault line running through the middle of our lives; no one can escape its presence. The HIDDEN forms a border country that turns out to be, paradoxically, our native land. We all live with it, on it, in terms of it. We all have our unique experience of it. It is as near as breathing. The HIDDEN is inescapable. We can ignore it, with varying degrees of success, but it does not go away. It is part of who we as human beings are. This is where every priesthood begins.

The hidden reality of which I speak has many names. It may be called GOD, the DIVINE, the HOLY, the NUMINOUS. It may equally be called REALITY, LOVE, TRUTH, MEANING, WISDOM, LIFE, DIRECTION, WHOLENESS, HOME.⁴ No one can make a complete list. Not one of these names will ever be entirely adequate by itself. If we use one to the exclusion of the others, our language may even become misleading.⁵ We cannot name the HIDDEN REALITY in the way we name the objects of daily existence. If we attempt to do so, we create a fundamental error in apprehension. If we take “GOD” as a term pointing to something that coexists, on an equivalent level of reality, with “universe,” “cat,” “coin,” “loaf of bread,” or “daisy,” then GOD is reduced to being one thing among many. But the GOD who stands at the inmost depths of the arcana is not one among many.⁶ This GOD is both different from all else and yet deeply involved in all else. GOD is, in the language of the early Christian scriptures, ho ón, “the ONE WHO IS.”⁷ Apart from GOD, nothing. In and with GOD, everything.

GOD is deeply implicated in our lives, in every place and moment of human experience. Yet this presence of GOD does not mean that GOD is an object we can control, something to which we have access at will. The HOLY retains its freedom; it can be absent even in its presence. The HIDDEN TRUTH is equally near and equally far, equally hidden and equally revealed, equally accessible and equally removed from each of us. There is no way to get control of GOD, to make GOD remain accessible or perceptible or close, and thereby to turn the HOLY to our particular use. Quite the contrary, we recognize the HIDDEN, when we encounter it, because of its absolute priority over us in time, in being, in power, in creativity, in height and depth, in beauty, in grace. Encountering it, we both fear and love: fear because we see that we are so small and have so little control, love because it is the source of being, of life, of all good.

Despite our ancient human longing to pin GOD down, we cannot even confine the HOLY in a shrine or a rite, to wait there on our bidding. We should like to tie the DIVINE to some particular place or time so that, knowing its precise location, we could avoid it when we wish and summon it on our own terms, by our own choice. If we could do so, however, we would only succeed in removing the HOLY from where it really lives, deep inside all our experience, at the origin of all that exists. Ultimately, pinning GOD down is a futile and wrongheaded exercise. Religious shrines and rites have a substantial value, but it is not the value of guaranteeing our access to the arcana on which all priesthood rests. That access is always and only a gift—indeed, a self-giving—of GOD that may come upon us anywhere in our lives in the world. The most we can do is try to pay attention.

It can be helpful to imagine our human encounter with the HOLY as life in a border country. It is a country in which, at privileged moments of access, we find ourselves looking over from the everyday world into another, into a world that undergirds the everyday world, limits it, defines it, gives it coherence and meaning, drives it. Yet this hidden world is not another world, but the familiar world discovered afresh. It is the everyday world seen at new depth, with new comprehension. It is like discovering that the small part of the iceberg we are familiar with is buoyed up by a much larger mass of ice beneath the surface. In the border country one discovers connections, roots, limits, meaning. To live there for a while is like having veils pulled away. In the long run we find that the border country is in fact the place we have always lived, but it is seen in a new and clearer light.

It may take an exceptional moment or event to pull the veils back for us. But, paradoxically, such a moment reveals that the border between the everyday and hidden worlds is found everywhere, even in the most ordinary moments of life.⁸ The poet Fredegond Shove could speak of such a moment as a “transformation.” And yet, the moment was not remote or alien:

No iceberg floating at the pole; no mark

Of glittering, perfect consciousness, nor dark

And mystic root of riddles; . . .

not at all strange,

Not set beyond the common, human range;

Possible in the steep, quotidian stream,

Possible in a dream....⁹

Some “peak experience,” unexpected and disruptive, may be necessary to wake us up, but it is far from being the only moment when we live on the border with the HOLY. Once awakened, we begin to see the TRANSCENDENT in the ordinary and to recognize that the dullest circumstances may be unexpectedly shot through with fire.¹⁰

The discoveries we make in the arcane border country focus around two things: finitude and connections. These, after all, are the two most basic conditions of human existence. We are finite—bounded and limited in many ways, most obviously by the ultimate boundary we call death, but also by any number of other factors external and internal to us. We are limited by the existence of other human beings, by space and time, by culture and history, by education or its lack, by disease. We are also bounded by the limits of our abilities, by the strength or weakness of our bodies or our intellects or our souls, by the difficulty we find in doing what we believe to be right, by our struggle for and against truthfulness, by sickness, by death.

In the borderlands, we become inescapably aware of our own smallness and incompleteness. In the half-awake world of everyday life, we may encounter the bounded quality of our lives only as isolated moments of guilt or fear or as that moral anxiety (often quite secularized and deprived of its real meaning) that pervades modern middle-class Western culture. In the border country, these moments of incompleteness or uncertainty prove to be aspects of something larger, grounded in the single reality of finitude as a fundamental defining fact of human existence. Our presence here is not always pleasant, but it is truthful and therefore strengthening.¹¹

Equally fundamental to our existence is the fact of connection. However narrowly our finite boundaries are drawn about us, no one can in fact be human in isolation. Human existence is always social, even for the hermit.¹² It is social not only in relation to other human beings, but in relation to the entire world in which we live and to the arcane REALITY which undergirds it.¹³ To be human means to be in interaction with other beings. If one is deprived of the usual opportunities for communication, one will resort to whatever can be found—to remembered encounters, to the hope of being restored to one’s friends and family, to imagined companionship, or to communion with the world of nature or of spirits. In the borderlands, this need for connection is revealed as something more than a string of isolated needs and solutions. It is a basic, defining fact of our humanness.¹⁴

The border country, therefore, is a place of intense vitality. It does not draw us away from the everyday world as much as it plunges us deeper into a reality of which the everyday world is the surface.¹⁵ It is a country of intense experience, not always pleasant. We may experience fear and dread, anger and desire in their full power. We are likely to encounter our own smallness and the limitations of our power in a way that proves, for a time at least, frightening. But we may also experience the love that binds heaven and earth together, which pervades and unites all things. We may find a kind of joy that can only be described, in the language of absurdity, as ecstasy, ekstasis, an emerging from and standing outside oneself. We may experience a peace that is not absence of distress but rather an intense, intimate, and fertile connection with oneself and one’s world. Of such are the arcana made.¹⁶

No human being has, in principle, any better or surer access to this arcane border country than any other person. We all live equally near it, indeed within it, though perhaps without being aware of it. One person, through some accident of temperament or history, may become more attentive than another and may therefore come to be recognized as someone who knows the secrets and who can minister out of them; but this does not deny the priestly ministry of others. Indeed, without some ability to experience the secrets ourselves, we could not learn them from others. The secrets are never taught, in the sense that one can be taught, say, the names of plants. They are only experienced. But they require interpretation. There is always a process by which we begin to understand our experience and come to grips with it, and this process works best with the advice and support of those who know the arcana better than we do.

