Tag: Priest

83rd Birthday Reflections: My Shamanic Interview with my Granddaughter Eva

Just before my 83rd birthday (September 6th) my 14-year-old granddaughter, Eva Maria, interviewed me as part of a class assignment at her new high school, Northfield Mount Hermon. (You can watch the exchange in the video above.)

During the interview, I somewhat surprised myself by owning my identity as a shaman. I said it clearly, “I’m a priest and a shaman.”

The two can be nearly synonymous. Let me try to explain.

As I understand it, a shaman is a person, male or female, who:

  • Experiences a strong vocation,
  • To consciously recognize, embrace, and inhabit at least three worlds,
  • (1) the Middle World of daily sense experience, (2) the Lower World of largely unconscious, suppressed, and/or denied emotions and thoughts, and (3) the Upper world of mystical union with Life’s Source, spirits, and ancient ancestors.
  • A shaman undergoes a long period of training and testing at the hands of spiritual mentors,
  • Who eventually confer formal recognition of shamanic identity on their trainee,
  • Who then uses traditional wisdom and ritual to connect with the three realms just identified,
  • To benefit her or his community.

Well, it has recently occurred to me that in those senses, I happen to be a shaman.

To wit:

  • I experienced a strong unwavering vocation. At the age of six (!), I decided that I would become a Catholic priest.
  • To that end, I entered the seminary at the age of 14 and entered a long (and sometimes spiritually painful) preparation for ordination that reached its culmination at the age of 26.
  • That was followed by 5 more years of study and further formal recognition of my identity as a teacher and “discerner of spirits good and evil” (with my doctoral degree in moral theology).
  • More specifically, progress towards ordination was marked by conferral of important (though often overlooked) shamanic “minor orders,” viz.:
  1. Lector: one recognized as having done at least the minimum reading and study to qualify as a worthy candidate for shamanic office.
  2. Porter: one who can therefore open doors to unseen realities in the lower and upper realms. 
  3. Acolyte: a beginner in the rituals evoking other-worldly Spirits at rites of initiation, special meals, marriages, healings, and reconciliations.
  4. Exorcist: one formally equipped to name and expel (largely invisible) evil spirits (such as those of war, injustice, racism, sexism, classism, and nationalism) afflicting individuals and communities.
  5. Subdeacon: a worthy initiate into service of the community.
  6. Deacon: a full-fledged community servant empowered to speak publicly about connections between community spiritual traditions and everyday life.
  7. Shaman: one whose mere words can infallibly bring the very Spirit of God from the upper realm to the middle world.

In all of this, the shaman in question was obliged to practice compulsory celibacy until he arrives at the realization that the fundamental eroticism of the universe is not primarily about genital sex, but about divine creativity, grace, and evolution.

Do you see what I mean?

Yes, I am a shaman. And so (potentially) are all Catholic priests, though (like me until recently) few of them recognize and much less embrace such identity – often specifically rejecting it as somehow pagan, “new agey,” and superstitious.

It is anything but.

In fact, at the age of 83, my recent experience in Spain has caused me to double down on the insights just expressed.

My new ritual (expressed here and in other recent postings) is causing me to adopt Tarot Cards as portals into the Upper and Lower realms just referenced. I’m becoming what my troglodyte friends in Granada call a “tarotista.” I’ve been reading my own cards every day, and occasionally those of friends. The cards are full of connections with the shamanic traditions, mysteries, and studies described above.

I’m actually thinking about starting a Tarot business to make money — not for myself of course. (I don’t need it.) But I’m thinking about an organization in Costa Rica called Casa del Sol (House of the Sun). They’re very poor people who make solar ovens and teach women there to construct and use them. They also teach ecological gardening and maintain a beautiful and quite extensive garden where they raise produce for market sales. Unlike me, they do need money.

Watch this space to find out the specifics about readings private and public.

Why I Left the Priesthood: Part One

At least before all the scandals hit, I had always admitted quite freely and with a certain sense of pride that I had been a priest “in a former life.” I suppose that’s because as a Catholic born before the Second Vatican Council, some positive residuals still lurked in my mind around the ideas of priesthood and church. It’s also because I still sincerely value the training, education, spiritual focus, lasting friendships, and tradition of hospitality that I inherited from my 20 years of formal association with the Society of St. Columban (the organization of priests to which I belonged). Besides, people in the contexts where I’ve worked since then –   mostly at Berea College in Central Kentucky, or in our local St. Clare’s church (where I had also served as a priest in that “former life”) – seemed to appreciate my previous incarnation. So when they’d ask me why I left the priesthood, I used to say,

I don’t think I’ve ever left the priesthood, or even could. They always told us “once a priest, always a priest;” and I think that’s true. The priesthood isn’t something “they” confer on a person. It’s an acknowledgement of an identity, a “character” that no one and no decision by me or by “them” can remove. I, and so many of my colleagues in the seminary, had a priestly character from the beginning, and ordination simply amounted to its acknowledgement and confirmation by the church. So I still think of myself as a priest. It’s true, the sacramental dimension is missing. But apart from that, as a teacher of theology and director of a Peace and Social Justice Studies program, I’m pretty much doing the same work I did before I left the canonical priesthood. I’m still a priest.

 That’s what I used to say. I don’t any longer like that answer. Its approach to the priesthood was too exceptional, setting me and my friends apart from others in a way I’ve come to see as self-serving. None of us was at all that unique. We were pretty much ordinary, working class kids, who escaped factory work (or truck driving, or delivery routes, or the policeman’s beat) to become the first in our families to get a college education. We joined a highly exclusive club that put us on a pedestal from the beginning, and gave us an exaggerated opinion of our own importance. Before we were 30 or had done really anything at all, we were among the most honoured and important people in our communities. That sort of unmerited aura and especially the accompanying expectations eventually drove me from the priesthood as I once knew it. 

Still there was truth in my statement about priestly character. There was indeed something special about me and those who came with me through the seminary. But the specialness belonged not to me or to them uniquely. What my words unwittingly expressed was an intuition about the nature of being human. The intuition is that everyone has that priestly character I was referring to. Luther, I think, (with his dependence on Augustine) was gesturing towards something like that. Though he didn’t say it as clearly as mystics like Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross – or as Hindus or Buddhists do – he was referring to the spark of the divine (the indwelling Spirit) deep within everyone. Awareness of its presence simply dawns on certain people earlier than on others. For some, it never reaches consciousness at all. It happened to dawn on me (more or less) quite early, but not in the way it has over the past decade or so. To get there I had to do a lot of growing, sometimes painful, but often delightful.  The growth was intellectual, personal, and spiritual. Each step moved me further and further from the priesthood as I imagined it for myself and experienced it in others before ordination.

(Next Monday: Intellectual Steps away from the Priesthood)