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
