Epiphanies: Reflections on my Twentieth Anniversary as a Priest

Last Tuesday, March 25, 2008, I celebrated the twentieth anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood. Strangely, as I looked back on the past twenty years (has it really been that long?), what came to my mind were five passages that, in recent years, really stopped me in my tracks, as it were, when I read them.

Everyday, I read an enormous amount of words—in addition to all the “official words” I have to read in correspondence and reports and newspapers. My bedroom is filled with books, on shelves, beside my bed, on the floor. So, when, amidst all the prose that passes before my eyes each day, something strikes me so strongly that I have to stop, put down the book, savor or reflect or just be struck dumb, it usually means that those words have leapt out of a printed page to connect with something deep and real for me.

On my twentieth anniversary as a priest, these are five passages that I remember as “stopping me in my reading tracks” in the past five years.

1. Reading an introduction by Tobias Wolff to a marvelous set of essays by the unbelievable Andre Dubus entitled Broken Vessels, I found these words:

“All this parading on the high road has nothing to do with the real possibility of the personal essay, which is to catch oneself in the act of being human. That means a willingness to surrender for a time our pose of unshakeable rectitude, and to admit that we are, despite our best intentions, subject to all manner of doubt and weakness and foolish wanting.”

It was particularly the last series of words: “doubt and weakness and foolish wanting” that made me put down the book in self-recognition.

2. On one of many plane trips, I forget now where to, I was reading Kate Atkinson’s multi-layered detective novel Case Histories. The character Rosemary, a harried mother of three daughters, is watching her children play, and in a moment of clarity and self-realization, she admits to herself that she loves only one of the three:

“Olivia was the only one she loved, although God knows she tried her best with the others. Everything was from duty, nothing from love.”

Trying to survive amidst the many demands of my job, I felt the second sentence hit me with the force of an epiphany.

3. My favorite sermon writer is a woman, an Episcopalian priest named Barbara Brown Taylor, who writes/preaches with such humanity, in such gorgeous, flowing prose and with such a deep and often surprising grasp of the essential meaning of the Gospel. I was reading her recent memoir entitled Leaving Church, an account of the external and inner events that led her to decide to leave parish ministry. She describes her experience of ministerial burn-out:

“It was the wild geese that were calling to me. When I heard them coming, I hurried to the window, straining to see them through the branches of the tall pines overhead. Sometimes all I caught was a beating wing or an outstretched neck, but even that was enough to set me weeping again. No thoughts went with the tears. The tears simply fell out of my eyes, and it was not until the geese were gone that the words formed in the empty air. Take me with you.”

Those words, especially that last spontaneous, surprising prayer to a departing flock of wild geese, actually made me gasp quietly, and, for a while, sit with book lowered on my lap, unheeded.

4. I was reading myself to sleep in Rome a few weeks ago, with the help of a book I picked up in the Hongkong airport, just because its first part was set in Rome. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love turned out to be an entertaining, insightful, engagingly written account of a woman’s search for wholeness and spirituality in Rome, India and Bali. While I know that that description makes it sound dangerously like lugubrious chick-lit, it really isn’t: the New Yorker and GQ gave it rave reviews, for goodness’ sake. Before I go off further in this defensive vein, let me identify the sentence that was a book-shutter for me.

Gilbert is explaining why she ends up in an ashram in India. She writes:

“The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I’m going to over-simply define as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.”

“The heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.” The phrase arrested me with its truth.

5. On the evening of Holy Thursday this year, I was reading excerpts from Pope Benedict XVI’s homily for that morning’s Chrism Mass, the Mass in which priests renew their priestly promises. I always look forward to Benedict’s homilies. He is, in my opinion, one of the great intellectuals of Europe today, and his writing is always characterized by grace, elegance and spiritual depth. His Holy Thursday homily was no exception.

Benedict describes the priest as one “who stands before the Lord”:

“The priest must be somebody who watches. He must remain on guard before the relentless powers of evil. He must keep the world awake to God.”

“He must keep the world awake to God.” In recent years, I had not read anything that so simply and purely captured what I felt my priesthood was for. I have carried that sentence with me, as a mantra, as a motto, as something one returns to in prayer.

Looking at these five passages, I realize that they were epiphanies of a sort for me, experiences of revelation, mostly of self-revelation. Part of me is embarrassed by the “weakness” that they lay bare, the ragged, struggling, unquiet state of my humanity they make manifest.

And yet, on my twentieth anniversary as a priest, I thanked God for these epiphanies of incompleteness and search as a human being. If I have been a priest of any worth at all, if I have been able to speak words that connect with others, if I have been able to respond to other’s sufferings with compassion, if I have been able, over the course of these twenty years, to do some little bit of keeping the world awake to God, it is surely partly because of this incompleteness and struggle.

I can only imagine how much more insufferable I would have been, if all I had, or at least saw in myself, was strength and efficiency and completeness.

The epiphany on my twentieth anniversary was the realization that my weakness and struggle have contributed to my being a better priest, and the awakening of a deeper desire to continue keeping the world awake to a God who can be experienced as mercy and faithful love, in the midst of our ongoing struggle to become human.