The Priest as Enchanter

by Urban T. Holmes

from To be a priest, pp. 173-181,
edited by Robert E. Terwilliger and Urban T. Holmes, Seabury Press, New York, 1975.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions.

Urban T. Holmes is the Dean of the School of Theology at the University of the South. His field of special interest is theology and culture, and he is the author of a number of books and articles in that field.

There is no issue in Christian thought today—particularly the doctrine of the priesthood—which can avoid the critical focus of contemporary theology: the doctrine of revelation. The question is how does the transcendent God make himself known in a way that is capable of being perceived, interpreted, and acted upon in history at this present time.(1)

In some circles revelation is thought of as a message given in ancient times which now only needs to be believed and obeyed. This view of revelation involves those who hold it in an immense task of translating ancient meanings into modern meanings. It also makes assumptions about the relation between Creator and creature which raises two serious theological problems.(2) First, it implies that there is a difference between God’s presence and God’s act of self-revelation. For if revelation is only a message received in the past, it means either that God is not present today, or that he is present only in silence. Second, if revelation ended a long time ago, then there is a special kind of history which is revelatory and no longer present, and there is present history which is not revelatory. Christians who hold this view almost inevitably take a negative attitude toward their own times. It is very difficult for them to avoid lapsing into that nostalgia for the “golden age” which Bonhoeffer rightly called “the leap of death.”

I believe that God is present now and that this presence is inevitably an act of self-revelation in our ordinary history. The spiritual hunger which many of us see in the Church today, exemplified in the revival of the retreat movement, the new interest in meditation, the explosion of personal witness, and the rise of prayer groups—as well as a renewed sense of the Holy Spirit among us—is expressive of the desire to experience God-making-himself-known-to-man-now. This cannot be rendered intelligible unless we believe God reveals himself at the present in the ordinary lives of contemporary persons.

Furthermore, revelation is the experience of God in relationship; it is intersubjectivity. Gabriel Moran, a Roman Catholic lay brother, has said: “Revelation is ... what communities experience.”(3) Revelation is the sense of being called into being within a saving social reality by that which transcends that social phenomenon but which makes itself known in our present history in the context of a significant interaction with others. Since all of history is in God, man may encounter the revelatory invitation in any dimension of his life.

If we ask what this has to do with the priest, the answer is: “Everything.” What was described in the previous paragraph was the priestly community. A working definition of a priest is one who leads in awakening persons to the revelatory character of their community experience in their present history. If this is true, then obviously the nature of the priesthood as far as the Christian faith and the Church Catholic is concerned cannot be understood apart from the doctrine of revelation. Therefore, the problem of what it means to be a priest is integral to the critical focus of contemporary theology.

The priestly vocation is not always considered within this setting today. Ministerial studies abound and the art of pastoral care has a rapidly expanding bibliography. We have tended to set these studies within a psychological and sociological framework. As far as it goes, this can be very beneficial.

But sociology has tended to describe priesthood as a role function within an institution. It would be unfair to imply that this has been the only interpretation offered in the name of sociology, but Seward Salisbury is representative of that discipline when he writes: “The clerical task is a profession, a career, and an occupation.”(4) By “profession” he means the rendering of service, by “career” he describes the doing of this service over a lifetime, and by “occupation” he refers to the fact that it is done as gainful employment.

The sociological theory that lies behind this is that the dominant function of religion, which the priest represents, is to adjust, adapt, and integrate the social structures within which it operates, to promote their stability, and to serve the well-being of their members as good citizens by the legitimation and reinforcement of the society’s values. The great French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, argued that society exudes a certain effervescence, which can be experienced as “religious” and leads to the attribution of transcendence to what is, in fact, society itself. In this way, while seeming to serve God the religious specialist is actually serving the society and its members. The true existence of Being, which transcends the social world and yet is concerned for and acts in the social world, is not necessary in such an understanding of religion and is frequently ignored or even denied as the source of the adjustment, adaptation, and integration of society.

Aside from the fact that this can easily infer that Karl Marx was right and religion does maintain the status quo and not the revolutionary needs of the oppressed—an image of the priesthood which finds considerable Old Testament support—it has also promoted the idea that to be a priest is principally to serve the prevailing society in ministering to its members in accordance with that society’s expectations. This notion has some roots in the Constantinian Church, where the priest was responsible for the education of the society’s citizens, for the social welfare distributed to the society’s poor and infirm, and for the communication of governmental decrees. It was symbolized in the priest’s civil function as registrar of births, marriages, and deaths—a task now performed by the clerk of court. It has a degree of contemporary expression in the advocacy over the last fifty years of the professional model of the priesthood.