Even the best priest needs the service of others as priests. However long you live in the border country and however familiar you become with it, you will never pass beyond all need for priestly ministration from others. Since we are, by nature, finite beings, each of us limited by space and time, none of us will ever experience directly more than one life’s worth of GOD, of TRUTH, of REALITY. What each of us comes to know are fragments of something immeasurably larger than we can grasp. My neighbor knows other fragments, which may well be the ones that make sense of my own. Therefore, I must turn to my neighbor in search of understanding, in search of the priestly ministries that can flow from that person’s experience. And my neighbor will need to turn to others, too—perhaps to me.¹⁷

This is an ongoing, never-ending process that is characteristic of human life. As Gregory of Nyssa said long ago, human life is not directed toward a static goal. Heaven is an epektasis—not an arriving at GOD, but a continual process of stretching and being stretched out toward GOD.¹⁸ The communion with the HOLY and with one another that characterizes priestly ministry is not only a means to some further end, but a participation in the goal itself. To be intimately connected with one another, to serve as priests to one another, together in the gracious presence ofTRUTH, ofREALITY, of the HOLY, of GOD—this is not only the way we grow in apprehension of the arcane border country; it is already, in itself, a taste of human life as it was meant to be from the beginning.

Each such experience enables me to risk further openness to the HOLY. Each such risk enables me to grow further in priesthood, so that I come to my own priestly ministrations with greater power and insight. There is more of me to participate in the ministry, more to give to the service of another, more to join in connection with the other. Yet what results, if one is paying attention, is not grandiosity, not a conviction of one’s own excellence and importance. It is rather enjoyment, a deep openness that forswears grasping and control in favor of delight in GOD and one’s neighbor, and in communion with them. For priesthood is not a thing in itself as much as it is a relation between beings.¹⁹

As I have already suggested, we experience the arcana in many forms. Some of them are of a kind that we commonly call “spiritual” or “mystical.” We may even experience a union with the HOLY that seems almost to remove us entirely from the everyday world. At other times, however, our discoveries as we voyage further into TRUTH may seem quite “secular.” The revelation may be political in its implications, like the vision of human dignity that prevented Rosa Parks from giving up her seat on the bus or the dream that drew Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., into the struggle for civil rights. Or the revelation may take the characteristically twentieth-century Western form of self-discovery—the discovery, say, of hidden beliefs that have governed our behavior without our conscious awareness. One person discovers that he has never believed seriously in his own human worth and has merely been living out the expectations of others—of parents, perhaps, or of spouse. Another discovers that she has believed herself to be the only real human being in the world and has been living an entirely self-centered existence in which others have been reduced to tools or obstacles. Such a moment of personal insight is also a glimpse of some element of the hitherto hidden TRUTH.

Every moment of revelation is an encounter with TRUTH. It is said that the scientist who discovered the structure of the benzene molecule saw its hitherto indecipherable shape in a dream, in the form of a snake taking its tail in its mouth. This does not diminish the importance of his work in the laboratory or the careful attention to ordinary, everyday reality that such a discovery required. Without that work he would not have known what he was seeing. Yet, as is usual with great intellectual breakthroughs (paradigm shifts, as we have learned to call them), the solution came not only from hard work, but also as gift, as revelation. Every moment of discovery, every cry of “Aha!” or “Eureka!” represents an encounter with the HIDDEN HOLY.²⁰

What all experiences of the arcana share is that they change our perspective and produce meaning where, before, there was confusion or misunderstanding. Human experience is far from being self-explanatory and is too rich for any a priori scheme to interpret it fully. The meaning of your life always has to be built on the spot. You may find some reusable planks from earlier buildings. Some existing plans may suit your needs. You may even find some prefabricated materials useful in the project. But meaning will still have to be built on the spot.²¹ The true understanding and interpretation of life arises out of a conversation among ideas and world and people. The conversation involves both me, with my particular experience of my own life, and my neighbors, who experience the same reality from slightly different vantage points. This great, ongoing conversation is the exercise of priestly ministry.

My priests are not always people I have chosen or identified for myself as priests. Some of them may seem ill-equipped for the role. Some of them may even be my enemies. The only absolute qualification of a priest is insight, an insight that comes from some encounter with the arcana, some time spent in awareness in the border country. Perhaps the person made a brief foray to the border country and no more. Perhaps someone may speak with insight while intending only to be cruel. Perhaps I may reveal to someone else a great truth that I do not really understand myself. There is nothing neat, tidy, or predictable about this process. Neophytes and slackers and the completely unwilling—as well as those who have grown old in faithful, attentive priesthood—may contribute something of value. One might not wish to rely primarily on the neophytes or slackers, but GOD is free to speak through any voice at all.

Even those elements of creation that do not have human voices—the physical environment, the animal world, or the angelic orders—may also contribute, speaking directly to soul and spirit without words. I will not deal with these nonhuman priesthoods in this book. Our primary priesthood is human and will be quite enough for one volume. But we share with the rest of the universe our creaturely status. We have much to give to one another and to learn from one another. There is much more that could be said on the subject of other beings as priests to us and of us as priests to them.²²

Learning about religion, theology, or spirituality may strengthen one’s priesthood, but it cannot substitute for the primary knowledge gleaned from one’s own experience of the HOLY. That experience demands our own careful attention and also the wisdom of other priests to interpret it. Theology comes into its own when it is understood as a way to cultivate this process of interpretation. A person who lives faithfully and attentively in the border country may become a good priest without formal instruction. A learned theologian who avoids the border country will be a poor priest, no matter how much education he or she has.²³ The cultivation of attentiveness and the deepening of understanding can make us better priests. And yet even the most indifferent human being will, at some time or other, hand on a stray insight that can turn someone’s world around and make it new. So inevitable is our priestly ministry that it goes on, to some degree, even without our cooperation. How much more can it achieve with our cooperation?

