Stand-in

I have just--and I literally mean just about "just"--come from the first conference of the annual opening retreat of the seminary year, and while I've had an exciting enough weekend moving back in, my muse has refused to enthuse at news. On the other hand, however, it responds to the lightest of touches from thought-provocations that occurred during Archbishop Bohan's first conference.

The chief thought, and the one I'm recording here, has to do with relationships. In speaking of our own relationships with Christ, the Archbishop noted that we generally only allow a very small number of people into our "personal space," emotionally speaking. We only allow a very few to come close enough to "touch us." The point of this, of course, is that if Jesus is to touch our lives, we must allow Him to be that close, to be within our very person, our personal space.

This thinking, however, sent me off on a tangent relating to how this connects to the sort of relationship priests have with their people. The thing that set me off was thinking that, in general, most of the people we allow to be really close to us, in our personal space, are people who allow us into theirs in return, and from a certain logical perspective, this is necessarily so. Looking at physical objects, if you move one into contact with another, it is impossible for only one to become close to the other, but both must become proximate to each other.

This rule of thumb, however, does not seem to hold much water when it relates to the relationships of priests, since priests are very often invited right into the heart of people's lives--often under the context of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, but in a broader sense as well. Unless they have had reason to think otherwise, people tend to be remarkably open and trusting of priests, and will confide in them, spill their woes to them, and ask help from them--often without hesitation. And it is most certainly not the norm for the priest to respond in like kind to his people, and, indeed, if the priest does have such close friends, his relationship is then entirely that of an individual person, and not that of a priest, particularly.

What this concludes with, then, is an out-of-the-blue, unexpected affirmation of the understanding of the priesthood that explains the role of the priest within the Christian community as that of an alter Christus. The priest, in a sense, is open to such remarkable trust because he stands in persona Christi. Likewise, however, the priest does not return this closeness because it is not a closeness that is shared with him as a person. The reciprocity of the closeness comes into play in the relationship of Christ and the Christian. Though the priest is a stand-in for Christ, he is most certainly not Christ himself.

Most definitely, this is no new doctrine... but it is always cool to have a familiar belief come at you from an angle which you never considered, and when the divine mysteries manifest themselves again and again in situations you'd never considered, it is, of course, nothing other than marvellous.