The model of the professional, which Salisbury described as one of service, may be further considered as the work of one who has mastered certain skills based upon a theoretical body of knowledge in which he is certified and for which the members of society recognize their need. The need for the ability to predict and control, as valued in a technological culture such as ours, dominates this model. I think there is good in the professional model, as far as it goes, but there is a fundamental theological flaw within it as well. This flaw—like the theory that religion exists to adjust, adapt, and integrate the society by the legitimation and reinforcement of its values—is that there is no need in this model of the priest for the actuality of transcendent being.

I know a bishop who instructs parish search committees that one question they must ask of prospective candidates is: “Do you believe in God?” I talked with the chairman of such a search committee, who acknowledged her initial amazement at this suggestion of the bishop. She told me: “At first we thought this was very strange, but we asked it as he suggested. While no one said, ‘No,’ some of the ‘Yes’ answers sounded very much like ‘No.’” She added, not just as an afterthought, “How can they be priests?”

The problem is compounded by a further fact. If we define the priesthood as a role within a social structure or institution (the Church) that is part of society, then the possibilities for that role are the possibilities that lie within the society. We live in a secular society, for which the category of revelation is foreign, even repugnant. I am speaking of our behavior, not what we profess. As Harvey Cox has said, secularization is the fact of living in a closed society, secularism is the believe that this is in effect all there is.(5) It is enough for my purpose to point out that secularization has the effect of imposing only a secular expectation on any role function within it, including the priesthood.

Some years ago, one of my students came to me in great distress. He was doing field work at a boys’ training school in Wisconsin and one of the case workers had met him with the challenge: “What are you doing here that is any different from what I am doing?” His distress was born not just of the fact that there was no language with which he could make this savant of the secular society understand his own self-perception, but much more that he, the child of a secular culture, could not find the words to make clear to himself—much less anyone else—the call to serve our risen Lord.

Max Weber, the great German sociologist and contemporary of Durkheim, characterized what I am describing by saying that we live today in a “disenchanted world.”(6) What this colorful phrase means is that we live today with no socialized expectation of the evidence of God’s presence in the world. It is not a part of our collective representation. Society does not tell us that the whole world is alive with proof of transcendent glory. If any one testified to having seen “little people” or having been visited in a dream by an “angel” or having heard a heavenly call, our first thought would be of hospitalization.

No one believes in God now as he would have two hundred years ago. If we believe, it is not because we have a common consensus within society that interacts with the Church to reinforce and refine that belief. We believe in the absence of any positive socialization, if not in the face of considerable negative influence. Our language, for example, no longer emerges from and undergirds a sense of the transcendent presence. The word “monster,” to illustrate the point, comes originally from the Latin monstrare, meaning “to show,” and is derived from medieval man’s belief that any physical aberration in human or subhuman animal life was the direct result of divine intervention for purposes known only to God. This never occurs to us who understand genetic accidents. The word “enthusiasm,” to cite another example, means now only to be excited about something with accompanying phenomena readily explained by psychological “triggers” and the flow of the ductless glands. The word comes, however, from a Greek root meaning to have “God within you,” denoting that to which man once commonly attributed the experience.

The effect of our disenchanted society is to rob the priest of any normal, common-sense, or socialized expectation as one who mediates the presence of a transcendent reality. This is to deprive him of any structural definition of his role as that person who awakens mankind to the revelatory character of their community experience. It strongly influences us to think of the priest in terms of a socially constructed reality—to cite Berger and Luckmann’s term—that discounts any human resources that lie below the sociocultural definition of man and that ignores any possibility of a transcendent vocation for you and me.

Priesthood in any such narrowing of definition becomes meaningless, because it is of the very character of priesthood to be rooted in the living possibility of revelation effected by the personal relationship of man to God present in his ordinary existence. A way of putting this is to say that the priest is an enchanter.

Some years ago, when about to undergo surgery, I had the following fantasy. I was being wheeled down the hall to surgery on one of those carts with which most of us are familiar and I thought to myself: What if I looked up at the surgeon (who was a friend of mine) and said, “Dick, do you know what you’re doing?” What if he had replied, “No, but I have an eschatological hope!” Dick is a devout Roman Catholic, but in spite of that, I know what I would have done in the face of such an answer. The irony is that the answer is appropriate for the priest. There is a difference. Dick is a professional surgeon, who must be in control. The business of the priest is to awaken us to that which cannot be controlled: God’s self-revelation in our community experience.

