everyday world in ways that burden us still. When our national priests claimed that GOD willed the evils of conquest or slavery, they effectively justified both the deeds themselves and the passions of greed and racial hatred that informed them. Doctrines of Manifest Destiny, based on the history of Israel, and a professedly literal interpretation (actually a racist allegory) of the curse of Noah gave weight to a whole series of lies about white superiority that still permeate our culture. Americans go on living with the consequences of our demonic priesthoods. Perhaps it is much the same with other nations.
Priestly experience, then, is frightening and sometimes dangerous. To be a priest entails living on the everyday plane with an awareness of the DEEP under our feet. In reality, of course, all human existence is lived out on this boundary; and yet, we are not, as human beings, conscious of it all the time. We can and do retreat into the shallows of the everyday; we prefer, most of the time, the lower stakes of day-to-day existence. But, as Genesis puts it, humanity was created from dust and the breath of GOD (2:7); we belong to both worlds. When we encounter the HOLY, we are encountering what is essential to us, even if it seems beyond us. We are drawn inescapably. From the beginning, in Cain and Abel, humanity has been approaching the border with gifts and with fear.
The fear is well-founded. TRUTH, as such, is beyond our grasp. We can at most grasp lesser truths of varying degrees of inclusiveness. The flaws in ourselves distort the lens through which we look. The person who wants to be important will look for a truth that is distinctively his or her “truth” and will make it out to be better than the next person’s. The person who happens to despise others, whether Jews or people of color or homosexual persons or some other group, will find some plausible pretext for prejudice and hatred—and will not notice how these lies distort all areas of life. The person of intense partisanship will concoct some device to prove that his or her group alone possesses the truth and all others are contemptible. It is hard for us to turn our competitiveness, our schemes, and our preconceptions loose and simply to live in communion on the boundary.
TRUTH, as a whole, is beyond us and, at a certain obvious level, almost unaffected by our existence. TRUTH, in our grasping at it, however, falls prey to all the twists and turns that human evil can inflict. Going to the boundary, meeting the TRANSCENDENT, does not deliver us from our humanness. Sometimes it may even magnify our human potential for evil to an appalling degree. The egomania that brought suffering and death to the people of Jonestown is an extreme example of something endemic to humanity; but it gained its particular power, at that specific moment, from the perverted but powerful priesthood of one man. Xenophobia and violence were in central Europe long before Hitler; but Hitler’s priesthood gave him the power to focus the passions of his audience in obedience to a chimerical god of racial purity. The power of Hitler or of Jim Jones came from their having been in the border country. But their own evil distorted what they found there, and the warping of their priesthood destroyed them and many others.
Priesthood is dangerous for us, both as priests and when we have recourse to another’s priestly ministry. If it were possible to rid ourselves of the arcana and to live a human existence untroubled by such dangers, one would be more than a little tempted to do so. But it is not possible. We would have to extinguish our human drive to look around us and to seek meaning and value. We would have to lose our ability to commune with one another and with the universe. We would have to forswear our desire to understand, our delight in beauty, and every creative impulse. We would have to cease being human, which is not, finally, within our power.
Rather than seeking to escape from priesthood, we shall do better by learning to practice it with humility, honesty, disinterestedness, generosity, an appropriate degree of self-doubt, and an awareness of fundamental human equality. Given these qualities, we shall learn to be priests who also accept the priestly ministry of our neighbors. We shall aim at being priests who celebrate life rather than destroy it. If we cannot altogether avoid being the heirs of Cain and Abel at the boundaries of human existence, we can at least aim to contribute further to the wreckage that perverted priesthood inflicts.
One factor in determining how well we succeed is the question of how we name the arcana. I do not mean by this statement that there is one “correct” name that will somehow protect us from the effects of our own evil. Christians name the HOLY “GOD.” It is a good name. But, however appropriate, it has not saved Christians from killing or degrading both outsiders and one another in order to “prove” our intimacy with the ULTIMATE. Still, our names for the HIDDEN REALITY do influence what we seek at the boundary and what we bring back with us into the world of the everyday. Probably we do best if we acknowledge that one name has never been and will never be sufficient.
If we understand the arcana as our border with POWER and not also with TRUTH, we shall feel no obligation to honesty in pursuit of our priestly goals. If we conceive the HOLY as objective and not also personal, we may find that we have little sense of one another’s human potential for holiness. If we conceive of the TRANSCENDENT only as LAWGIVER, we shall understand our world, our lives, and ourselves very differently than if we conceive it also as LOVE. If we know it as KNOWLEDGE and not also as WISDOM, we shall abandon ourselves to the pursuit of something too narrowly intellectual, not rich nor human enough. No single name suffices to hint adequately at what lies beyond our grasp. Responsible priesthood therefore involves a conscientious attempt to learn those combinations of names that give us most adequate direction, that falsify our experience least, and that put us most surely in touch with our shared humanity as well as with the transcendence of REALITY.37
The search for the authentic names of GOD is a search for authentic priesthood. Happily, we do not have to begin the search from scratch. We inherit priestly traditions. We learn from other priests as well as from our own encounters on the boundary. Yet we have an ongoing responsibility to test and purify the tradition as well as to absorb and hand it on. The tradition of priesthood is no more secure from abuse than the individuals who belong to it. We must all be its purifiers and renewers as well as its preservers and practitioners. The priesthood we share is forever in process of formation.
All that I have written thus far has to do with the universal human priesthood. My argument is that all human beings are priests, by virtue simply of our humanity. To be sure, we share this priesthood with the whole of creation, giving and receiving these ministries in exchange with oceans and continents, angels, trees, stars, rivers, and everything that is.38 (This is a subject deserving of fuller treatment, but not one I can pursue here.) At the center of our experience as humans, however, is our priesthood to and with one another. We can perform this priesthood badly, but we cannot escape it. Nothing really useful can be said about the subject of priesthood in the life of the church until this fact is firmly in place as the foundation and starting point.
The more specifically Christian dimensions of this priesthood derive from the work of Jesus, who took up this priesthood that belongs to all of us and lived it out in a particular way. He handed it back to his followers in a form not so much altered as interpreted by his life and teachings. Before we can understand how Jesus interpreted our shared priesthood, however, we need first to take a look at another sort of priesthood—one that is sometimes placed in opposition to the priesthood we all share. Not only do we human beings practice the shared priesthood that belongs to all by right of our shared humanity, we also create models of this fundamental priestly ministry in the form of a sacramental priesthood, the priesthood of the ordained, the clergy. This is not an occasional aberration, but a strong, widespread human tendency. The next chapter will examine the purposes, benefits, and dangers of this sacrament of our common priesthood.
1. Sometimes, as in the ancient mysteries, the arcana may be deliberately hidden in order to set the stage for an initiation, so that the force of the arcana, suddenly revealed, can explode into new consciousness for the initiate. But this practice is a recognition of the secret nature of the arcana and serves as a way of putting them to use mystagogically, not the fundamental reason why they are kept secret.
2. “The knowledge which constitutes eternal life is not a projected knowledge as of an external
