Priests are formed by prayer. They’re also formed by education, and by desire. I would like, for a moment to leave out the language of calling, or vocation, which is where people usually begin to discuss the topic. “When did you realise that God was calling you to become a priest?” That’s a question which all those who present themselves for ordination have learned to answer with a personal account of a spiritual experience. This is relatively new in the Church of England, which for centuries gladly ordained the thick sons of the landed gentry and the clever sons of the poor and middling sort of folk.
The need for a spiritual experience to explain vocation hasn’t yet quite got a grip on the Catholic Church. At least it hadn’t when my first spiritual director, who was Roman Catholic and a wise man, said to me that there were three qualities that the Church looked for in those who came forward for ordination. One, as I recall, was sanity. One was the capacity to learn the things that the Church expected her priests to know. And the third was desire. You had to want to be a priest. “You have the first two,” he said, “but you don’t have the third. You’re sane and basically a decent person.” “Thank you,” I thought. “There’s no doubt of your academic ability.” “Thank you again,” I thought, and possibly “Duh.” “But you don’t really want to be a priest. You want to be a priest and a writer.” Then, and I can’t remember just how he phrased it, he said that if I wanted to be a priest, I had to get the sense of my identity as a writer out of my system.
Why this sacrifice? It didn’t strike me at the time, but my director didn’t say that I had to lose my sense of identity as a mother, wife or sister. It didn’t strike me because my sense of myself as a writer was stronger than any of these. Yet these identities are relational, and being a writer, with all the mystique that identity has accrued, is merely functional. To be a priest it was necessary that I identify only as a human being, a person in relation to others. A human being in relation to God. A human being living for God and for other human beings.
Did I mention that this was difficult? Possibly the most difficult thing I’ve done, or tried to do? It was. And yet this is the most spiritually informed and emotionally intelligent example I can give of the work that goes into what is called clerical formation. Generally, when we speak of deskilling in the process leading to ordination, we’re thinking of something much more like military basic training. Even when someone enters the process as a “future theological educator” with all the skills needed for the Church’s ministry, they must go through basic training, the breaking down and reconstituting that makes a man a man of the cloth. Or woman, as the case may be. This is the army, Mister Jones.
Many of us have difficulty with that. As I try to unravel the difficulty, I notice the difference between learning to identify simply as a human being and learning to identify as part of an institution. The first is a spiritual formation. The second is formation of the kind that a pig undergoes as it becomes a tinned ham. When I was a curate in post-ordination training, there was always a time of worship: “Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me; Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me. Melt me, mould me, fill me, use me, Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.” We were being asked to pray to become a thing for God: not a person, but an object. Not an “I” but an “it”. Is that really what the Holy Spirit does when it comes down? Make people into things? Few of us were ecstatic at the prospect.
On the evening before I was ordained, my bishop said to me, “When the Church recognises a vocation, the Holy Spirit is telling the Church that it needs the gifts this person brings”. It’s a scandal for there to be so many clergy whose gifts and experience have been considered surplus to requirements, and who at the end of decades of ordained ministry know that their potential has been squandered. And by “squandered” I mean “wasted by the Church”.
But sometimes, since God has a sense of humour, there’s a surprise. I began writing the libretto for The Death of Klinghoffer before I was baptised. It had its premiere in 1991. This April, on the opening night of the Festival del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, at the end of the performance, I joined the curtain call just before the close. The director, Luca Guadagnino, took my right hand, and Maestro Lawrence Renes my left. We walked to the centre of the stage. They lifted my arms, like two grownups about to swing a toddler. One, two, three, bow. I can write. This is my gift. Bow again to wild applause