It seems to me that we must come to grips with that difference and recover the vocation of the priest to enable persons to perceive the revealing presence of God in their ordinary lives by refusing to let the priestly calling be defined purely in structural terms. There is no problem in speaking of the priest at least as a professional, but the categories of the professional are peripheral to the core of the definition of a priest.

Barbara Myerhoff, an anthropologist, described in her recent book, The Peyote Hunt, a religious specialist among the Huichol Indians of Mexico who combines in one person the classical sociological definition of the priest and the eccentricity of the shaman. The institutional role, with all its predictable expectations, is joined to a person who possesses a certain personal integrity as he lives on the margins of the social structures.(7) He is both a controlled professional, if you will, and an unpredictable agent of surprise. This is a concrete representation of the model I have in mind for the contemporary Christian priest, who is both professional and enchanter.

Such a model catches up Margaret Mead’s argument that religious communities need to be both conservative and innovative. The day has passed, I trust, when we glibly offer the false polarities between the mystic and the prophet or the traditionalist and the pioneer. Martin Luther King, to name one prominent Christian witness, embodied all these things. There needs to be a constant dialogue within every priest, wherein he settles for no one position. It is a vocation that both must be open to conserve and to innovate and must be capable of reduction to no single category or stereotype.

The need then is to rescue the central notion of priesthood from the categories of control, such as are necessary in concepts of information retrieval, mastery of skills, job descriptions, and evaluative measurement. We need to recover for the priest the mediating function by expecting not that he be something different from this, but that he be something more than this. He should be acquainted with realms of human experience that exist in the twilight of our learning, in the depth of human existence, and in the possibilities of God’s future. The priest needs to affirm the liminal quality of the shaman, even if the model of the shaman per se is not always helpful.

This notion is very difficult to realize in a technological society, which is most uncomfortable with the unpredictable. It is even troublesome to find images to express in an operational manner the priest as enchanter: one who leads us into the depths of human experience that underlie the structures of a society committed to planning rather than hoping.(8) Myerhoff, in her most helpful discussion of the religious specialist among the Huichol, offers the concept of the priest as the leader of pilgrimage, that movement away from the routinized center of our existence to the center of life’s meaning found “out there.” This suggests that the ground of being is more often than not discerned when we consciously strip ourselves of the trappings of role and status that make up most of our daily life—just as our Lord was lead outside the city walls to be stripped and to die.

Most of us are familiar with the image of the pilgrimage as a journey to a distant place, if for no other reason than we have read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Few of us, I daresay, have consciously gone on such a pilgrimage. There is, however, another kind of pilgrimage, which perhaps touches closer to our own lives and can illuminate the meaning of enchantment: the inner journey. Robert Ornstein, a psychologist, points out that each of us has two brains: the left hemisphere, which controls the right side, and the right hemisphere, which guides the left side. The left brain deals in a world of prediction, analysis, and logic. The right brain lives in a world of spontaneity, surprise, and free association. Pilgrimage as an inner journey, can be seen as a movement back and forth between the two domains of our two brains.

The value of Ornstein’s paradigm is that it possesses a scientific aura, perhaps even credentials. Our society, obsessed with science, has lived too long in half a brain, which is the reason we understand our world as disenchanted. The goal is to live in both sides, and the question is how the priest as leader of the pilgrimage can help to achieve this or, to put it another way, can evoke once again in our experience the sense of enchantment that awakens us to the revelation in ordinary living. This is in a sense impossible, because we are speaking of a mystic art. No one can reduce the methods of Picasso, T. S. Eliot, or Ingmar Bergman to computer tapes, and it would be a contradiction to attempt a job description of the enchanter. We can only point to certain qualities that some observe in the enchanter and his priestly arts.

I would include in such a description, first, a singleness of mind—Jesus called it purity of heart—coupled with an inner silence and a reverent iconoclasm. The priest who would be an instrument of enchantment must flirt with being boring, absentminded, and heretical. Just as there is a thin line between genius and psychosis, so is there between purity of heart and banality. The pompous dogmatist and the “bull in the china shop” are both acting out of fear. A reverent iconoclasm and an inner silence operate out of hope.

