The clash of the immanent and the transcendentﾅ

In 1976 I had the opportunity to travel to Italy as part of a Holy Year celebration event. The contrast of concepts and images became one of those personal clarifying moments that remain with me to this day.

Everywhere we journeyed, around the city of Rome and Vatican City, from Pompeii to Florence, we were reminded of the limitlessness of time. Antiquity was the air we breathed, the sights we experienced.

Our hotel was situated on the Via Salaria, The Salt Road connecting our part of the city with the ocean as I remember it. This was the road the Romans trekked two thousand years before bringing that precious commodity from the coast to the merchants and people of the city.

As we walked the ruins of Pompeii one could almost sense the bustle and energy of the city the moments before it was frozen in time. As we toured the inner circle of Vatican City, St. Peterﾒs and the Sistine Chapel we couldnﾒt help but be transported into the grandeur of centuries past. The only truly new part of our journey was the recently opened dual-lane autostrada linking Rome to Florence.

It was in the city of Florence, however, that I had what was for me a startling experience. We were being guided through the Baptistery, actually a separate structure from the cityﾒs cathedral, when our tour guide mentioned that it had taken artisans 200 hundred years to complete the mosaic inside the dome.

ﾓTwo hundred yearsﾔ to complete a mosaic struck me like a thunderbolt. We Americans were celebrating the 200th anniversary of our Independence. The clash between our sense of time and history in the States and the Vaticanﾒs sense of time and history has resounded for me ever since.

As Church in America, however, we live in immanence. We have an incredible sense of the immediacy and driven need to accomplish our mission. This moment is all we have. We need a reformed and renewed inclusive priesthood in our Church. Our impatience for a married priesthood and womenﾒs ordination is almost painful. After all, we built a nation that has impacted the globe in 200 years. How could we not have accomplished our expectations for our Church in less than forty years?

Surrounded by images and structures that have borne the passage of hundreds or thousands of years almost force a person to live in the transcendence of time. What is a year, a decade, a century, or even a millennium to those who are enveloped by the ages? After all, it had taken two hundred years to complete a mosaic, and almost three thousand years to pave a road from Rome to Florence!

In its simplest form, we are experiencing a true clash of perspectives: immanence versus transcendence.

Iﾒve been reading corpus-member Fredrick J. Luhmannﾒs Call and Response: Ordaining Married Men as Catholic Priests. His work chronicles the development and imposition of celibacy on Latin Rite clergy and the implementation of the Pastoral Provisions allowing married former Protestant clergy to be ordained as Roman Catholic priests.

As I read through conciliar and canonical citations and written correspondence, I couldnﾒt help but be continuously struck by the worldview that so celebrates Godﾒs transcendence as to completely miss Godﾒs immanence. Even references to the lived tradition of married clergy in the Eastern Churches fail to appreciate the richness that these men, their wives and children have been for their communities.

Jesus was priest -- mediator between God and humanity precisely because he experienced, immanently within and outside himself, the incredibly transcendent presence of God, and found himself driven to share that good news.

Whether or not weﾒve been sacramentally ordained, weﾒve been baptized into this priesthood of Jesus. We have an even more immediate and critical mission in front of us than being ﾓallowedﾔ to (re)gain a rightful place in leading community worship.

We have been gifted with the experience and knowledge that the everyday life we lead, the relationships we treasure, is truly ﾓholy ground,ﾔ the place where we can meet and touch the face of God who loves us. Our radically transformative mission as corpus is to share that good news with people who long to hear it.

C. Russell Ditzel Russ can be reached at crditzel@corpus.org