Living on the Border of the Holy. L. William Countryman

      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 in ancient Latin between sanctus and sacer, but ordinary language tends to be muddled on these matters. Religion, it turns out, models our encounter with the HOLY so successfully that we often fail to distinguish the original from the copy. In what follows,I will use the arcane names, particularly GOD and the HOLY, to refer to what we encounter in the border country. I will use “sacred” to refer to the institutions of religion that serve as models, images, or maps of the arcana.

      This does not mean that religion is completely divorced from the HOLY. Like everything else in the everyday world, religion may, at any moment, surprise us by opening onto the HOLY. GOD may—and often does—meet us through it. Religion prepares us to recognize and interpret the HOLY when we do encounter it. The young Samuel, for example, heard the voice of GOD in the Temple at Shiloh, but the old priest Eli had to tell him what he was hearing (1 Samuel 3:1–18). The rites of religion accustom us to certain patterns of encounter with the HOLY. Religion maintains the language and patterns and traditions of spirituality that help us interpret what we encounter in the border country. Still, we should avoid confusing the sacred with the REALITY it stands for. Such confusion constitutes idolatry and can cause profound harm.⁴⁴

      Religion is almost as inevitable as our fundamental priesthood.⁴⁵ It is not hard to understand why. The HOLY that we keep bumping up against in our lives is both all-pervasive and also hard to find when we want it. Our experience of it, the experience that grounds our priesthood, is elusive. Because we are creatures of time and space, we feel the need to settle this omnipresent but ungraspable REALITY into the concreteness of a sanctuary, a fast or feast, a rite—in short, in religion. GOD, TRUTH, ULTIMATE REALITY, the HOLY—these we cannot see or hold or visit at will; but we can make pilgrimage to a sacred shrine, perform sacred gestures, recite sacred texts, sing hymns, and join together in celebrating sacred occasions.

      If these rites are of more than the simplest sort, if (for example) they require the combined efforts of many people or take several days to perform or involve many different activities, they will probably require the services of religious specialists. The approach to GOD, remember, is dangerous. If our shrines and festivals and rites are to be good images of the HOLY (their very purpose in being), they, too, must be presented as foci of power and danger. Otherwise, they are of no value. We grant them power ourselves, through our reverence for them; and then we seek help to deal with their ascribed power without endangering ourselves. The power we grant them is real power, for it represents the culture’s or community’s collective extension of authority to the designated signs and rites. The power of those appointed to help us in the presence of the sacred is equally real.

      Hence the creation of priest-specialists, whom we might also call “priests of religion.” Their office comes into being in order to replicate or reproduce, on the level of religion, the role of the fundamental priest in life itself.⁴⁶ As we live out our fundamental priesthood on the margin between everyday life and the HIDDEN REALITY, so the priest of religion (in serving that role) lives on the margin between the profane world, with its spaces, times, and people, and the separate and sacred sphere of religion. The worshiper lives, for the most part, in the profane sphere, all those aspects of life defined by religion as non-sacred. She or he approaches the boundary of the sacred as if a stranger, seeking guidance from someone more at home there in order to enter the sacred realm and depart unharmed. All this replicates the experience of the fundamental priesthood in the presence of the HOLY—an experience that is too diffuse, too scattered throughout our existence, and too unpredictable for us to maintain a clear grasp of it. Since we cannot afford to lose sight of such important things in our life, we create maps, icons, and images to point us toward them.

      Religion and its priesthood have as many different forms as there are different conceptions of the HIDDEN HOLY and different methods of mapping it. We are concerned here, ultimately, with the life of the church and its priesthoods—the priesthood of the whole people and the priesthood of the ordained. But if we are to understand how Christian religion deals with priesthood, we have to pay attention to its roots in the ways the people of ancient Israel ordered their religion and its priesthood. Much has been written on this topic by historians of Israel and of religion in general, and no doubt much more remains to be said. We do not need a detailed account, however, or a complete history of how the institution developed and changed in response to changing times—only a broad sense of its basic outlines and its particularity.

      I do not want to overemphasize the uniqueness of the religion of ancient Israel. The sacrificial system at its heart was, in fact, broadly the same as that of other Mediterranean cultures.⁴⁷ Still, each religion is significantly unique, significantly different from all others. Each takes materials

Скачать книгу