The long-standing hope of all human spirituality is that we can learn to involve ourselves more effectively with the priestly dimensions of our lives. If so, this will occur by becoming more attentive and open to the REALITY that surrounds and upholds us. Sometimes, of course, the HOLY reaches out to us and calls us—even seizes us—through circumstances beyond our control. A great crisis or a great joy makes us suddenly aware that the world is much larger and deeper than we had supposed. Ultimately, the whole encounter in the border country is possible only to the degree that the HOLY is willing to meet us there.²⁴ Still, we can cultivate our attentiveness intentionally. We begin by cultivating humility. Humility does not mean some exaggerated demeaning of self, but a faithful, realistic, nondefensive appraisal of ourselves, of both our gifts and our weaknesses. Attentiveness also requires patience, a hopeful willingness to wait while the HOLY reveals itself, even if that seems to take far longer than we should wish. It calls for love—the love of the TRANSCENDENT that draws us onward, an answering love of our own from within, and a love for the neighbors who share this adventure with us. Attentiveness calls, above all, for a growing devotion to truth and a rejection of hypocrisy. Lies turn out to be like plugs in a conduit, damming the flow of the HOLY more effectively than any other barrier we can impose. Faithful humility, hopeful patience, love, integrity—these are the keys.

Even if we cultivate such virtues, however, there is no possibility of mastering this priesthood, only a hope that it may master us. One cannot by working at it make oneself the perfect priest. If you try, you will wind up focusing more on yourself than on the REALITY met in the arcana. Our experience of the HOLY always turns out to be conversational—always partly beyond our control. We cannot perfect priesthood by making ourselves perfect—even supposing this were possible—because GOD’S part in the conversation is not at our bidding.²⁵ No matter how advanced you may become in priesthood, the most penetrating, most astonishing insight may still be given to the seemingly unprepared person at your elbow. There is no program guaranteed to produce superior priests.²⁶

With this reservation in mind, we can still make one basic observation about those who become exceptional priests. They often prove to be marginal, in some sense, to the mainstream of their society. This is only an observation, not a rule. There are certainly exceptions. Yet the person who is thoroughly at home in the everyday world probably finds less occasion to look beneath the surface. It is easier to take the world for granted when it flows smoothly and when you feel a clear sense of belonging. The person whirled in the eddies at the edge of the stream and battered, perhaps, against the rocks may be more ready to look at what is beneath the surface.²⁷

The priestly value of marginality becomes manifest in a variety of ways. We have heard a good deal over the past few decades of “soul friends” or of “the wounded healer.”²⁸ The phrases remind us that priestly ministry is not a gift from the strong to the weak, but rather a sharing between persons fundamentally equal. Indeed, this equality is of the essence in priesthood. We stand beside one another sharing what we have found in the border country. Our weakness, more than our strength, reveals our mutual equality. Weakness drives us to the contemplation of a reality more encompassing and truer and more fundamental than the everyday, and then shows us that this revelation, granted in this way to us, must be granted in the same way to all. We understand that we cannot stand above anyone else in the presence of GOD, only alongside.

Another example of the value of marginality is the role of gay and lesbian people in the late twentieth century. As lesbians and gay men have come out of the closet, it becomes clear that there are far more of us in religious vocations than our percentage of the total population would lead one to expect. What brings us into such roles, often within religious institutions that are officially intolerant toward us even while they accept our contributions to their life? Some might argue that gay and lesbian people are simply more spiritual by “nature.” But I think such an argument misses the point. It is not our strength but our marginalization in modern Western culture that compels us to pay attention to the deeper aspects of our human experience. Lesbians and gay men are not immune to the common temptation to pursue distraction instead of attentiveness. But whatever path we follow, we find ourselves living with a basic contradiction in everyday life, knowing that REALITY has shaped us in ways that the mainstream of our culture not only rejects, but even at times punishes. We have to ask questions that others do not have to ask.

People for whom the everyday world is not “working” have to do something about their experience of discontinuity. There are many possible responses, of which a conscious practice of priesthood is only one. Some marginalized people retreat into fantasy worlds, some into amusements and distractions, some into an excessive devotion to work or to serving others, some into the anesthetizing of their anxieties with drugs or into other kinds of hopelessness. Still others take the offensive in the hope either of changing a world that seems to have no place for them or of creating a world apart, where they will be freer to live as they think right. The priestly response does not necessarily sit in judgment on these other options. There are moments when each of them may be the best or even the only available choice for a given person.

But the person who takes up the priestly ministry in a conscious way is saying that the first order of business is neither to salve one’s wounds nor to change the outer world, but to experience what is and to understand how one’s experience of it is experience of the HOLY. By leading our lives, the lives we have been dealt by circumstance, on the boundary with the HIDDEN, we grow in understanding—an understanding which we can then share with others at the boundary. Priesthood begins with finding and continues with showing.²⁹ It is both reflective and active. Ultimately, it is in fact transformative, though we cannot always predict how it will transform us or the world around us.

Sometimes a person’s priesthood is shaped and given its direction by circumstances one can only regret. In 1986, at a conference on AIDS at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, I met Bill Irby, a gay man living with AIDS. He was doubly marginalized, both by his sexual orientation and by having AIDS—so often treated as disgraceful and unclean. He insisted on being open about both of aspects of his marginality, and he had the good fortune to work in a firm that was willing to accept that. Not long before the conference, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger had reminded Americans how much life is beyond our control and how inescapable death finally is. After decades in which we had come to imagine that medical and other technologies were eradicating chance, we were appalled. We had forgotten how to deal with such realities.

When Challenger exploded, Bill found his coworkers turning to him. He was, after all, the only one among them who had already been brought face to face with the fact of his own mortality. He was living in that part of the borderlands called “sickness and death.” People were practically lined up, he said, outside his office door, as if at a confessional, to hear what he might have to say about the unexpected limits of our lives. They hoped he might have found some wisdom that would help them deal with the shock of the unexpected disaster.

I do not tell this story to suggest that such a priestly ministry is required or inevitable for those with terminal illness.³⁰ No, this was his particular priesthood, for which his illness had, as it turned out, prepared him. What was supremely painful and life-destroying in his own experience had turned out to be the means and occasion of his giving a priestly gift to others. Like him, any of us may find ourselves flung into a priesthood not of our choosing. But even if it is not so obviously and dramatically unwelcome, for all of us our priesthood is at least partly a product of who we are—of the lives we find ourselves living through accidents of birth and upbringing, temperament, education, and health.

