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).
2
The Priesthood of Religion
The fundamental priesthood belongs to all of us by virtue of our humanity. The only preparation or authorization for it is what comes from living our common human life honestly and attentively in the presence of the HOLY. There are, of course, some people who turn out to be exceptional priests, in whom our shared priesthood becomes particularly clear and who help the rest of us become aware of who we are. But there is no formula for producing such priests. Our priesthood—like the rest of our human individuality—is the result of unpredictable encounters among temperament, social definitions, personal history, and the uncontrollable will of GOD. For better or worse, we cannot make the necessary encounters with the HOLY happen at our own bidding. We can make ourselves available to them, but we cannot command GOD’S presence.39
There is an element of surprise that is integral to our every experience of the HIDDEN. We can treat this surprise as a gift and delight in it. But, often, its very unpredictability strikes us as a problem. Human beings are not content simply to wait on the unpredictable HOLY. If we cannot control it, we at least want some map of it. We want to celebrate the HOLY, to hand on our knowledge of it. And so we commemorate our encounters with GOD by composing songs and stories about them, by reenacting them in ritual, and by constructing models of them in the form of sanctuaries. This process is the creation of religion, with all its traditions and sanctuaries and ritual observances—and the priestly orders that serve them.40
Religion is not the same thing as the encounter with that HIDDEN TRUTH that is within and under all our days, the encounter with the HOLY, with GOD. “Map is not territory.”41 Religion belongs not to the border country, but to the everyday world, the world of surfaces, where it reproduces the pattern of our most profound spiritual experience in the concrete, everyday terms of rites and doctrines and sacred times and places. What I have called by such names as GOD, TRUTH, or the HOLY in the preceding chapter, religion represents in terms of “the sacred” and “the pure.” It contrasts these with “the profane” and “the unclean,” which function as images of what I have been calling “the everyday world.” “Sacred” applies to places, rites, things, and people set apart as symbols of the HOLY.42 “Profane” (literally, “before/outside the shrine”) signifies the opposite of the sacred. “Clean” or “pure” refers to whatever is in accordance with the sacred, what can safely enter the sanctuary; “unclean” and “impure” define the people and things that are to be excluded from shrine and rite.43
I am using this terminology in a quite particular way in order to give some clarity to these pages. The words are susceptible of many meanings, of course, and others will use them differently. I am not claiming to define them for good and all—only for purposes of the present discussion. My usage is not without foundation in ordinary language, particularly the distinction