Mastery Year 2: Part 5: Post 3: Priesthood?

"What is a priest?" asked Apple Blossom at breakfast.

For some reason, the entire candidate's group, except Veery, and Oak, had ending up sitting at the same table with Apple, a single yearling, and she had been using the opportunity to pick our brains. Halfway through the meal, Nel excused herself because she had spotted someone she'd been meaning to talk with, and switched tables with Greg, but Apple continued prompting discussion.

"A priest is a male priestess," said Ebony, and took a big bite of eggs. She was just giving Apple a hard time.

"A priest/ess," Apple amended, making a motion with her hand to indicate the slash. "What is a priest/ess? What is it you're all trying to do?"

"I'm trying to be a good person," said Olli.

"That's not what I mean," said Apple. She has learned how to be persistent. "I'm asking in the abstract."

"That depends on whom you ask," said Greg, and we all looked at him because he had not spoken earlier. "What?" he asked, "is this a candidate's-only interview?"

"Not formally," I assured him.

"I'm asking you, anyway," said Apple. "You and them. What's a priest? ess?"

"No," said Greg, thoughtfully. "I didn't mean it's a matter of opinion, I mean that different systems have different kinds of priests, especially if you include clerics and ministers and monks and shamans in the category. Which I suppose we do, here."

"There's a difference between a priest and a minister, though," interjected Olli, "and between a priest and a monk. Christianity has all three, and they are distinct."

"Granted," said Greg.

"But what is it?" persisted Apple. "What's the larger category?"

"Well, I'm a minister," said Ollie. "That means I serve the people, but I don't have any special power, not like a Catholic priest."

"That's like a rabbi," commented Ebony, who was raised Jewish. "They're, like, religious experts, not religious authorities."

"I think most of us are ministers, then," said Steve, looking around. "We all serve."

"Raven and I are witches," Ebony corrected him. "We do have special powers."

"But not authority," said Raven.

"No, not authority, unless we have a leadership position in our own coven," Ebony agreed.

"But aside from Kit's teaching coven, we're both solitaries," added Raven.

"And yet you are also both priestesses, yes?" Greg pointed out. "If a priest has special authority, in what sense are you priestesses as solitaries?"

"We stand as intersessionaries between humanity and the, the Everything," explained Raven. As an animist, she doesn't exactly have a god concept. She frowned.

"Ministers do that, too," said Steve, "but we're not priests."

"I didn't know you're a minister," said Ollie.

"I'm a Quaker. We're all ministers."

"I think I'm a priest and a minister," suggested Eddie. "My priesthood is between me and the Goddess. My ministry is to animals and the humans who need them."

"What about you, Daniel?" asked Apple. I had been characteristically quiet.

"I don't know," I told her, slowly. "I don't think of myself as a priest. I don't know that Charlie is a priest. I guess I'm becoming whatever it is he is." A man who has married the land? Is not that a kind of intersessionary? But it doesn't do to speak of such things, and I didn't know the word for it anyway.

And Rick said nothing at all.

Note

Hi, all.

This week has been "crazy," and I'm running behind schedule. So, you can expect a post...sometime.

-best, D.

Mastery Year 2: Part 5: Post 2: Therapy

So, fall semester begins, and for the first time neither I nor June have any new classes. Of course, the same has been true for every semester this year, but for some reason the fact is impressing itself on me more strongly this time. Perhaps it's only that summer has seemed very long and I was, without realizing it, looking forward to a change and there isn't any.

I am still taking the two classes all mastery candidates take, Chaplains' Seminar and Candidates' Seminar. I teach my own workshops and things, and I sometimes join one of Charlie's classes for the day (usually Messing Around Outdoors, it's fun) or substitute for him, or I sit in on Steve's American Religious History class, which he took over from Greg, just to see how he's doing. So it's not like I have no contact with academics, it's just that I'm not taking classes with novices, nor do I have a vicarious connection to the novice's view of the year through June, as I did last year. I feel...isolated, somehow, outside of the school that I have spent so long within.

So far in that I'm out.

Perhaps I shall discuss all of this in therapy. I started individual therapy some weeks ago, not because I think I need it, but because it's actually a graduation requirement for candidates--a year and a day of it, of course. I'm not sure why, I think it's something about making sure you're not crazy. I didn't do it my first year, because I knew I wouldn't finish that year anyway, and this this year I sort of let it get away from me until Allen reminded me of the requirement mid-summer. I hadn't exactly forgotten about it, and I had to admit I've been reluctant. Individual therapy, as opposed to the group therapy I did as a yearling, seems so associated with...having problems. To me, at least. I don't want to think of myself as one of those people in therapy. I know better, but it worries me all the same.

Allen laughed at me.

"Are you worried I won't be friends with crazy people?" he asked.

Allen is not my therapist. He says it's one thing to conduct group therapy with yearlings he met recently, but quite another to offer one-on-one counseling to friends he's known for a decade. He won't serve as therapist with any of us. Instead, he maintains a list of people who practice nearly, whose work he admires and trusts, and who know the school exists. They're paid from our tuition, though at a discounted rate. Some will even come to campus, if several mastery candidates are seeing them that year, though the one I picked doesn't.

It's interesting. No major insights or breakthroughs, yet, and I have to admit I still don't think I need therapy, but the opportunity to talk about myself freely for fifty minutes a week--I like it.

Mastery Year 2: Part 5: Post 1: Lammas

Happy slightly belated Lammas. This year, as last, we had a feast, several tastings (this time garlic, vinegar, and mead) and several types of talent shows--magic (of course), but also martial arts, and what I guess counts as debate, though the format was different than any debate I've ever seen.

The first part of the day was hot and sunny, and the sprouts (and some of the adults) had a water-fight--the fight wasn't an official scheduled activity, the way it was last year, but it was fun anyway. Then a thunderstorm blew in, so we retreated to the Dining Hall for the worst of the lightning, then came out again and danced in the rain. So, that was fun, too.

But that's not really what I want to talk about. The thing is that every year, the masters and some number of others who have completed the mastery program (that is, also masters, but not school employees) withdraw into the Mansion and do something that we're not supposed to know about. And we don't know about it. I'm one of the few students who even knows they do something, since they slip away one at a time and don't call attention to their going, and even I don't know what they do.

For the first several years I was here, the vanishing gave me a delicious sense of mystery, and so many things around here have, at one time or another. Then it started to piss me off. I felt excluded, condescended to. But this year was different.

For the first time it occurred to me that if I asked what they're doing, they'd probably tell me. Secrets around here are usually kept by evasion and distraction, not by outright refusal, and never by lying. But it also occurred to me, again for the first time, to think about the whole thing from the masters' perspective. Like, not just did I want to ask, but, if I were one of them, would I want to be asked?

And I don't think I would. It's like they give their lives to the school, they are at work, in one way or another, almost all the time, let them have their privacy.

I don't know, I just never thought of it before from a perspective other than my own needs and wants. And it's not about me.