The three states of life

Loving God, then, is, in the real world in which Redemption has taken place, what life in its absolute fullness is all about. But, as I have said so often, loving God is not simply having God as the object whom we love; it is taking upon ourselves (or rather, being willing to receive) the very love God has--or better yet, the love who is God Himself.

But God is a Trinity, and therefore the love who is God is also triune: one, but having three names. And I mentioned at the outset that the three Christian states of life give emphasis to one or the other of these modes, if you will, of God's love, while not repudiating or denying the others. It is time to spell out what this means.

Essentially, the layman takes over the Father's way of loving, the priest the Son's, and the Religious the Spirit's. Now the Father is the Creator, and thus His love in the Trinity is that of the originator, and for the world is the creative love for the whole universe; the Son is the Redeemer, and thus His love in the Trinity is that of the expressing of the Father's love (as the Word), and for the world is the redemptive love for those who are (actually or potentially) chosen to share in the Divine life; and the Spirit is the sustainer (the paracletos or "support"), and His love in the Trinity is that of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father, and in the world is the indwelling of God in His creation.

All this, obviously, is extremely mysterious; but let us look at what it means in terms of what human life is like when it expresses each of these kinds of Divine love. We will approach the matter backwards, as it were, because I want to end with the lay life, the least understood, by comparison with the other ways of loving, since more has been written about them through the ages.

The Religious, then, is the human being who expresses in his life primarily the love of God the Spirit: that reciprocal love in which God loves the world and the world loves God. He is thus the primary vehicle by which God can demonstrate the "length and width and depth" of his love for human beings, while at the same time, he is the representative, as it were, of the created universe expressing its true relation (which is love) to the Creator and Redeemer.

The Religious, therefore, is essentially the contemplative, the mystic. His state of life is one in which everything is subordinated to the facilitation of the emptying of oneself of everything connected with self-fulfillment so that God can be in him "the totality of the One who sums up everything and is in everything." The Religious not only tries to allow God to love him to the limit, but also is the one whose whole life is summed up in love for God.

"But," you say, "not all Religious are shut up in monasteries and convents contemplating God; there are active orders too." That is, of course true, just as it is true that there are priestly and lay mystics. It must be stressed again and again that every Christian life is a mixture of the three "pure" states, because God is a Trinity, not a committee of three. I am speaking of the Religious state as a "pure" state, showing what is essential to it as Religious. But there are Religious orders that have a redemptive mission to others, and orders that engage in scientific research and so on. These are Religious orders because the emphasis is not on the action, but upon the mystical dimension of the attitude toward the action. They are Religious orders because of the way they look on what they are doing; and they are primarily Religious if the orientation is that all is directed toward God as the goal.

This is really what is distinctive about the Religious state as distinguished from the other two states of the Christian life: God is the goal. In the other states, God is the starting-point, and the world (either the created universe or the people in it) is the goal. The priest or layman does not use the world or the people in it as a vehicle for loving God, but loves the things and people of this world with God's love. The Religious is the one who sees the world and everything and everyone in it in its relation to God.

And that is why it is the Religious who is the representative of the world loving God. He is the one who makes explicit this dimension of the relation between God and the world; he, as mystic, is the voice by which the world utters its praise of its Creator and Redeemer, because it is his eyes which are the eyes of the world seeing itself as created by God and redeemed by God and it is his heart which is the heart which is the world's heart bursting with gratitude and joy because of what God is and what God has done for it.

Again, there is nothing wrong with priests or laymen joining in this rejoicing and expressing their gratitude to God for all that he has done for us. This is just the priests and laymen taking over the Religious dimension of the Christian life, which is "proper," as it were, to the Religious state as such, but which must be in all states of life because God's love is triune. It is just that the Religious life is the life which is the sacrament, as it were--the visible sign--of this particular way in which the love of God expresses itself in human life.

The witness of the Religious to the non-Christian is this: He has nothing himself, and shows himself to the world as having nothing; he has no worldly possessions, he has no worldly partner, he has no worldly will of his own. He has, as it were, no "personality" of his own which he holds on to: he is, by obedience, a pure "member" of his order, and his will is not his, but that of God through the Superior's slightest wish. His very appearance is not to be distinctively his; recent Popes have stressed the notion of the Religious "habit," the uniform, which is part of what they are as a "sign" to the world. The sign is that the individual has disappeared as something distinctive.

But of course, the Christian paradox is that the Religious as such, the contemplative, in this disappearance, "owns nothing but possesses everything," has the whole of the human race as his partner in love, and does exactly what he wants--because he has chosen to want what his superior wants.

