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SEVEN PRIESTLY VIRTUES
Read - Heart of Priesthood by Father Mc Namara
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Seven Priestly Virtues
FROM SOLITUDE TO STORYTELLING
By Father William McNamara O.C.D.
Christ said, “I am the temple,” and at that crucial historical moment he shifted the axis of the whole world from buildings, cities, and even the home as the centre that held people together, and replaced that centre with something extremely personal and indispensable for mediating between estranged humanity and the ineffable Godhead: himself. As God – man he is the mediator. He is, by nature, in essence, priest.
When Jesus urged the fisherman to follow him, promising to make them fishers of men, he subsequently actualized that promise of the most essential ministry by sharing with them his won priestly power. They would be priests indeed: celebrating sacramentally what God has done and continues to do in Christ, and, with scorched lips and broken hearts, preaching the word of God. Not only preaching the word of God but vitally embodying it. If they do not embody it, they will die. If they do embody it, they will be killed. There is no other way to be a priest.
Then Jesus instituted the Church, not to organize religion (horrors!) but to personalize it: to keep the personal passionate presence of God alive forever at the creative centre of all Human affairs. The key to this personal contact with the transcendent is the priest. He is the warrant against human estrangement, alienation, illusory autonomy, natural reductionism, narcissistic hedonism and all the inevitable frustrations, addictions and desperations that are always the sad result of such a dehumanized, ungodly condition.
What can we do with a world ( modernity ) that will not transcend itself, that has lost touch with the sacred, with its centre and its source of life? Temple, church and palace have been abolished – or banalized. Everything has been profaned, that is, thrust outside of the sphere of the holy. Sacred mountains and groves are also gone; so that the world of man and nature is emptied of transcendent significance, of any ultimate meaning. No wonder there is a rebellion among the young against this drab, one – dimensional world, Hordes of young people are going to India to discover the sense of the sacred, the inner meaning of life which has been lost in the West. But, as Dom Bede Griffiths, O.S.B., sadly reassures us, India, too, is rapidly losing it.
Wherever modern civilization spreads, all holiness, all sense of the sacred, all sense of transcendent reality disappears. This decline of the West and diminution of the Spirit in the East is another dramatic Fall of Man. What can we do in the face of our narcissistic culture and in the path of techno – barbaric juggernaut? We can ordain priests. We should only do this on the condition that we have done our utmost to assure that their training in preparation for this incomparable ministry is better than ever before.
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