While some of us are pushed into our priesthood by our everyday weaknesses and limitations, others may be drawn into it by a strong awareness of the arcana, an awareness that they cannot shake off and which summons them to serve the HOLY as priests. The pull of creativity, which is only partially under human control, has often drawn artists into priestly functions in our world. Indeed, for educated people in the modern West, the artist often ministers more effectively as priest than any religious functionary. Not all artists might wish to describe their work in these terms. Some abstractionists, for example, with their emphasis on pure line and color, might be uncomfortable with such language. Yet the public has found in the works of someone like Mark Rothko something of profoundly spiritual import. Sitting before his paintings, one has an uneasy and liberating sense of doors that lead further without leading away. They are compelling icons of the borderland.

Whether we are drawn or driven, then, whether our priesthood is shaped more by our marginality and our sufferings or by our gifts and longings, we become the priests that each of us, individually, alone can be. Our priesthood is a fulfillment of the potential that resides in the humanity of each of us. It is the experience of communion both with deepest REALITY and with one another.

But perhaps I am creating an impression that priesthood has to do only with great events or extraordinary gifts—with the exceptional rather than the ordinary dimensions of our lives. Nothing could be further from the truth. As I have already suggested, priesthood is a pattern of human life acted out daily in the most ordinary ways. Parenting, for example, is a priesthood in which the parent reveals to the child the hopes and values that shape an inner center to our seemingly miscellaneous experience. Childhood, too, is a priesthood, for the child still sees things that adults have learned not to see, and the child will often show the parent a thing or two that the parent had long forgotten. It is this capacity in the child that Thomas Traherne and William Wordsworth emphasized in their differing ways.³¹

Mentors are also priests, sharing their experience of REALITY in a way intended for the good of the person they advise. We find that the perspective of our mentors, related to ours and yet distinct, reveals new dimensions to our own half-understood experience. Listeners, the people who simply hear us out quietly, are also priests. They encourage us as we look around us in the border country, examine the unfamiliar terrain, and begin to give expression to our experience and our discoveries. Speech directed to a patient and attentive audience often brings to the surface revelatory qualities that we had not noticed in our lives.

Teachers and learners are priests to one another, encouraging and supporting each other in the border country. Growth in knowledge and understanding carries with it certain risks. We cannot learn without taking a risk that it will change our world, quite probably in ways we had not anticipated. We have to risk the possibility that what we have valued in the past may cease to seem valuable, that new light may call us to new ways of thinking and living, that we may see old landmarks from new perspectives and therefore, for a time, feel that we have lost our bearings altogether. The person who is formally the student is not the only one at risk, for the student brings a distinct perspective to the material that may compel the teacher to see it in new ways. They are poor teachers who do not learn from their students. Teacher and learner encourage one another in the face of these risks, forming a priestly community that has agreed to venture together into the unknown.

Politicians are priests—I mean the true practitioners of statecraft who have a genuine care and regard for the body politic, not just people trying to impose an abstract ideal on it or to make a profit. They encounter that HOLY REALITY that animates our life as communities and seek to show us how to live in conformity with it. They seek to mold, out of the motley materials of our jumbled histories, a society that will be a blessing and not a curse. There have been too few of them in the tormented world of the last few decades. The same kind of priesthood belongs, at another social level, to faithful executives and managers of all sorts. They are priests to the communities that they lead and serve, seeking not just short-term profit for a corporation, but a community in which work is a human and not a degrading activity. Neither politicians nor managers can perform such a priesthood entirely on their own. They can do it only as they enter into priestly conversation with the communities they guide and serve and begin to understand what lies in the communities’ depths. The community is priest to them, as they are to the community.

Our spiritual counselors are priests to us. Perhaps they speak to us most overtly and explicitly about our relation to the HOLY, to GOD, to TRUTH, though they have no monopoly on such matters. We expect them to hear us out and to speak to our particular experience, not with prefabricated answers, as mere mouthpieces of religion sometimes do, but with a deeply rooted wisdom that can interpret and respond to our most varied needs and uncertainties. It is a commonplace of spiritual direction that the attentive counselor will also learn from the person who is seeking counsel, that there are no one-way streets in this sort of human interaction.

Perhaps our most common experience of priesthood—and often our most powerful one—is found in friendship. In friendship, desire and opportunity combine to allow us the truest knowledge of another person we are ever likely to get. In old friends we can see the flaws as well as the good points, and yet we still delight in them, still recognize their uniquely human beauty, accept that they, like us, stand in GOD’S presence at the border with the HOLY. Our knowledge of our friend and our friend’s knowledge of us enables us to serve one another particularly well as priests, often in ways so casual that we barely notice that priestly ministry is going on.

Priesthood is part of the warp and woof of our existence. Even the most casual of human interactions may involve an element of priestly ministry, perhaps without our actual consciousness that it is so. If we identify certain people particularly as priests—artists, for example, or holy women and men, or people who have come close to death—we do not mean that they are the only priests. For most of us, most of the time, our priests are people like ourselves—and are all the more valuable to us for that.

Up to this point, I have been speaking of priesthood entirely in positive terms. This is appropriate because priesthood is an intrinsic necessity for human life—as necessary as air and water and food. Such necessities are, in their inmost essence, life-giving and good. Yet, in practice, priesthood is not always benign. The roots and connections and limits of human experience run deep beneath the surface. Priesthood provides our access to them. But the border country is dangerous country. Not everyone who enters it emerges as a priest of TRUTH. Some of us linger long without ever paying real attention. Our impressions are jumbled and half-submerged. Others may take into that country shortcomings of character that will make us try to bend our meeting with the HOLY to our own ends. In such cases, we will return to the everyday world having seen not so much REALITY as a magnified version of our own internal untruth.

To become a true priest of the LIFE-GIVING HOLY requires a certain loving detachment. We have to enter the border country and live among its secrets without having our eye fixed too much on how we can make use of them. We are there for love and communion and enjoyment, not for use. We must often learn to let the HOLY set the question as well as give the answer. We must accept the gift of insight as sufficient reward. If we enter the border country to control it or organize it, or to have our prejudices confirmed or to make some gain, we risk having our humanity warped or destroyed. And we shall usually harm others in the process.

If we enter the borderlands “knowing” too much in advance, if we only want answers to our prefabricated questions, or escape from an everyday reality that we are tired of grappling with, or proof of our own righteousness and wisdom, or a chance to satisfy our own grandiosity by taking possession of great mysteries, we cannot grow in truth—except by having our expectations shattered. If we are distracted by self-interested motives, we cannot be fully present to TRUTH; we cannot be attentive long enough to grow in it. TRUTH, after all, can be humiliating; it can deprive us of our most treasured lies and plunge us right back into the problem we were trying to escape. But TRUTH is also what grounds us and our everyday world. What is not true is not of GOD, is not, finally, HOLY or real. To live safely in the border country, we need to cultivate a quiet openness to the unexpected and to let go our hopes of ever controlling GOD. If we use the priestly arcana to gratify personal ambition or to protect us from whatever we fear, they will be distorted and become malignant. If we use them to satisfy the passions of a group, they will become demonic.