And the sign to the world is that fun the Religious has as completely free, that enjoyment of life which the non-Christian cannot understand but which he sees and which forces itself upon him as so evident. The non-Christian sees the monastery and the convent as a place of escape from responsibility; and yet he sees the monk and nun as responsible individuals, in control in their relinquishing of control, not escapists, absolute realists, not pie-in-the-sky idealists, in their "flight" from the world taking the world's cares on their shoulders and offering up these cares to God, who is running the universe. "How can they give up all this and be so happy?" is what he asks; and this leads to "How can it make sense to give up all this?" That is their witness. Their "martyrdom" (which is the Greek word for "witness") is their resurrection. They emerge as individuals because of their individual, free expression of their taking in of the world and expressing its love for God.

The Religious, therefore, is the expression of the Theological virtue of charity: love. This is the virtue that expresses the life of the Spirit in the world.

The priest is the one who takes over the attitude of the Son: the redemptive love of God for the world. Thus, while God for the Religious is the Omega, God for the priest is the Alpha, and the world--that is, those to be redeemed--is the goal.

The way the priest looks at things is that he sees what a treasure the Faith is, and what a shame it is that this marvelous gift is not understood and shared by everyone.

Again, we are all "organs" of the one Priest who is the only real Priest (in the sense of the one who offers sacrifice) in Christianity; and so we all not only share but must share in the Son's attitude, the priestly attitude, in order to be Christian at all. The Faith is given to each Christian in part to be shared with others, not to be buried in his own soul, because faith is love, just as hope is love.

But we are again speaking of the "pure" state, the sacrament, now, not of love precisely (that is the Religious state), but of hope. The Spirit is love, the Son is hope, the Father is faith, if you want to connect the Theological virtues to the Persons of the Trinity; but faith, hope and love are one. Note that faith and hope occur, as Paul remarks, in this world; and love is the virtue that carries over as such into the next. You can't have hope where there is fulfillment, and you can't have faith when you see. Thus, the priestly and the lay state are states that deal with this world as their locus and goal; they transcend this world, because they are God's attitude toward it, but they are aimed at the "transformation of the world to God," as St. Paul says.

Because, then, the priest (in the sense of the ministerial priesthood) is the visible sign of the virtue of hope and the Redemption, he is, of course, the one to whom the Sacraments (in the strict sense now, the Seven) are entrusted.

The person who is the human expression of this aspect of the love of God is, of course, the Bishop, who is the Representative or Emissary of Jesus (that is the meaning of the Greek word apostolos) in his diocese. He is not the representative of the Pope; each Bishop is the person who is taking over Jesus function as Prince of Redemption in his own diocese; but he does so only in union with all the other Representatives. Since they each and all have no function except to represent Jesus Himself as Prince of Redemption, how could they be at odds with each other? Thus, the "college" of Bishops is the Representative, and at the same time each Bishop is the Representative--and to the extent that he is at odds with the College of Bishops, he represents himself and not Jesus.

Now the Bishop delegates some of his functions as Representative of the Prince as Redeemer to the priests. They are not Representatives of the Prince in their parishes, but representatives of the Bishop, who is Representative of Jesus, the Redeemer.

Now the attitude that the Bishop takes is that he has no mind of his own. The Religious has no will of his own; the Bishop has no mind of his own. His mind is to be purely and simply "the mind that was in Jesus the Prince." His function is not to command, but to preserve and transmit. True, he commands his priests; but he does not command, really, his laity, his "flock." He shows them the way; he reveals the Truth that Jesus taught, preserving it from error; he provides the Sacraments for their ease in living the Divine life; and he can, if they refuse to accept the Truth as it actually exists, exclude them from communion with the Believers--because in truth they are not in union-with the believers in the Truth. Does this damn them, this anathema? No; their own conscience is their judge; it simply says that what they are advocating by their statements or their life is not the objective truth, and is not to be followed by people who want to hold to the objective truth.

Thus, though the Sacrament of Change of Mind (now called that of Reconciliation, what used to be called "penance") makes the Bishop (and by delegation, the priest) into a judge, its function is forgiveness, and it cannot condemn. Even when the priest refuses absolution, he cannot send anyone to hell; that is for the person and God alone. His refusal of absolution (which is not to be done lightly, if ever) means that "I cannot, in the name of Jesus, remove this sin from you, because it seems to me that you still want it." Jesus Himself cannot "forgive" a sin that the person still wants, because, as I said earlier, from God's point of view there is nothing to forgive; it is simply the erasure of what is repudiated by the person. Thus, the Bishop or the priest is not really judging the person in this Sacrament, but offering renewed hope to those Baptized (who by this bath were washed of their previous sins) who have sinned and so fallen from the life and the hope they once had.

