we cannot always predict how it will transform us or the world around us.
Sometimes a person’s priesthood is shaped and given its direction by circumstances one can only regret. In 1986, at a conference on AIDS at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, I met Bill Irby, a gay man living with AIDS. He was doubly marginalized, both by his sexual orientation and by having AIDS—so often treated as disgraceful and unclean. He insisted on being open about both of aspects of his marginality, and he had the good fortune to work in a firm that was willing to accept that. Not long before the conference, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger had reminded Americans how much life is beyond our control and how inescapable death finally is. After decades in which we had come to imagine that medical and other technologies were eradicating chance, we were appalled. We had forgotten how to deal with such realities.
When Challenger exploded, Bill found his coworkers turning to him. He was, after all, the only one among them who had already been brought face to face with the fact of his own mortality. He was living in that part of the borderlands called “sickness and death.” People were practically lined up, he said, outside his office door, as if at a confessional, to hear what he might have to say about the unexpected limits of our lives. They hoped he might have found some wisdom that would help them deal with the shock of the unexpected disaster.
I do not tell this story to suggest that such a priestly ministry is required or inevitable for those with terminal illness.30 No, this was his particular priesthood, for which his illness had, as it turned out, prepared him. What was supremely painful and life-destroying in his own experience had turned out to be the means and occasion of his giving a priestly gift to others. Like him, any of us may find ourselves flung into a priesthood not of our choosing. But even if it is not so obviously and dramatically unwelcome, for all of us our priesthood is at least partly a product of who we are—of the lives we find ourselves living through accidents of birth and upbringing, temperament, education, and health.
While some of us are pushed into our priesthood by our everyday weaknesses and limitations, others may be drawn into it by a strong awareness of the arcana, an awareness that they cannot shake off and which summons them to serve the HOLY as priests. The pull of creativity, which is only partially under human control, has often drawn artists into priestly functions in our world. Indeed, for educated people in the modern West, the artist often ministers more effectively as priest than any religious functionary. Not all artists might wish to describe their work in these terms. Some abstractionists, for example, with their emphasis on pure line and color, might be uncomfortable with such language. Yet the public has found in the works of someone like Mark Rothko something of profoundly spiritual import. Sitting before his paintings, one has an uneasy and liberating sense of doors that lead further without leading away. They are compelling icons of the borderland.
Whether we are drawn or driven, then, whether our priesthood is shaped more by our marginality and our sufferings or by our gifts and longings, we become the priests that each of us, individually, alone can be. Our priesthood is a fulfillment of the potential that resides in the humanity of each of us. It is the experience of communion both with deepest REALITY and with one another.
But perhaps I am creating an impression that priesthood has to do only with great events or extraordinary gifts—with the exceptional rather than the ordinary dimensions of our lives. Nothing could be further from the truth. As I have already suggested, priesthood is a pattern of human life acted out daily in the most ordinary ways. Parenting, for example, is a priesthood in which the parent reveals to the child the hopes and values that shape an inner center to our seemingly miscellaneous experience. Childhood, too, is a priesthood, for the child still sees things that adults have learned not to see, and the child will often show the parent a thing or two that the parent had long forgotten. It is this capacity in the child that Thomas Traherne and William Wordsworth emphasized in their differing ways.31
Mentors are also priests, sharing their experience of REALITY in a way intended for the good of the person they advise. We find that the perspective of our mentors, related to ours and yet distinct, reveals new dimensions to our own half-understood experience. Listeners, the people who simply hear us out quietly, are also priests. They encourage us as we look around us in the border country, examine the unfamiliar terrain, and begin to give expression to our experience and our discoveries. Speech directed to a patient and attentive audience often brings to the surface revelatory qualities that we had not noticed in our lives.
Teachers and learners are priests to one another, encouraging and supporting each other in the border country. Growth in knowledge and understanding carries with it certain risks. We cannot learn without taking a risk that it will change our world, quite probably in ways we had not anticipated. We have to risk the possibility that what we have valued in the past may cease to seem valuable, that new light may call us to new ways of thinking and living, that we may see old landmarks from new perspectives and therefore, for a time, feel that we have lost our bearings altogether. The person who is formally the student is not the only one at risk, for the student brings a distinct perspective to the material that may compel the teacher to see it in new ways. They are poor teachers who do not learn from their students. Teacher and learner encourage one another in the face of these risks, forming a priestly community that has agreed to venture together into the unknown.
Politicians are priests—I mean the true practitioners of statecraft who have a genuine care and regard for the body politic, not just people trying to impose an abstract ideal on it or to make a profit. They encounter that HOLY REALITY that animates our life as communities and seek to show us how to live in conformity with it. They seek to mold, out of the motley materials of our jumbled histories, a society that will be a blessing and not a curse. There have been too few of them in the tormented world of the last few decades. The same kind of priesthood belongs, at another social level, to faithful executives and managers of all sorts. They are priests to the communities that they lead and serve, seeking not just short-term profit for a corporation, but a community in which work is a human and not a degrading activity. Neither politicians nor managers can perform such a priesthood entirely on their own. They can do it only as they enter into priestly conversation with the communities they guide and serve and begin to understand what lies in the communities’ depths. The community is priest to them, as they are to the community.
Our spiritual counselors are priests to us. Perhaps they speak to us most overtly and explicitly about our relation to the HOLY, to GOD, to TRUTH, though they have no monopoly on such matters. We expect them to hear us out and to speak to our particular experience, not with prefabricated answers, as mere mouthpieces of religion sometimes do, but with a deeply rooted wisdom that can interpret and respond to our most varied needs and uncertainties. It is a commonplace of spiritual direction that the attentive counselor will also learn from the person who is seeking counsel, that there are no one-way streets in this sort of human interaction.
Perhaps our most common experience of priesthood—and often our most powerful one—is found in friendship. In friendship, desire and opportunity combine to allow us the truest knowledge of another person we are ever likely to get. In old friends we can see the flaws as well as the good points, and yet we still delight in them, still recognize their uniquely human beauty, accept that they, like us, stand in GOD’S presence at the border with the HOLY. Our knowledge of our friend and our friend’s knowledge of us enables us to serve one another particularly well as priests, often in ways so casual that we barely notice that priestly ministry is going on.
Priesthood is part of the warp and woof of our existence. Even the most casual of human interactions may involve an element of priestly ministry, perhaps without our actual consciousness that it is so. If we identify certain people particularly as priests—artists, for example, or holy women and men, or people who have come close to death—we do not mean that they are the only priests. For most of us, most of the time, our priests are people like ourselves—and are all the more valuable to us for that.
Up to this point, I have been speaking of priesthood