In the scriptures of Israel, one of the first stories about human life in this world is about priesthood and how it can become entangled with personal ambition. In the stories about Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Eden, the first characteristic human activities mentioned are sex, childbirth, and the naming of children (Genesis 4:1). After these activities, we hear of productive labor, specifically herding and farming (4:2). Third, the scriptures mention priesthood (4:3–4).

Abel and Cain each offered sacrifices to GOD, choosing good things from the fruits of their work. Sacrifice is one of the ancient sacraments of priesthood; it represents the entry into the border country, with its attendant loss of control and self-possession. But like any rite, it cannot guarantee a divine response. The HOLY always remains in its own power, not in ours. It shows itself to us as it wishes; it holds back when it chooses. The first sacrifices were like all the later ones in this regard. GOD, the story says, accepted one sacrifice and rejected the other. No reason is or can be given. It was an exercise of the sovereignty of the REAL. At one moment, the HOLY shows itself; at another, not.

Cain, however, refuses to accept the judgment of GOD, of the HOLY. He will not let go of his insistence on satisfying his own desires. The differing response to the two sacrifices creates jealousy in him, and from this spring hatred, falsehood, murder, judgment, exile, alienation, revenge, and a host of other ills. In this Hebrew story, one man competing with another over priesthood brings about all the troubles that the Greeks blamed on the curiosity of a woman who opened a forbidden box. Cain could not consent to let GOD be GOD, the HOLY be the HOLY, because to do so would confront him with his own limits. His only concern was to prove that he was as good as or better than his brother. To this end, he tried to use the DIVINE. When he failed, he grew angry, his priesthood became malignant, and he made himself a murderer.³²

Priesthood becomes dangerous partly because we try to use it as one more opportunity for human competition. In every age, claims to possess unique (or at least superior) access to the HOLY are rife. Such claims are often entangled with struggles for power or financial gain, but they cannot simply be reduced to them. If anything, our desire to exceed one another in our “command” of ULTIMATE REALITY is even more decisive than the struggle for everyday goods. We are constantly frustrated by the impossibility of gaining any clear, decisive advantage over our competitors. The lust to be recognized as the unique priest can easily lead a person into falsehood, extravagance, vituperation, demagoguery, and pandering to popular bigotries.³³ At the same time, of course, this lust leads one away from true priesthood, which can flourish only in company with an unaffected regard for TRUTH.

The person who subordinates priesthood to the passions not just of an individual, but of a group, makes of it something even more destructive and evil—something we can legitimately call “demonic.” As Simone Weil wrote, “The flesh impels us to say me and the devil impels us to say us; or else to say like the dictators I with a collective signification.”³⁴ Hitler must have spent time in the border country The very power with which he evoked and encouraged and fed the passions of his audience identifies him as a man with experience of the arcana. But his desire to sway an audience, to become their leader, and to satisfy their demands led him to become demonic and to sanction the demonic in them. Hitler had indeed seen demons in the border country. But he mistook their nature. He mistook the demons for Jews and Gypsies and gay men and the others he hated, when in fact they were reflections of himself and his audience—of their own evil grasping after control and exaltation. When our internal evil comes, in this way, to be externalized and to take power over us, it is not too much to speak in terms of demons and demon possession.³⁵

The results were powerful—but, as it turned out, only for death and destruction. Hitler satisfied the worst of his nation’s passions and in doing so destroyed the lives of millions—many of them his own partisans, still more of them people who became his enemies only because he insisted on being theirs, few of them people who held any deep ill will for him before he attacked them. The results were not only appalling but bizarre, a great conflagration beyond rational comprehension, a holocaust, as it has come to be called. And what is a “holocaust”? It is a whole burnt offering. The language is sacrificial language. The language is about approaching the arcana—an approach turned in this case to evil and destructive use. The borderland is dangerous country.

Priesthood, then, has the capacity to do harm. In the case of Hitler’s priesthood, as in that of Cain’s, the harm continues to ricochet through history. As Genesis declares, one murder will beget others (4:13–15). How long will it be before the people of Germany and Austria will be free to think of themselves in terms that are not radically conditioned by the holocaust, whether through acknowledgment of it or through denial? (Denial, after all, is merely the postponement of acknowledgment; and when the debt is finally paid, it carries heavy interest.) How long will it be before the modern world can free itself from the self-replicating specter of genocide? How long will it be before the Jewish people can think of themselves in terms that are not overwhelmingly dominated and driven by this one event? In one sense, the answer to all these questions is “never.” The Hitlerian history is a permanent accretion to our identity as human beings, just as its own roots stretch back into the distant past. In even the most superficial sense, the answer is “not for a very long time.”

Such priestly evils reverberate through the history of many nations, perhaps all. In the United States, they have to do particularly with the evils involved in two aspects of our history. One is the conquest of the continent by people of European descent, who often justified what they were doing in religious terms as the triumph of Christian light over pagan darkness or, in a thinly secularized form, as the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny. The other was slavery, for which a religious apologetic was also offered.³⁶ In each case, evil priesthood, claiming access to ultimate TRUTH, shaped the everyday world in ways that burden us still. When our national priests claimed that GOD willed the evils of conquest or slavery, they effectively justified both the deeds themselves and the passions of greed and racial hatred that informed them. Doctrines of Manifest Destiny, based on the history of Israel, and a professedly literal interpretation (actually a racist allegory) of the curse of Noah gave weight to a whole series of lies about white superiority that still permeate our culture. Americans go on living with the consequences of our demonic priesthoods. Perhaps it is much the same with other nations.

Priestly experience, then, is frightening and sometimes dangerous. To be a priest entails living on the everyday plane with an awareness of the DEEP under our feet. In reality, of course, all human existence is lived out on this boundary; and yet, we are not, as human beings, conscious of it all the time. We can and do retreat into the shallows of the everyday; we prefer, most of the time, the lower stakes of day-to-day existence. But, as Genesis puts it, humanity was created from dust and the breath of GOD (2:7); we belong to both worlds. When we encounter the HOLY, we are encountering what is essential to us, even if it seems beyond us. We are drawn inescapably. From the beginning, in Cain and Abel, humanity has been approaching the border with gifts and with fear.