Why is the Bishopric and the ministry of the Sacraments not open to women? First let me say something about the fact that it isn't. Part, at least, and to me the most clear part, of the Scriptural foundation for this is in Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 14, in contrast with what was said about women's keeping their heads covered in Chapter 11. There, when all is said and done, he says that it is the custom for women to cover their heads. But in Chapter 14, he says this:

"As to the custom in all communities of the sacred people, women are not to speak out in the meetings; they have no permission to speak out, and should be obedient, as the Law says. If they want to know something, they can ask their husbands later at home; it is not proper for a woman to speak out in the community. Or do you think you are the ones God's word comes from? Or the only ones it has come to? If one of you thinks he is a prophet or inspired, then he ought to recognize that what I am writing to you is one of the Master's commands--and if any of you does not recognize it, then he is the one who should not be recognized."

This clearly indicates--to me, at least--that the "speaking out" or transmission of the Word to the community was recognized from the earliest times (that letter was written before any of the Gospels) as not something women were to do by order of Jesus Himself. And it has been the constant tradition of the Church since then that, though women have had a rank equal in status to Bishops (abbesses of convents held that rank), they were never ministers of the Sacraments or official transmitters of the Word to the community. So the question is Why, not Whether women can be priests.

I think the answer lies in the fact that the Bishop and priest have no mind of their own as such. They are pure vehicles for the transmission of something that is not theirs and that they have no control over. They are not leaders; they are absolute followers. They appear to be leaders, because they are the visible representatives of the one who is the real leader; but since they are purely His representatives, they must not let their own personality intrude upon the clear transmission of what Jesus has to say to the people they have contact with.

Now the interesting thing about women, as can be seen from Mary, is that women have control. It is the woman's choice that determines the marital relationship; the man proposes, but the woman accepts or rejects. And the woman is the one whose gives personality and direction to the life style of the family; she has traditionally been the one who sets the tone of the family's life.

And Mary is the one who made the Redemption possible; she had the choice of accepting it or rejecting this opportunity. She was not commanded to accept; it was offered her; and presumably, if she had not accepted, the Redemption would not have happened. This can be seen from the contrast between the angel's reaction to Zechariah's difficulty and Mary's. Both asked, essentially, "How can this be, because there is an obstacle in the way?" In Zechariah's case, it was the age of Elizabeth, and evidently in Mary's (since she was already engaged to a man) it was a vow never to have sexual relations. The angel says to Zechariah, "Well, it's going to happen, and to show you, you are not going to be able to speak until it does happen." But the angel says to Mary, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you," and so on; simply explaining the situation. No, it is clear that the angel was telling Zechariah the priest what was to happen, and expecting that he would go along with it; but the angel was offering something to Mary, and deferring to her will.

I think that what God is telling us in the exclusion of women from the sacramental ministry is that it contradicts what women are as a sign that they should become pure transmitters of what is not theirs. They can become Religious without contradicting their reality as women, since the choice to become a Religious is a control, just as the choice of Mary was as much a choice to accept as it was control. When a Religious offers obedience, then each time the Superior issues a command or expresses a wish, the Religious chooses to accept this as his own direction of his own life; and thus, the Religious is determining himself using the Superior's voice as information. He has "given up" his will without losing it.

But when the Pope, say, declares that contraception is not to be practiced among Christians, then in the first place, he is not directing his own life (he is, after all, celibate), but is simply transmitting something to others as the truth about human sexuality. Secondly, he does not have the statement of others to "conform" to, but must discover what the Master wants from many ambiguous pronouncements from many quarters, and he must be very careful that he is discovering what the Master is saying, and is not expressing the "mind" of the majority in the Church, nor the thing that seems most reasonable to himself. He is like a radio; once tuned in to the proper signal, it proclaims what the signal says, and it does so best when nothing of itself creates static or noise.

Note that the Bishop is not a Theologian. The Theologian is the one who tries to discover the depths of the meaning of what is in the Revelation of Jesus. The Bishop (and the Pope's pronouncements are those of the Bishops as a College, and not his own) does not have the function as such of plumbing the depths of the Revelation, but of preserving it intact: of pronouncing as to whether this or that Theological formulation is or is not consistent with the actual deposit of faith. The Theologian is a creative discoverer, as it were; the Bishop is essentially a conservative, a preserver.

