December 9, 2004
Limits
A priest was deposed this week. The notice of it came as a stern, official memo to us all — the Presiding Bishop on up and down — stark in its simplicity, signed by names surrounded with a bevy of pluses lest no one of us fail to be aware that a bishop and his fellow presbyters had spoken and a sparrow had fallen.
He was young, arrogant, handsome, promising, was the priest. I hardly knew him, and instantly when first I met him, I did not like him. But I did know and have learned painfully that whenever that happens, there’s a better than average chance that I have met something of myself.
We are both addicts. He used his addiction to commit a felony. I used mine to take the twelve-steps. We’ll probably never know why it was not the other way around. The sheer, translucence that separates the two directions we took may simply be a glass like that of which St Paul spoke and through which we can see only darkly.
I am diminished and crippled by the arbitrary and smugly canonical rightness that strangles the grace that once set apart this young priest whom I did not like. For God loves him no less, nor me for the limits of my incapability.