The fear is well-founded. TRUTH, as such, is beyond our grasp. We can at most grasp lesser truths of varying degrees of inclusiveness. The flaws in ourselves distort the lens through which we look. The person who wants to be important will look for a truth that is distinctively his or her “truth” and will make it out to be better than the next person’s. The person who happens to despise others, whether Jews or people of color or homosexual persons or some other group, will find some plausible pretext for prejudice and hatred—and will not notice how these lies distort all areas of life. The person of intense partisanship will concoct some device to prove that his or her group alone possesses the truth and all others are contemptible. It is hard for us to turn our competitiveness, our schemes, and our preconceptions loose and simply to live in communion on the boundary.

TRUTH, as a whole, is beyond us and, at a certain obvious level, almost unaffected by our existence. TRUTH, in our grasping at it, however, falls prey to all the twists and turns that human evil can inflict. Going to the boundary, meeting the TRANSCENDENT, does not deliver us from our humanness. Sometimes it may even magnify our human potential for evil to an appalling degree. The egomania that brought suffering and death to the people of Jonestown is an extreme example of something endemic to humanity; but it gained its particular power, at that specific moment, from the perverted but powerful priesthood of one man. Xenophobia and violence were in central Europe long before Hitler; but Hitler’s priesthood gave him the power to focus the passions of his audience in obedience to a chimerical god of racial purity. The power of Hitler or of Jim Jones came from their having been in the border country. But their own evil distorted what they found there, and the warping of their priesthood destroyed them and many others.

Priesthood is dangerous for us, both as priests and when we have recourse to another’s priestly ministry. If it were possible to rid ourselves of the arcana and to live a human existence untroubled by such dangers, one would be more than a little tempted to do so. But it is not possible. We would have to extinguish our human drive to look around us and to seek meaning and value. We would have to lose our ability to commune with one another and with the universe. We would have to forswear our desire to understand, our delight in beauty, and every creative impulse. We would have to cease being human, which is not, finally, within our power.

Rather than seeking to escape from priesthood, we shall do better by learning to practice it with humility, honesty, disinterestedness, generosity, an appropriate degree of self-doubt, and an awareness of fundamental human equality. Given these qualities, we shall learn to be priests who also accept the priestly ministry of our neighbors. We shall aim at being priests who celebrate life rather than destroy it. If we cannot altogether avoid being the heirs of Cain and Abel at the boundaries of human existence, we can at least aim to contribute further to the wreckage that perverted priesthood inflicts.

One factor in determining how well we succeed is the question of how we name the arcana. I do not mean by this statement that there is one “correct” name that will somehow protect us from the effects of our own evil. Christians name the HOLY “GOD.” It is a good name. But, however appropriate, it has not saved Christians from killing or degrading both outsiders and one another in order to “prove” our intimacy with the ULTIMATE. Still, our names for the HIDDEN REALITY do influence what we seek at the boundary and what we bring back with us into the world of the everyday. Probably we do best if we acknowledge that one name has never been and will never be sufficient.

If we understand the arcana as our border with POWER and not also with TRUTH, we shall feel no obligation to honesty in pursuit of our priestly goals. If we conceive the HOLY as objective and not also personal, we may find that we have little sense of one another’s human potential for holiness. If we conceive of the TRANSCENDENT only as LAWGIVER, we shall understand our world, our lives, and ourselves very differently than if we conceive it also as LOVE. If we know it as KNOWLEDGE and not also as WISDOM, we shall abandon ourselves to the pursuit of something too narrowly intellectual, not rich nor human enough. No single name suffices to hint adequately at what lies beyond our grasp. Responsible priesthood therefore involves a conscientious attempt to learn those combinations of names that give us most adequate direction, that falsify our experience least, and that put us most surely in touch with our shared humanity as well as with the transcendence of REALITY.³⁷

The search for the authentic names of GOD is a search for authentic priesthood. Happily, we do not have to begin the search from scratch. We inherit priestly traditions. We learn from other priests as well as from our own encounters on the boundary. Yet we have an ongoing responsibility to test and purify the tradition as well as to absorb and hand it on. The tradition of priesthood is no more secure from abuse than the individuals who belong to it. We must all be its purifiers and renewers as well as its preservers and practitioners. The priesthood we share is forever in process of formation.

All that I have written thus far has to do with the universal human priesthood. My argument is that all human beings are priests, by virtue simply of our humanity. To be sure, we share this priesthood with the whole of creation, giving and receiving these ministries in exchange with oceans and continents, angels, trees, stars, rivers, and everything that is.³⁸ (This is a subject deserving of fuller treatment, but not one I can pursue here.) At the center of our experience as humans, however, is our priesthood to and with one another. We can perform this priesthood badly, but we cannot escape it. Nothing really useful can be said about the subject of priesthood in the life of the church until this fact is firmly in place as the foundation and starting point.

The more specifically Christian dimensions of this priesthood derive from the work of Jesus, who took up this priesthood that belongs to all of us and lived it out in a particular way. He handed it back to his followers in a form not so much altered as interpreted by his life and teachings. Before we can understand how Jesus interpreted our shared priesthood, however, we need first to take a look at another sort of priesthood—one that is sometimes placed in opposition to the priesthood we all share. Not only do we human beings practice the shared priesthood that belongs to all by right of our shared humanity, we also create models of this fundamental priestly ministry in the form of a sacramental priesthood, the priesthood of the ordained, the clergy. This is not an occasional aberration, but a strong, widespread human tendency. The next chapter will examine the purposes, benefits, and dangers of this sacrament of our common priesthood.

1. Sometimes, as in the ancient mysteries, the arcana may be deliberately hidden in order to set the stage for an initiation, so that the force of the arcana, suddenly revealed, can explode into new consciousness for the initiate. But this practice is a recognition of the secret nature of the arcana and serves as a way of putting them to use mystagogically, not the fundamental reason why they are kept secret.

2. “The knowledge which constitutes eternal life is not a projected knowledge as of an external thing, but an experimental knowledge. We do not merely know about the Divine Relationships. That is only the dead form of knowledge which the intellect is capable of receiving. In spiritual life we know these Relationships by substantial identification in the Spirit of love.” R. M. Benson, quoted by Martin L. Smith, “The Theological Vision of Father Benson,” in Martin Smith, ed., Benson of Cowley (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 1983) 30–31.

