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Maria Sacerdota—Mary, Protopriest of the New Covenant
by The Rev. Dr. Alla Renée Bozarth Before Jesus was his mother. Before supper in the upper room, breakfast in the barn. Before the Passover Feast, a feeding trough. And here, the altar of Earth, fair linens of hay and seed. Before his cry, her cry. Before his sweat of blood, her bleeding and tears. Before his offering, hers. Before the breaking of bread and death, the breaking of her body in birth. Before the offering of the cup, the offering of her breast. Before his blood, her blood. And by her body and blood alone, his body and blood and whole human being. The wise ones knelt to hear the woman’s word in wonder. Holding up her sacred child, her spark of God in the form of a babe, she said: “Receive and let your hearts be healed and your lives be filled with love, for This is my body, This is my blood.” * From Women's Uncommon Prayers: Our Lives Revealed, Nurtured, Celebrated, by E.R. Rankin, M.A. Burke, A. Smith (Harrisburg, PA: 2000) 287-288. |
I have had quite a few priests in my life; some have even worn a clerical collar. Some, but not most. Most don’t have an ordination certificate and have never had a bishop’s hands laid on them, not even in the rite of confirmation. Being a priest is much more fundamental than all that.
To be a priest is first to be attentive to the Divine or the Holy as it is revealed in the midst of our ordinary lives; it is then to share that experience of the Holy with those who stand beside us—those who wonder, struggle, and try to make sense of their own experiences of the Holy. William Countryman, an Episcopal priest and professor of theology, writes that “the encounter with the Hidden [Holy] is a kind of fault line running through the middle of our lives; no one can escape its presence.”[1] We recognize this fault line in sudden, brief life-changing moments—as when a seismic shift opens up the earth to reveal gold mixed with the rock, hidden treasure that has been there all along. Such moments happen to us all; they are encounters with God whether we name them as such or not. That’s why priestly ministry is an inescapable part of being human. We can do it intentionally or unintentionally; we can do it poorly or well. But we cannot avoid it. Some of my best priests have been so unintentionally. An older pediatrician came into the ER of the hospital where I worked. He was losing blood rapidly from a tear in his aorta. His wife sitting by his side, he asked to have his IVs taken out. As he slipped into a coma and died, she quietly talked about all the children he had cared for during his life. At one point the wife turned to a colleague of mine standing nearby and said simply: “You never know what a day will hold.” They were priests to everyone in the hospital that night, revealing the veil between the ordinary and the Holy to be so thin as to be almost non-existent. Both of my children have been priests to me, from the very moment of their birth. Each time as I lay in bed, exhausted from giving birth, the newborn was laid on my stomach. Each time the false dichotomy between works and grace was exposed—in the end, everything is absolute gift. It is Holy. The veil between the ordinary and the Holy has also been lifted for me by musicians who speak Truth with their melodies, teachers who explore the depths of Wisdom and not mere knowledge, and soul friends who bear witness to that which is Sacred even in the most messed up places of my life. Anyone, or anything for that matter, who can name or facilitate or interpret the moments and places where the ordinary and the Holy touch is a priest. The ordained priesthood merely serves as a reminder that we are all called to be priests to one another—to share our experiences of the Holy and to help one another make sense of them in ways that bring meaning to our lives. Well, if that is what priests do—share their experiences of the Holy in the midst of ordinary life—then Mary was most definitely a priest. For her very body was the border of the ordinary and Holy, the human and the Divine. As early as the sixth century, Mary has been portrayed in mosaics, paintings, and icons wearing priestly vestments, sometimes wearing even the vestments belonging to bishops. One icon in particular that portrays Mary in this way is called Mother of God of the Inexhaustible Chalice. Mary is wearing a chasuble, the priestly covering worn during Eucharist. Her hands are lifted up and out in an “orans” position, the position of prayer. In front of her on the altar is a golden chalice which holds Christ, with the upper body of Christ visible above the rim of the chalice. This is Mary as priest, revealing and bringing into being the inexhaustible presence of Christ in the Eucharist. And we find Mary as priest not only in the art of the Church, but in its theology and its prayers; for Mary was sometimes referred to in the devotions and in the theology of the Church as “Virgin Priest.” |