Thus, women who say that they have a "vocation" to the priesthood are deluding themselves. They may be called to share in the transmission of hope to others, but not through performing the Sacramental ministry. This vanishing into conservation is not consistent with the Divine dimension of womanhood; women's essence is creativity.

For women to consider it "unequal" for them not to have "leadership" roles in the Church is for women to repine because they do not share in the abuse of the priestly function. Yes, there have been and still are Bishops who interpret "ministry" as being synonymous with "majesty," and who consider themselves "leaders" of their flock and not pure followers of their Master, who administer and govern rather than tune in and transmit, who judge and condemn rather than forgive and give hope, who act like corporate presidents rather than slaves of the slaves. But this is not what the priesthood is; the priesthood is the priest vanishing so that Jesus can speak authentically through him--and, to take the traditional "justification," finally--Jesus was male, not by accident but by Divine plan, and his spokesman, whether White, Black, Yellow, or Red, is a male, the son of a woman.

There is no question of "leadership" in Christianity. There is one "leader" and only one: Jesus, and He leads through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, not through the decrees of the hierarchy. The function of the hierarchy is to enable people to discover whether the Holy Spirit or their own spirit or the spirit of evil is prompting them; because the Holy Spirit does not contradict Himself, and if some prompting within you tells you to do something that the Bishop says is not Catholic, then this is not the prompting of the Holy Spirit. That is all. As to "leadership," Jesus said, "The one among you who wants to be in the top position is to become the slave of everyone else."

Finally, the layman is the human expression of the creative love that God has for his whole universe and each thing in it; the living out of a life that is a sacrament, as it were, of faith, because the layman recreates the material world unto the image and likeness of himself as divine, and thus divinizes everything he comes into contact with. Just as the cathedral of Chartres is a building which is stone speaking worship to God, a divine building, so everything the layman touches becomes something that speaks of God in the world, recreating it from within into something more than material, more than human, into something material, human, and divine.

The layman, like the priest, has the world for his goal and the love of God as his source. His Christianity consists in the fact that he does not see what he is working on as an expression of himself, but as an expression of God, working through his hands. His object is to rid himself of his own way of looking at things, his personal view of what he is working on, and to try to see it as God sees it, and to act on it as God acting on it, not as he acts on it as human.

And, of course, this means giving up goals, and submitting to the things he is working on; not dominating the reality he deals with and wresting it to his will, but studying it and finding its potentials, and helping it be itself; his function as Christian is to disappear in his work, so that it is the work which achieves the reality, not the worker--just as the cathedral of Chartres is the work of God through the workers, who have no names, who are just his instruments of transformation of the world.

Sometimes the instrument is known, of course; the Theology of Thomas Aquinas is his as well as God's; but it was certainly not the intention of Thomas Aquinas to produce a Thomistic system of philosophy and Theology, but simply to be the vehicle by which the truth could emerge as well as possible through his weak mind (One who attempts philosophy and Theology is reminded at every sentence how weak his own mind is). If the instrument is to be known, then so be it; but the point is that this is irrelevant to the instrument. It is that the work achieve its own self-development that is the goal; and if the worker suffers and falls into oblivion, then this is perfectly fine.

We will, of course, be spending the rest of this book in a sketch of how this attitude expresses itself in the various phases of the lay life, so let this be enough to distinguish it from the priestly and Religious attitudes.

Note that not one of these ways of life is at all attractive. The Religious gives up everything, including the initiative in making choices; the priest gives up his own mind in favor of conservation of a truth that is not his; and the layman gives up his own self-expression. The Christian gives up his own fulfillment, whatever his state of life.

Now of course, there is a perversion of each of these states of life, which we find all too often. The Religious can give up responsibility and use the Religious life as a kind of welfare society where he can live quite comfortably. The priest can use his role as representative to assume "leadership" in the Church, and act as if his mind was the mind of Jesus, instead of the other way round--as if he were the super-Theologian, in other words. And the layman, of course, is the one whose temptation is to find in self-expression self-fulfillment. That is, each state of life can be used as a vehicle in which to advance oneself, rather than a means of disappearing, of crucifixion, with a resurrection which is the act of someone else and not the goal of the work.

But then it isn't the Christian life at all. True, the resurrection of the Christian happens simultaneously with the crucifixion; the happiness of the fulfillment is one with the agony of self-repudiation; the life of the Spirit is the death of the "old man." The point is that the death is not for the life of oneself, as if one is a means toward the other, which is the "real thing." That makes the self the goal, and is not the Christian paradox. We do not die in order to live; the death is the life, because the life of the Spirit is the contradictory of the self-fulfillment which is Original Sin acting in us.