3. By “the HOLY” I mean roughly what Rudolf Otto described using the term—or more specifically his conception of the HOLY as “nonrational.” I cannot follow him in his concept of the HOLY as an a priori category, since this mingles elements of the HOLY (as I am using the term) with elements of the sacred (see below, chapter 2). I see the sacred as a category of religion and therefore externally related to the HOLY, not truly integrated with it. See Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958) 1–40, 112–42.

4. I have chosen to set names for the substance of the arcana in small capitals, both to help the reader relate them to one another as equivalents and also to remind us that they cannot be understood in an entirely literal way.

5. “We must use names because we are speaking about a God who is personal, not an ‘it.’ We speak to God as Father, Mother, Friend, Lover, because we are speaking to one who is closer to us than we are to ourselves, one who has in Jesus become one with us. Yet we also know that our speaking to God is not like speaking to a father, mother, lover, or friend, because we are speaking to one who utterly transcends all of those descriptions.” James Griffiss, Naming the Mystery: How Our Words Shape Prayer and Belief (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 1990) 83.

6. To some extent, even the most ordinary words share in this complex relationship with their referents: “All names, whether of God or anything else, are interpretations of a reality that is ultimately hidden from us, and they all fall short of the reality they would name. For that reason they are sacramental; they direct us to the reality, but are not to be confused with it” (Griffiss, Naming the Mystery, 63).

7. Exodus 3:14, Septuagint.

8. “I would say that most of the time we are for all practical purposes withdrawn from that sharpness of being, and only at rare intervals does one suddenly realize the distinctive tension of being alive. It is as if a machine were just quietly turning over, when suddenly it speeds up with almost unbearable acceleration and the pitch of its whine becomes almost excruciating to the hearing.” Ralph Harper, On Presence: Variations and Reflections (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991) 93–94.

9. Fredegond Shove, “Revelation,” in Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956) 20.

10. “Attention to the ordinary tends to be in conflict with contemporary experience with its emphasis on the dramatic, the violent, and the shocking. . . . The sacred character of the ordinary things of life is prominent in [Barbara] Pym’s novels. It will continue to be so in contemporary life within and outside the church because the ordinary permeates all human experience. No human life is devoid of the ordinary, and any attempt to dispense with it is a move in the direction of meaninglessness and non-being.” Belinda Bede, “A ‘kinder, gentler’ Anglican Church: The Novels of Barbara Pym,” Anglican Theological Review 75 (1993):395–96.

11. “Ironically, or perhaps very appropriately, it is a harder side of nature that often grounds me. Nature is not only beautiful and bountiful; at times it is devastatingly destructive, and at others, exquisitely indifferent. We can’t blackmail nature. We can’t wheedle or cajole it into perpetuating illusions we hold about ourselves. . . . Nature’s indifference leaves us quietly to face our own truth, while in constancy it stands at our side. Its very indifference creates an environment at once unrelenting and gracious.” Jean M. Blomquist, “Barefoot Basics: Yearning and Learning to Stand on Holy Ground,” Weaving 8/5 (September/October 1992): 11.

12. “[The] completeness of emphasis on first-hand solitary seeking, [the] one-by-one achievement of Eternity, has not in fact proved truly fruitful in the past. Where it seems to be fruitful, the solitude is illusory. Each great regenerator and revealer of Reality, each God-intoxicated soul achieving transcendence, owes something to its predecessors and contemporaries. All great spiritual achievement, like all great artistic achievement, however spontaneous it may seem to be, however much the fruit of a personal love and vision, is firmly rooted in the racial past. It fulfills rather than destroys. . . .” Evelyn Underhill, The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986) 118–19.

13. This is the insight expressed in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. “If God were alone, there would be solitude and concentration in unity and oneness. If God were two, a duality, Father and Son only, there would be separation (one being distinct from the other) and exclusions (one not being the other). But God is three, a Trinity, and being three avoids solitude, overcomes separation and surpasses exclusion. . . . Through being an open reality, this triune God also includes other differences; so the created universe enters into communion with the divine.” Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society, trans. Paul Burns (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1988) 3.

14. “Ultimate Reality confronts us in such a way that we are addressed. By being addressed we encounter One who is other to ourselves, but the otherness disclosed in this manner is one of communion and not separation.” Christopher Morse, Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Disbelief (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1994) 91.

15. The border country connects the “surface” or ordinary reality with its deeper roots. We will imagine it best if we think of the border not as dividing “natural” from “supernatural” or “this world” from “the world to come” or even “creation” from “God,” but rather as connecting the “everyday” with the “transcendent.” The “transcendent” may as easily be “within” the everyday as beyond or under or over or next to or otherwise “outside” it.

16. “Our ministry [in the AIDS pandemic] is a theology of redemptive and sacrificial acts, expressing through deed—and through loss—what the Gospel proclaims in words. What we do, what we experience, and what we liberate others to do animates the new Law: We love God. And we love our neighbor. We are purified by our experience, and everything else is secondary. Our experience seems sometimes to be devoid of beauty, but it is never devoid of truth.” Warren W. Buckingham III, opening plenary address for National Episcopal AIDS Coalition “Hope and Healing” Conference, Santa Monica, Calif., February 3, 1994.

17. “[Charles Williams’s] ‘doctrine of substituted love’ requires each of us to carry the burdens of others. . . . This may fly in the face of our very modern insistence—and pride—that we should do everything ourselves. To try to do everything ourselves, however, is to fly in the face of the laws of the universe, and it results in what Kierkegaard called ‘sickness unto death.’ [Gabriel] Marcel and Williams were convinced that only exchange or substitution can be a realistic antidote to despair. But first, ‘you must be content to be helped,’ and that is sometimes harder than to carry someone else’s fear. And yet it can be done.” Harper, On Presence, 44.

18. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist Press, 1978) 12–13. Cf. Rowan Williams, Christian Spirituality: A Theological History from the New Testament to Luther and St. John of the Cross (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1979) 62–67.

19. “Perhaps [Gabriel] Marcel’s single most important insight, more important than his distinction between problem and mystery, or his sense of being as presence and presence as mystery, is his insistence that what truly makes a person human is his or her capacity for being open to others.” Harper, On Presence, 43.

20. “Already in everyday human speech we sometimes hear someone say, ‘That was a revelation for me.’ ... By that we mean that something surprising took place, something that broke through the experiences of everyday routine, and on closer inspection (for experience is also ‘reason’ and interpretation) that seemed to be ‘news,’ news in which we nevertheless recognize the deepest of ourselves. Here the new at the same time seemed to be the ‘old familiar’ which had not yet been expressed. . . .” Edward Schillebeeckx, Church: The Human Story of God, trans. John Bowden (New York: Crossroad, 1990) 22.

