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Living on the Border of the Holy. L. William Countryman
Читать онлайн.Название Living on the Border of the Holy
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780819225078
Автор произведения L. William Countryman
Жанр Зарубежная эзотерическая и религиозная литература
Издательство Ingram
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, it is in fact transformative, though 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.