me, with my particular experience of my own life, and my neighbors, who experience the same reality from slightly different vantage points. This great, ongoing conversation is the exercise of priestly ministry.
My priests are not always people I have chosen or identified for myself as priests. Some of them may seem ill-equipped for the role. Some of them may even be my enemies. The only absolute qualification of a priest is insight, an insight that comes from some encounter with the arcana, some time spent in awareness in the border country. Perhaps the person made a brief foray to the border country and no more. Perhaps someone may speak with insight while intending only to be cruel. Perhaps I may reveal to someone else a great truth that I do not really understand myself. There is nothing neat, tidy, or predictable about this process. Neophytes and slackers and the completely unwilling—as well as those who have grown old in faithful, attentive priesthood—may contribute something of value. One might not wish to rely primarily on the neophytes or slackers, but GOD is free to speak through any voice at all.
Even those elements of creation that do not have human voices—the physical environment, the animal world, or the angelic orders—may also contribute, speaking directly to soul and spirit without words. I will not deal with these nonhuman priesthoods in this book. Our primary priesthood is human and will be quite enough for one volume. But we share with the rest of the universe our creaturely status. We have much to give to one another and to learn from one another. There is much more that could be said on the subject of other beings as priests to us and of us as priests to them.22
Learning about religion, theology, or spirituality may strengthen one’s priesthood, but it cannot substitute for the primary knowledge gleaned from one’s own experience of the HOLY. That experience demands our own careful attention and also the wisdom of other priests to interpret it. Theology comes into its own when it is understood as a way to cultivate this process of interpretation. A person who lives faithfully and attentively in the border country may become a good priest without formal instruction. A learned theologian who avoids the border country will be a poor priest, no matter how much education he or she has.23 The cultivation of attentiveness and the deepening of understanding can make us better priests. And yet even the most indifferent human being will, at some time or other, hand on a stray insight that can turn someone’s world around and make it new. So inevitable is our priestly ministry that it goes on, to some degree, even without our cooperation. How much more can it achieve with our cooperation?
The long-standing hope of all human spirituality is that we can learn to involve ourselves more effectively with the priestly dimensions of our lives. If so, this will occur by becoming more attentive and open to the REALITY that surrounds and upholds us. Sometimes, of course, the HOLY reaches out to us and calls us—even seizes us—through circumstances beyond our control. A great crisis or a great joy makes us suddenly aware that the world is much larger and deeper than we had supposed. Ultimately, the whole encounter in the border country is possible only to the degree that the HOLY is willing to meet us there.24 Still, we can cultivate our attentiveness intentionally. We begin by cultivating humility. Humility does not mean some exaggerated demeaning of self, but a faithful, realistic, nondefensive appraisal of ourselves, of both our gifts and our weaknesses. Attentiveness also requires patience, a hopeful willingness to wait while the HOLY reveals itself, even if that seems to take far longer than we should wish. It calls for love—the love of the TRANSCENDENT that draws us onward, an answering love of our own from within, and a love for the neighbors who share this adventure with us. Attentiveness calls, above all, for a growing devotion to truth and a rejection of hypocrisy. Lies turn out to be like plugs in a conduit, damming the flow of the HOLY more effectively than any other barrier we can impose. Faithful humility, hopeful patience, love, integrity—these are the keys.
Even if we cultivate such virtues, however, there is no possibility of mastering this priesthood, only a hope that it may master us. One cannot by working at it make oneself the perfect priest. If you try, you will wind up focusing more on yourself than on the REALITY met in the arcana. Our experience of the HOLY always turns out to be conversational—always partly beyond our control. We cannot perfect priesthood by making ourselves perfect—even supposing this were possible—because GOD’S part in the conversation is not at our bidding.25 No matter how advanced you may become in priesthood, the most penetrating, most astonishing insight may still be given to the seemingly unprepared person at your elbow. There is no program guaranteed to produce superior priests.26
With this reservation in mind, we can still make one basic observation about those who become exceptional priests. They often prove to be marginal, in some sense, to the mainstream of their society. This is only an observation, not a rule. There are certainly exceptions. Yet the person who is thoroughly at home in the everyday world probably finds less occasion to look beneath the surface. It is easier to take the world for granted when it flows smoothly and when you feel a clear sense of belonging. The person whirled in the eddies at the edge of the stream and battered, perhaps, against the rocks may be more ready to look at what is beneath the surface.27
The priestly value of marginality becomes manifest in a variety of ways. We have heard a good deal over the past few decades of “soul friends” or of “the wounded healer.”28 The phrases remind us that priestly ministry is not a gift from the strong to the weak, but rather a sharing between persons fundamentally equal. Indeed, this equality is of the essence in priesthood. We stand beside one another sharing what we have found in the border country. Our weakness, more than our strength, reveals our mutual equality. Weakness drives us to the contemplation of a reality more encompassing and truer and more fundamental than the everyday, and then shows us that this revelation, granted in this way to us, must be granted in the same way to all. We understand that we cannot stand above anyone else in the presence of GOD, only alongside.
Another example of the value of marginality is the role of gay and lesbian people in the late twentieth century. As lesbians and gay men have come out of the closet, it becomes clear that there are far more of us in religious vocations than our percentage of the total population would lead one to expect. What brings us into such roles, often within religious institutions that are officially intolerant toward us even while they accept our contributions to their life? Some might argue that gay and lesbian people are simply more spiritual by “nature.” But I think such an argument misses the point. It is not our strength but our marginalization in modern Western culture that compels us to pay attention to the deeper aspects of our human experience. Lesbians and gay men are not immune to the common temptation to pursue distraction instead of attentiveness. But whatever path we follow, we find ourselves living with a basic contradiction in everyday life, knowing that REALITY has shaped us in ways that the mainstream of our culture not only rejects, but even at times punishes. We have to ask questions that others do not have to ask.
People for whom the everyday world is not “working” have to do something about their experience of discontinuity. There are many possible responses, of which a conscious practice of priesthood is only one. Some marginalized people retreat into fantasy worlds, some into amusements and distractions, some into an excessive devotion to work or to serving others, some into the anesthetizing of their anxieties with drugs or into other kinds of hopelessness. Still others take the offensive in the hope either of changing a world that seems to have no place for them or of creating a world apart, where they will be freer to live as they think right. The priestly response does not necessarily sit in judgment on these other options. There are moments when each of them may be the best or even the only available choice for a given person.
But the person who takes up the priestly ministry in a conscious way is saying that the first order of business is neither to salve one’s wounds nor to change the outer world, but to experience what is and to understand how one’s experience of it is experience of the HOLY. By leading our lives, the lives we have been dealt by circumstance, on the boundary with the HIDDEN, we grow in understanding—an understanding which we can then share with others at the boundary. Priesthood begins with finding and continues with showing.29 It is both reflective and active. Ultimately,