Secondly, there is in the enchanter a visible, happy incongruity born of his recognition that in God there is the coincidence of opposites joined with an awareness that he himself is not God. The “opposites” lie in the priest as still unreconciled contradictions. By way of illustration: On a flight from Chicago to Nashville I was seated next to a man who informed me that he did not “buy” religion. Over Indianapolis one of the plane’s engines caught fire and we had to make an emergency landing. As soon as we were safely down, I muttered, “Thank God! Now I hope they break out the booze!” My fellow passenger, equally relieved that we were safe, asked if I had been praying. “Of course,” I said. “What else?” He went on, as if he had trapped me in some inconsistency, “I don’t understand how you can pray and ask for a drink in almost the same breath.” For once I thought of a good comeback on the spot instead of the next day. “If you understood that,” I told him, “then you’d ‘buy’ religion!”

In the third place, the effective priest combines within himself the toughness of the seasoned pastor with the transparency of the child. This is uncontrived. I think we all know when someone is playing at being this way. He used to be a caricature of Bing Crosby in Going My Way. Now it is more likely to come across as an imitation of the “waterfront priest,” affecting a kind of “mod” look with a holy gleam in the eye.

Fourth, I have never met an enchanter who did not possess a certain wholesome earthiness. The Judaeo-Christian tradition has been its own worst enemy to the degree that it has incorporated into its own life that peculiar brand of Middle Eastern asceticism, characterized by an obsessive fear of the material world, which has been reinforced by centuries of recurring Puritanism. Its Christ is docetic, its sacraments are banal, and its sense of the holy is sanitized. The effective priest is not a dilettante or a “shrinking violet.” The idea that “cleanliness is next to godliness” originated with the rabbis of the Talmud, reflecting their anxiety over pollution. It strikes me as quite inconsistent with the Incarnation. The priest who would awaken us to God’s self-revelation cannot so easily avoid the “darker rooms” inhabited by the tellurian spirits and the chothonic powers of the world.

Finally, the enchanter is one whose strength is his weakness-made-manifest. He takes St. Paul’s injunction seriously that in our weakness is our strength (2 Corinthians 12:10). In the foolishness of man God becomes for us a living reality. The priest is the jester, the court fool, who abrogates the aggressive seriousness of the “successful” for the incongruity of victory in the midst of failure.

Much more could be said, but it is important that we understand that these and any other descriptions of the person of the priest-enchanter are not character traits to be learned, but are by-products of a quality of life. That quality of life arises from the cultivation of those areas of our existence that resist social definition in role and status and are not reducible to any cultural ideology.

I recall many years ago being challenged by an up-and-coming naval officer, who had had just enough to drink to overcome a certain conditioned reticence in the presence of the clergy. For some time he pressed me with personal questions, and finally explained his actions by saying, “I must know what makes you priests ‘tick’.” I have always been grateful to this example of America’s finest; but after trying to figure out the answer for years, I have decided there is no answer if a priest is what God calls him to be. The enchanter is a man of the twilight, that characteristic coloring of known-and-yet-unknown, where the mystery of God and the longing of the human spirit meet in the light of revelation.

Notes

1. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus: God and Man, trans., Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968), p. 131; “The problem of revelation has become the fundamental question in modern theology.” Cf. Gabriel Moran, The Present Revelation: The Search for Religious Foundations (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 22.

2. I am indebted to Dietrich Ritschel, Memory and Hope (New York: Macmillan Company, 1967), pp. 17-18, for making these problems so clear.

3. Gabriel Moran, op. cit, p. 228.

4. Seward Salisbury, Religion in American Culture: A Sociological Interpretation (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1964), p. 206.

5. Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (New York: Macmillan Company, 1965), pp. 20-21.

6. A concise summary of this key concept in Max Weber in relation to other nineteenth-century thought of the same kind can be found in George Lichtheim, “Alienation,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 1 (New York: Crowell Collier and Macmillian, 1968), pp. 264-268.

7. Barbara Myerhoff, The Peyote Hunt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1974), pp. 94-101.

8. The distinction between “planning” and “hoping” is worked out in an essay by Jürgen Moltmann, Hope and Planning, trans. Margaret Clarkson (New York-Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 178-199. To plan is to have an anticipatory disposition to the future. To hope is to look toward that future which another, perhaps God, places at my disposal.

Copyright (c) 2007: All of the texts and techniques (pedagogical and relational)
displayed in this site are copyrighted materials.