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