we make in the arcane border country focus around two things: finitude and connections. These, after all, are the two most basic conditions of human existence. We are finite—bounded and limited in many ways, most obviously by the ultimate boundary we call death, but also by any number of other factors external and internal to us. We are limited by the existence of other human beings, by space and time, by culture and history, by education or its lack, by disease. We are also bounded by the limits of our abilities, by the strength or weakness of our bodies or our intellects or our souls, by the difficulty we find in doing what we believe to be right, by our struggle for and against truthfulness, by sickness, by death.
In the borderlands, we become inescapably aware of our own smallness and incompleteness. In the half-awake world of everyday life, we may encounter the bounded quality of our lives only as isolated moments of guilt or fear or as that moral anxiety (often quite secularized and deprived of its real meaning) that pervades modern middle-class Western culture. In the border country, these moments of incompleteness or uncertainty prove to be aspects of something larger, grounded in the single reality of finitude as a fundamental defining fact of human existence. Our presence here is not always pleasant, but it is truthful and therefore strengthening.11
Equally fundamental to our existence is the fact of connection. However narrowly our finite boundaries are drawn about us, no one can in fact be human in isolation. Human existence is always social, even for the hermit.12 It is social not only in relation to other human beings, but in relation to the entire world in which we live and to the arcane REALITY which undergirds it.13 To be human means to be in interaction with other beings. If one is deprived of the usual opportunities for communication, one will resort to whatever can be found—to remembered encounters, to the hope of being restored to one’s friends and family, to imagined companionship, or to communion with the world of nature or of spirits. In the borderlands, this need for connection is revealed as something more than a string of isolated needs and solutions. It is a basic, defining fact of our humanness.14
The border country, therefore, is a place of intense vitality. It does not draw us away from the everyday world as much as it plunges us deeper into a reality of which the everyday world is the surface.15 It is a country of intense experience, not always pleasant. We may experience fear and dread, anger and desire in their full power. We are likely to encounter our own smallness and the limitations of our power in a way that proves, for a time at least, frightening. But we may also experience the love that binds heaven and earth together, which pervades and unites all things. We may find a kind of joy that can only be described, in the language of absurdity, as ecstasy, ekstasis, an emerging from and standing outside oneself. We may experience a peace that is not absence of distress but rather an intense, intimate, and fertile connection with oneself and one’s world. Of such are the arcana made.16
No human being has, in principle, any better or surer access to this arcane border country than any other person. We all live equally near it, indeed within it, though perhaps without being aware of it. One person, through some accident of temperament or history, may become more attentive than another and may therefore come to be recognized as someone who knows the secrets and who can minister out of them; but this does not deny the priestly ministry of others. Indeed, without some ability to experience the secrets ourselves, we could not learn them from others. The secrets are never taught, in the sense that one can be taught, say, the names of plants. They are only experienced. But they require interpretation. There is always a process by which we begin to understand our experience and come to grips with it, and this process works best with the advice and support of those who know the arcana better than we do.
Even the best priest needs the service of others as priests. However long you live in the border country and however familiar you become with it, you will never pass beyond all need for priestly ministration from others. Since we are, by nature, finite beings, each of us limited by space and time, none of us will ever experience directly more than one life’s worth of GOD, of TRUTH, of REALITY. What each of us comes to know are fragments of something immeasurably larger than we can grasp. My neighbor knows other fragments, which may well be the ones that make sense of my own. Therefore, I must turn to my neighbor in search of understanding, in search of the priestly ministries that can flow from that person’s experience. And my neighbor will need to turn to others, too—perhaps to me.17
This is an ongoing, never-ending process that is characteristic of human life. As Gregory of Nyssa said long ago, human life is not directed toward a static goal. Heaven is an epektasis—not an arriving at GOD, but a continual process of stretching and being stretched out toward GOD.18 The communion with the HOLY and with one another that characterizes priestly ministry is not only a means to some further end, but a participation in the goal itself. To be intimately connected with one another, to serve as priests to one another, together in the gracious presence ofTRUTH, ofREALITY, of the HOLY, of GOD—this is not only the way we grow in apprehension of the arcane border country; it is already, in itself, a taste of human life as it was meant to be from the beginning.
Each such experience enables me to risk further openness to the HOLY. Each such risk enables me to grow further in priesthood, so that I come to my own priestly ministrations with greater power and insight. There is more of me to participate in the ministry, more to give to the service of another, more to join in connection with the other. Yet what results, if one is paying attention, is not grandiosity, not a conviction of one’s own excellence and importance. It is rather enjoyment, a deep openness that forswears grasping and control in favor of delight in GOD and one’s neighbor, and in communion with them. For priesthood is not a thing in itself as much as it is a relation between beings.19
As I have already suggested, we experience the arcana in many forms. Some of them are of a kind that we commonly call “spiritual” or “mystical.” We may even experience a union with the HOLY that seems almost to remove us entirely from the everyday world. At other times, however, our discoveries as we voyage further into TRUTH may seem quite “secular.” The revelation may be political in its implications, like the vision of human dignity that prevented Rosa Parks from giving up her seat on the bus or the dream that drew Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., into the struggle for civil rights. Or the revelation may take the characteristically twentieth-century Western form of self-discovery—the discovery, say, of hidden beliefs that have governed our behavior without our conscious awareness. One person discovers that he has never believed seriously in his own human worth and has merely been living out the expectations of others—of parents, perhaps, or of spouse. Another discovers that she has believed herself to be the only real human being in the world and has been living an entirely self-centered existence in which others have been reduced to tools or obstacles. Such a moment of personal insight is also a glimpse of some element of the hitherto hidden TRUTH.
Every moment of revelation is an encounter with TRUTH. It is said that the scientist who discovered the structure of the benzene molecule saw its hitherto indecipherable shape in a dream, in the form of a snake taking its tail in its mouth. This does not diminish the importance of his work in the laboratory or the careful attention to ordinary, everyday reality that such a discovery required. Without that work he would not have known what he was seeing. Yet, as is usual with great intellectual breakthroughs (paradigm shifts, as we have learned to call them), the solution came not only from hard work, but also as gift, as revelation. Every moment of discovery, every cry of “Aha!” or “Eureka!” represents an encounter with the HIDDEN HOLY.20
What all experiences of the arcana share is that they change our perspective and produce meaning where, before, there was confusion or misunderstanding. Human experience is far from being self-explanatory and is too rich for any a priori scheme to interpret it fully. The meaning of your life always has to be built on the spot. You may find some reusable planks from earlier buildings. Some existing plans may suit your needs. You may even find some prefabricated materials useful in the project. But meaning will still have to be built on the spot.21 The true understanding and interpretation of life arises out of a conversation among ideas
