Living on the Border of the Holy - L. William Countryman

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and norms among Christians today. The ministry of the laity is often contrasted with the ministry of the ordained. The ordained are under a certain suspicion of misconduct. The whole purpose of ordination in a world that has become more democratic may not be obvious. Churches often have trouble defining exactly what they see as the responsibilities of the ordained. Lay people are equally uncertain about their own role. In addition, many churches are embroiled in prolonged struggles over whom to ordain, while church authorities and seminary faculties engage in ongoing debates about how to prepare them for their work.

      I wish to call both those who are ordained and those who are not to a new appreciation of the fundamental priesthood they share with one another, with Christ, and indeed with all humanity. Only a return to the priestly character of all human existence can ground a renewal of our common priesthood. I wish also to propose a more thoroughly sacramental understanding of the priesthood of the ordained, which will root their work and identity in the fundamental priesthood of the whole people instead of in opposition to them. The ordained exist only in and for the priesthood of all; in turn, they bear a certain iconic significance for the larger priesthood. Recognizing this fact, I trust, will enable us to deal more effectively with some of our practical problems.

      The present work, in attempting these tasks, crosses a number of the existing boundaries of theological thinking. This work touches on biblical studies, church history, history of religions, theology, practical theology, and spirituality. We are not used to having one book traverse all these terrains. Church polity has usually been kept safely away from spirituality, lest their interaction set off a chain reaction that would prove mutually destructive. Biblical scholars and theologians keep to their separate turfs and eye one another suspiciously. GOD knows that each of us has enough to do at home without trespassing on one another’s territory, and I certainly have no illusion of having mastered all these fields.

      It may be that only the proverbial fool would rush into such a cross-disciplinary trek. If so, I plead guilty to foolishness, and hope that the reader will at least accept that it has been a faithful kind of folly. The examination is inspired less by the illicit pleasures of trespass than by a sense that we are exploring central issues in the life of faith today, and that none of the theological disciplines can handle these issues alone. If the present effort does not fully satisfy every reader (and I think I can guarantee that it will not), perhaps it will at least provoke wiser heads to do the job better.

      I do not pretend to deal with all the issues raised for each separate discipline. I hope, rather, that my work may make up for its failure to plumb the depths of each by focusing the disciplines together on a set of common issues and ideas. Above all, I hope that you, the reader, may find in this work something that will support your own priestly ministry in the presence of the HOLY and in the priestly company of all humanity.

      * I prefer “priesthood” not only because it is part of my Anglican heritage, but because it carries with it a connotation of standing in the presence of the HOLY that is not perhaps quite so strongly felt in the word “ministry.” Readers for whom the term “priesthood” is not comfortable or familiar, however, will find that if they mentally substitute “ministry” for it, they will not lose the main import of the ideas I am presenting here.

Part I

      1

      The Priesthood of Humanity

      It might appear, at first sight, as if a book about the life of the church ought to begin with the church itself or, at least, with what is distinctive to the Christian tradition—with Jesus, perhaps, or the Bible. But we can never truly understand what is distinctively Christian without placing it in the broader context of human existence itself. The gospel was not spoken (and cannot be spoken) in a timeless or abstract way. It is always spoken to specific people, who hear it with human ears and human minds. The news GOD speaks to human beings can only be good news if it addresses and affirms our humanness, the very humanness with which GOD first endowed us in creation. There is no contradiction between gospel and creation. The gospel takes what is already intrinsic to us and fills and enhances and clarifies it. We cannot explore the life of the church, then, or the meaning of priesthood in and for the church without, at the same time, exploring the meaning of priesthood to us as human beings.

      The first thing to say in our exploration of priesthood, then, is that priesthood is a fundamental and inescapable part of being human. All human beings, knowingly or not, minister as priests to one another. All of us, knowingly or not, receive priestly ministrations from one another. This is the first thing to say about priesthood because it is the most basic. Because it is basic, it is also fundamental and therefore useful. Unless we begin here, we are not likely to understand the confusions, uncertainties, and opportunities we have been encountering in the life of the church itself in recent years. We shall be in danger, in fact, of creating makeshift solutions to half-understood problems, easy answers to misleading questions, and temporary bandages for institutions that need to be healed from the ground up.

      What, then, is priestly ministry? It is the ministry that introduces us to arcana—hidden things, secrets. In one sense, priestly ministry is the most ordinary thing imaginable. All our lives, we are repeatedly in the position of finding, revealing, explaining, and teaching—or, conversely, of being led, taught, and illuminated. Everyone is the priest of a mystery that someone else does not know: how to construct a budget, how to maneuver through the politics of the workplace, how to roast a turkey, how to win the affections of the girl or boy to whom one is attracted. The experience is so common that much of the time we do not notice it at all. We are all constantly serving others as priests of mysteries known to us and not to them. And we are constantly being served by those who know what we do not.

      Some human work is priestly in a very obvious way: teaching, parenting, mentoring, coaching, the performing arts, the arts of statecraft. These make use of what we know to sustain human life or to initiate the young into adulthood or to hand on our cultural traditions. Other tasks involve a voyage into the unknown in order to bring back news for priestly use. Prayer is like this—the prayer of quiet listening and reflection. Scientific research is a journey into the unknown. So is the work of creative artists and all serious thinkers. But even in the most daily of our daily routines, the process of priestly service never ceases. It belongs to the very fabric of ordinary human interactions. We are constantly standing alongside someone else, giving or receiving some new understanding of the world before us, whether through direct interchange or through the more remote means of communication made possible by technology. To be human means to be engaged in priestly discourse—the unveiling of secrets.

      These secrets are not, for the most part, kept hidden on purpose or as a way of excluding ordinary folk. Deliberately held secrets—the secrets of governments, of corporations, of cliques—are usually trivial in the long run. We keep such secrets mainly in order to present ourselves to the world as “insiders,” and we reveal them for the same purpose or because they will gain us some immediate advantage. This kind of secrecy has little to do with priesthood. 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

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