"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.
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