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SEVEN PRIESTLY VIRTUES
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Silent
The priest must be a silent man. Most of the great religious leaders in the old says (as well as in recent times ) were men or women who kept silent most of the time. In the outstanding cases of both the East and the West they remained speechless for most of their lives. And yet they had a prodigiously active influence on the world. That is why one of the greatest religious leaders in the history of the world said: “He who speaks doesn’t know and he who knows doesn’t speak”. The secular leader also needs silence. Charles deGaulle knew this. So did Mahatma Gandhi and Dag Hammarskjold. That is one reason why they were effective leaders.
What can we do in the face of our narcissistic culture and in the path of the onslaught of the techno-barbaric juggernaut? We can ordain priest.
You may object: silence is for monks. And you would be absolutely wrong. The monk does not own silence. It is a property of every man, woman and child. It is a human value. The monk simply accentuates it, weds it, and witnesses to this rich and silent dimension of life so that it will not be lost or forgotten in the talkative turmoil of everyday life. Only if a person speaks rarely and with discretion can he speak with any authority at all. Otherwise he is not worth hearing. If I knew a renowned orator, an eloquent preacher, who talked all day long on the phone, on the job, on the street, and jumped like a hot shot from a veritable Vesuvius of loquacity into the pulpit, I would not want to listen to him.
No priest has any right to talk more than he listens. And the One he should be listening to most of the time, night and day, is the Word, the second person of the Blessed Trinity. St. John of the Cross said that from all eternity God speaks one Word. That Word reached its fullness in Christ. Nothing remains to be said. But think of all the silence needed to attend to, digest, and assimilate the Word Made Flesh: “To whom shall we go? You alone have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68)
The Word was made
flesh. All flesh embodies him. How absorbed can one finite man be?
There is first of all the omnipresence of God – God participating in
all of creation, sustaining, strengthening and renewing us, making all
things new. Then the passion of God breaks through utterly,
definitively, and God becomes man, the Highpriest of creation. Jesus
becomes the Christ. Finally we have the only really limpid clue to the
Mystery. We surely have spotted the Logos and have God focused insofar
as we – all of us – make time to contemplate in silence the historical,
mystical, and cosmic Christ. But the man most responsible for this
silent adoration of God is the priest. If he cannot pray he is gagged;
if he cannot kneel he is fettered.
Storyteller
The priest must teach, inform and instruct; but mostly he is a storyteller – mythical and mystical. The truth is much too large and inscrutable to be contained inside of neat, tidy, categorical concepts an ideas. Doctrine and theology are indispensable but they are not enough. The faith did not initially come to us as systematic theology. It came as story.
Tell me about God: “Once upon a time there was garden …” Tell me about Jesus : “ Once upon a time there was a boy in a little town in Palestine called Nazareth…” Tell me about salvation: “Well, when that same by grew up, he loved people so much that the rulers began to get frightened of him, and do you know what they did? Tell me about the Church: “ A group of people, including his mother, took this man very seriously, identified themselves with him and kept his spirit alive, and do you know what happened to them?”
The
story faded and monumental doctrinal theses developed. In losing the
story we have lost both the power and the glory. What Hilaire Bellock
said seems irrefutable: “ Truth must always be clothed in splendour.”
We have committed the unpardonable sin of transforming exciting stories
into dull systems. We must tell and retell the old story and in the
telling of it discover and discern our own story, our own experience of
God. To tell the Bible story is to move from myth to mysticism, from
types to facts, from marvels to meaning, from eros to agape, from
events to experience.
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