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SEVEN PRIESTLY VIRTUES
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But when she returned to the inn with it, she heard that the Baal
Shem had already left for Mezbizh. She immediately set out after him
and since she had no money to ride, she walked from town to town with
her “katinka2 until she came to Mezbizh. The Ball Shem took the cape
and hung it on the wall. “it is well,” he said. “My mother walked all
the way back, from town to town until she reached Apt. A year after I
was born.”
“ I, too,” cried the woman to the Maggid, “will bring you a good cape
of mine, so that I may get a son.” “That won’t work,” said the Maggid.
“You heard the story. My mother had no story to go by.”
The
priest must have such a courageous trust in life that discreetly and
awesomely but unflinchingly he moves into the unknown, unmapped and
unstoried Abyss of pure faith, into the luminous darkness of the Hidden
God. And who knows if he will come out alive? He risks his life for the
flock. That is the kind of priest we need.
Sharer of the Good News
We tend to dilute and distort the Gospel. The best translation of the root meaning of the word, evangelion, is revolution. Literally it means “ good news” – not just any welcome piece of information, but news which impinges upon the fate of community. It is bad news before it is good news: the sinfulness of man and consequently what man has done to man, but then the redemption, the resurrection and the victorious centrality of the love of God, a love that sustains, strengthens, and renews us forever.
It is challenge enough to hold one’s peace in a world of verbosity. Perhaps the toughest challenge of all, in a worldwide, respectable atmosphere of mendacity, is to tell the truth. Our age resembles the catastrophic and of Shakespeare’s King Lear. The weight of this sad time we must obey/Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”
It is not his organizing energies, his gregarious talents, his frenzied activities that put the priest in touch with the people. In is his deep relationship with God who asserts daily his sovereign claim.
Like Shakespeare, the priest must tell the truth. There is hardly anything more crucial for the priest then to obey the sadness of our times by taking it into account without equivocation or subterfuge, by speaking out of our times and into our times not just what we ought to say about the Gospel, not just what it would appear to be in the interests of the Gospel for us to say, but what we ourselves have felt about it, experienced of it. Regardless of whatever risk, the priest much preach the Gospel truth, the truth he himself must live by. If he is faithful to the truth his life will be torn by tragedy, healed by comedy, and delightfully revolutionized by one serendipity after another.
Even when he is preaching, the priest’s silence must be shattering. Better to leave his people dumbstruck at the brink of mystery, awed by the unspeakable Glory, than well informed but snug and secure in their church pews. Before it is a word, the Gospel that is truth is silence, a pregnant silence in its ninth month, and in answer to Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” Jesus keeps silent. Even with his hands tied behind him, our Lord manages somehow to hold silence out like a terrible gift.
Reproduced with the kind permission of Father William McNamara O.C.D 2006
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