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