21. “. . . the Christian perception of the meaning of the offer of revelation comes about in a creative giving of meaning: in a new production of meaning or a re-reading of the Bible and the tradition of faith within constantly new situations of every kind.” Schillebeeckx, Church, 44.

22. “Countless times nature has drawn me into itself. ... It has reminded me over and over of the wonder and beauty of life and creation, as well as its power and fragility. . . . My sense of the Holy has always been rooted deeply in my relationship with the earth. Many, and perhaps most, of my early experiences of God—and many of my later ones as well—have mingled inextricably with the earth, with nature, with the holy ground of creation.” Blomquist, “Barefoot Basics,” 8–9.

23. “If ever humankind lived near the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and not near the tree of life, it is today. That is what Kierkegaard meant when he said that we know so much, have so much information, but have forgotten what it means to exist. It would be better to know less and to imagine more.” Harper, On Presence, 106.

24. “. . . the mysteries of God are the ways of God in getting through to us, in opening our eyes to face reality, in bringing us to faith, and hope, and love. . . . We can neither claim nor master these mysteries. They can only claim and master us.” Morse, Not Every Spirit, 43.

25. It may be that such perfection is not to be desired. The sculptor Stephen De Staebler has pointed out the value of our incompleteness: “It helps bridge the gulf when the other person or the image in the art is less complete. . . . We are who we are not so much because of what we have or are endowed with but because of what we are not endowed with.” Quoted by Doug Adams, “De Staebler Winged Figure Installed at G.T.U. Library,” Arts 6/3 (Summer 1994): 4. This is, in a sense, the negative statement of Paul’s doctrine of gifts; we are defined not only by the gifts we receive from the SPIRIT, but by those we do not receive directly and must therefore depend on our neighbor for.

26. There is a significant irony in the Gospel of Mark that alludes to this reality. Jesus tells the disciples, “To you the mystery of GOD’S kingdom is given, but for those people outside, all things turn out to be in riddles” (Mark 4:11). Yet from this point onward in Mark’s Gospel, the disciples never really get anything right, and the moments of true insight all come to outsiders.

27. “Although there are many experiences of meaning in human life, nevertheless it is above all experiences of meaninglessness, of injustice and of innocent suffering that have a revelatory significance par excellence. . . . The authority of experiences therefore culminates in human stories of suffering.” Schillebeeckx, Church, 28.

28. Kenneth Leech, Soul Friends: The Practice of Christian Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977); Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972).

29. “To experience oneself as a human being is to feel life moving through one and claiming one as a part of it. It is like the moment of insight into a new idea or an aspect of truth. What initially is grasped by the mind and held there for meaning begins slowly or suddenly to hold the mind as if the mind itself is being thought by a vaster and greater Mind. It is like the thing that happens when you are trying to explain something to a child and you finally succeed in doing so. Then the child says, ‘I see.’ In that moment you are no longer there in fact. The barrier that stood between the child’s comprehension of the idea and the idea itself has been removed. There is a flowing together, as if the child and the idea were alone in all the universe!” Howard Thurman, The Luminous Darkness: A Personal Interpretation of the Anatomy of Segregation and the Ground of Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1965) 98.

30. On the extraordinary depth of priesthood that AIDS has often elicited from those whom it effects, directly or through their loved ones, see Richard P. Hardy, Knowing the God of Compassion: Spirituality and Persons Living with AIDS (Ottawa: Novalis, 1993).

31. Traherne, Centuries 3.1–5; Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” The priesthood of children is often difficult for adults to accept. Robert Coles tells us of his own irritation when Anna Freud said to him, “Let the children help you with their ideas on the subject”: “At the time, I was rather put off—I thought she was telling me that close attention to boys and girls as they talked about religious issues would bring me closer to the way my own thinking, some of it childish, made use of religious interests. But years later, as I looked back . . ., I realized that she meant precisely what she said; she had in mind no condescension or accusation of psychopathology.” The Spiritual Life of Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990) xvi.

32. “If. . . the terror, the loss and the fear of the unknown abyss is too much, we will retreat from the edge. . . . Our fear and our terror will set like wet cement and we will become increasingly rigid. We then move from being quarrelsome, annoying, and irritating toward becoming theological and religious bullies. . . . [T]he rigidity is not primarily motivated by the desire to control other people; rather, it is primarily motivated by the desire to control God. ...” Michael Dwinell, Fire Bearer: Evoking a Priestly Humanity (Liguori, Mo.: Triumph Books, 1993) 162–63.

33. This lust can infect communities and institutions as well as individuals. “It is only because we are so accustomed to this—taking churches for granted, even when we reject them—that we do not see how odd they really are: how curious it is that men do not set up exclusive and mutually hostile clubs full of rules and regulations to enjoy the light of the sun in particular times and fashions, but do persistently set up such exclusive clubs full of rules and regulations, so to enjoy the free Spirit of God.” Underhill, The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today, 116.

34. Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Putnam, 1951) 54.

35. “. . . all of the demonic claims against human life have a common denominator. Typically, each and every stratagem of the principalities seeks the death of the specific faculties of rational and moral comprehension which distinguish human beings from all other creatures. Whatever form or appearance it takes, demonic aggression always aims at the immobilization or surrender or destruction of the mind and at the neutralization or abandonment or demoralization of the conscience. In the Fall, the purpose and effort of every principality is the dehumanization of human life, categorically.” William Stringfellow, “Resisting Babel: Preserving Sanity and Conscience” (excerpt from An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land [1973]), The Witness 78/9 (September 1995): 16.

36. Some advocates of slavery argued that it was GOD’S providence for the conversion and gradual perfection of Africans. I have, for example, a rebuttal to such arguments by Cornelius H. Edgar, The Curse of Canaan Rightly Interpreted, and Kindred Topics (New York: Baker & Godwin, 1862) 33–40. For a good survey of Christian polemics about slavery and their use of scripture, see Willard M. Swartley, Slavery, Sabbath, War, and Women: Case Issues in Biblical Interpretation (Scottsdale, Pa., and Waterloo, Ont.: Herald Press, 1983) 31–64. Peter J. Gomes identifies the “culturist” element in the use of scripture texts to support slavery and other forms of racism in The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart (New York: William Morrow, 1996) 46–51, 85–101. The same basic points hold true for the use of scripture to justify the European-American conquest of the North American continent.

37. The “names,” of course, are much more than words or titles. Each evokes not only an image of God, but a metaphor of how God is related to the everyday world. See Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987).

38. Among contemporary authors, Annie Dillard has shown particular insight into this truth. The spiritual world of Holy the Firm, for example, includes far more than just humanity and GOD (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).