Khaki Priesthood

You also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood. - 1 Peter 2.5

Sue Welch of Cornell University recently initiated an intervention that helped a young woman confront her bulimia and steer clear of suicide. Ms. Welch is not a professor at the elite Ivy League university. She’s a janitor.

And no, she hadn’t stayed in a Holiday Inn the night before. See, Cornell’s administration worries about its reputation as a demanding institution where overachieving stress-junkies stroke out and off themselves. According to Elizabeth Bernstein of the Wall Street Journal, in a survey of students at fifteen top schools Cornell won the stress test. So many undergrads have belly-flopped off the towering nearby cliffs that campus argot refers to suicide as “gorging out.” (http://biz.yahoo.com/wallstreet/071228/sb119881134406054777_id.html?.v=4&printer=1)

So the university did some admirable and even daring things which resulted in cutting the suicide rate by more than half. For my money, though, their wisest move was training custodians to spot kids with mental health problems. Surplus puke in a single dorm room set off the janitor’s psychological smoke-detector. She took energetic steps through the proper channels and the young woman received the help she needed. “These kids are looking to us to provide care,” Welch told Ms. Bernstein. “But they don’t see administrators every day, they see me.”

The point being that presence may count for more than expertise when it comes to care, whether that care is medical, emotional, or spiritual. Whether the fingers a marginal person stuffs down her throat are physical or intellectual, whether the ensuing eruption is digestive or verbal, the best person to catch on is the one on the spot.

It’s true that training matters. (I teach at the seminary; surely you knew I’d get around to that one.) Ms. Welch could spot the fault line and even feel it slipping, but beyond sending up a flare she was limited. She couldn’t supply the counseling or prescribe the medicine that might ultimately be needed. What she could - and did - do was bring to bear a basic knowledge applied in light of noticing and caring.

When Peter performed the mass-ordination that made all Christians priests, I think this was the kind of thing he had in mind. We Baptists are big on the “priesthood of all believers” but too often think it means we get to be on committees and talk at business meetings. These things, however, are not in themselves signs of redemption and may in fact be ingredients in eternal damnation. (”Where the meeting endeth not and the agenda is not quenched.”) Anyway, they don’t require the blood of Christ since you get similar privileges if you join the Moose Lodge or buy stock in a publicly traded company.

Christians miss the point when we think that believer priesthood involves a top-rung seat on the corporate ladder of the kirkenreich. What it really means is that God lets us all put on khaki clericals and mop up the barf of our fellow believers when various ills attack the body of Christ. It isn’t a very fun job and certainly not glamorous, but the good part is that the assignment includes (if we’re open to it) on-the-job training in how to spot a stressed-out saint in need of the Spirit’s healing touch.

Okay, sure, we still need “experts,” pastors and counselors and maybe even seminary professors with specific training in a given area. Spiritual ills are complex and we will all frequently find ourselves outside of our competence, needing to call in the specialist. But it all begins when the base-line believer, someone who sees her fellow saints on a daily basis, notices an unusual amount of projectile venting or sees the sharp, skeletal bones of a starved faith as they poke against the thin skin of a malnourished soul. And does something - nearly anything, really - about it.

Your brothers and sisters are looking to us - to the church - to provide care. But they don’t see the professor or even the pastor everyday, they see you. The question becomes - do you see them?

This entry was posted on December 31, 2007 at 8:43 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.