The problem with priesthood is that there are times when the awareness of Presence that is essential to fulfilling the role of priest, is simply mysteriously missing, leaving barely a whisper or a trace.
But perhaps, in the end, it is right here in this awkward place that, if I am willing to sit with the discomfort, that I may discover another fundamental calling of priesthood.
Yes, I am called to be a pointer to Presence. But, perhaps equally, I am called to acknowledge the loss of awareness of Presence that emerges in the inevitable state of sleep that creeps over me at times. I point not only to the deep abiding sense of Presence for which I long, but equally to the possibility of holding all the confusion, conflict, contradictions, and chaos that arise when I fall into unconsciousness. I stand in the midst of all the brokenness and confusion of my own life and of life in general, and bear witness to the possibility that this too can be held. There is a place for all the mess, all the opposites, and all the conflict. It just is what is.
The truth of the human condition is the truth of my condition. There are times when I am deeply grounded and aware of Presence; there are times, when I am flighty, insecure, trapped in anxiety, confusion, and worry. Both things are true of me at the same time. This does not make me a bad person or disqualify me from priesthood. It simply reminds me that my priesthood is conducted within the often deeply conflicted reality of my own human condition.
When I try to collapse the tension by believing the lie that I am never unconscious, that I am never lost, that I never wander astray, then I am perhaps most unconscious and most lost.
Most commentary on the parable Jesus tells in Luke 15, commonly known as “The Parable of the Prodigal Son,” focuses on the younger son who wandered astray. In our rush to understand the younger son, we forget his older brother who appears to have stayed at home. The problem for the firstborn son, is that he thought he had never left home. He was unable to see that, although his body may have stayed in place, his heart had wandered to a strange and foreign land just as much as his younger brother. He had lost touch with the generosity of his father and had excluded himself from the banquet of love and grace.
To be a priest is to see clearly and hold honestly the pain of the conflicted and confusing reality of the human condition. The priest is called to hold the tension of opposites, refusing to exclude or demonize either side. Priesthood points to the possibility of a banquet that welcomes all people regardless of how conflicted, compromised or confused they may be.
When I stand before the congregation Sunday by Sunday before anyone comes forward to receive bread and wine, I say
Jesus invites you to this table.
Come you who are hungry
and you who know you are poor.
Open your hearts.
It is the Lord who invites you.
As much as anyone, I need to hear this invitation.
All our failures and weaknesses are invited. It is all held. Nothing is excluded. I can only embody this truth when I have lived it in my own life at the deepest cellular level of my being. I can only welcome your flaws when I have deeply accepted my own.
When I acknowledge that I have lost my way, all that is left is to cry out, “Lord have mercy.” There is nothing I can do to fix it. But I can throw myself into the arms of eternal love and grace. From this place of utter abandon, it may be that priesthood is no longer a problem at all. It is simply the lived reality of all humanity in which I am invited to participate. And in my priestly functions, perhaps I can point a way in the midst of this reality, to the possibility of opening to an awareness of that Presence who holds in love all the tensions and conflicts of life.
In A Spacious Place 
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May 3, 2019 at 6:48 am
Bruce Bryant-Scott
The paradox of the divine is that it is both a presence and an absence. We know God as Creator, in our brothers and sisters, in the bread and wine, as revealed in scriptures. And yet, God is not a “thing” like tables and chairs. As has been clear for over 800 years, we do not speak of the being of God in the same sense as we talk about the existence of tables and chairs.
As Rowan Williams points out, in reference to Austin Ferrar in “Christ, The Heart of Creation” (2018), the supernatural is not something added on to the natural, something transcendent breaking in on the mundane. Rather, the infinite and uncreated somehow contains the finite and created, and we perceive the divine through creation, the transcendent in the ordinary. Jesus was born, he lived, and he died, and his disciples claimed he rose from the dead. All of this is historical and natural. But to discern that he was the Word Incarnate, that in his teachings we find glory, that in his death he reconciled the world to God, and that in his resurrection he overcame sin and death — these are not simply propositions about history, but statements that transcend it and relate to the eternal acting within the temporal.
The human condition seems to many in our western world to be absurd, broken, violent, filled with suffering interrupted by moments of comfort and joy. On a purely materialistic level it appears meaningless, except to the degree that we contingently ascribe meaning – meaning that some would say is rooted in the unconscious, or developed by blind evolution for the purpose of the propagation of the species, but no more. The challenge for all Christians, clergy and laity, is to look through all of this to the revelation of God in Christ, and to see how the infinite has always been in the finite all the time, that in the brokenness of humanity is to be found its strength and meaning.
It’s afternoon in Crete, so maybe this is a bit heavy for people just waking up in BC!
May 4, 2019 at 5:32 am
Christopher Page
It is morning now in BC Bruce so we are just waking up and beginning to assimilate your stirring words from far away in Crete. So lovely to find your thoughtful comment here. I think “the transcendent in the ordinary” might just be the title for my sermon my sermon tomorrow on John 21:4-14. Jesus appeared in the midst of the most ordinary circumstances of life performing the most mundane actions. It is hard not to feel that it was the very ordinariness of the circumstances that kept his followers from perceiving his presence. We so want resurrection to be spectacular and flashy. But, in fact, the Presence is most present in the simple ordinary realities of every day life. Perhaps this is easier to perceive in Crete.