All such factors bring into new relief questions that constellate around the issue of the integration between the public and personal dimensions of priestly life. How might such an integration be effectively achieved?
Unhealthy resolutions of the question
In addressing such a question, it might be helpful to proceed by initially identifying two unhealthy ways of dealing with the tension – public and personal dimensions of clerical life. Either clergy can merge the two into one or they can split the public and the personal, living under the illusion that the personal is private.
Firstly, clergy can over-identify with the public dimension of their life. They become their social role. Relationships particularly become role based: Clergy then only ever relate to others through their role. Their whole sense of identity emerges from the role. They are always the priest. As true as this is theologically, it is not true socially. If one over identifies with a role, with an institution outside oneself then identity is always extrinsic to the self. The source of identity consequently assumes surreal value. It cannot bear change or alteration or growth. The individual therefore lives in a defensive stance, forever having to protect the source of identity. Perhaps this is to state the obvious, although there are many subtle ways where and how such an over- identification occurs. Individual clergy might test the level of identification by asking, what would I do if I were not a priest? What would I be competent to do? What jobs in the employment section of the newspaper am I qualified for? What relationships would I have if I were to step away from priesthood? What do I talk about other than Church?
Yet, there is a further difficulty to such over-identification with role. It resides in the implications for growth. When we merge with something outside ourselves, when we live a role-based life, then we assume all the messages that go with that role and that source. We are given permission to have certain experiences and feelings; we are disallowed others. But what happens to those feelings, needs and experiences which are eschewed? At worst, they get pushed to the side and suppressed. But since it is the law of the psyche that everything within it must seek expression, it is only a matter of time before that which is suppressed re-asserts its presence. If it cannot be admitted consciously, then it will admit its presence covertly. It erupt in all forms and all manners: daydreams, disturbing dreams, difficult relational styles, addictions and compulsions. Consequently, the priest who has too rigidly identified with his role can find himself in the vortex of the Pauline dilemma of doing that which he would rather not – and ever more desperately so.
The subsequent result can, at worst, be a splitting between the public persona and the emotional reality, or the public and the personal dimensions of life. There is a danger within such a development that the persona subtly, but really, moves more and more into the world of fantasy. The public dimension of clerical life is forced more anymore into becoming a way of avoiding or trying to eliminate the inevitable contradictions of the priest’s emotional life, protecting the individual from an unlived personal life. The principal sources of the public dimension are now simply nostalgia or guilt.
The second ill-fated attempt to deal with the two dimensions of public and personal is to live with the two dimensions split from the start. In this scenario clergy settle for a more or less quiet double life: the public and the non-public dimensions running along parallel but hopefully never meeting at the sanctuary step. Then it may become unclear as to which dimension is more defensive than the other. Both the public or the non-public dimension can become a fantasy. While the public dimension of priestly life can move into the realm of fantasy when it is principally used as a defence against an unlived emotional life, the personal dimension itself moves into fantasy when it no longer admits the struggle of process towards integration and is contrary to the public dimension. It drifts into fantasy when it has split off from the ordinary network of relationships that constitute the priest’s life and becomes a substitute for the real demands of commitment and responsibility towards others. Particularly, it has evolved into fantasy when the ‘personal life’ runs on the illusion that it is private, that it is not affecting anyone else and is permissible on these grounds. As a fantasy it is full of consolation, but it goes nowhere. It is fraught with sentiment and guilt, but lacks the hope and imagination and love that keeps one moving towards an ever opening horizon. When one’s personal life leaves the individual feeling fragmented and more and more confused then it has lost its anchor in the tension that it needs to have with the public dimension of life.
The necessity of the tension
Throughout I have been making reference to the tension between the public and the personal dimensions of priestlylife. That is the nub of the issue. There is a tension, and always will be. The way forward to a creative and fulfilling life lies in the tension and not apart from it. Such a life does not conme from avoiding the tension but entering into it and allowing the tension itself to inform us. It can never be either/or; it must always be and/or for thepublic figure.
The most helpful tool in understanding how the two dimensions might work together is the mandorla: the almond shape created by the overlap of two circles. The mandorla is the experience of unity between two apparent opposites. The law of the mandorla teaches that the way forward is always to hold apparent opposites in tension until we live into the experience of their unity. The law of the mandorla is that truth is always paradoxical and that the presence of paradox is the test of truth. The art is to live with both sets of the tension. The mandorla also teaches us that if we try and live with only one side of the tension, it is only a matter of time before the rejected side reaches out to reassert its presence. But then it does so explosively.
Distinguishing between ‘private’ and ‘the personal’
As public figures priests’ lives are to be marked by the tension. Acceptance of the tension is the foundation of its resolution. But such integration begins with a distinction between ‘personal’ and its oft used, but misleading synonym, ‘private’.
Public figures are not their own person. Their actions, their peccadillos, have an effect that can be as dramatic, as it is significant. A media conscious society has put public figures under the most intense scrutiny perhaps in history. No longer can royalty, for example, have its customary mistresses and affairs and keep public appearances going with unmitigated aplomb. No longer can politicians have unusual financial arrangements, no matter how long ago, without it all coming out to be devoured by a public hungry to be shocked.
Public figures are public because they are so deeply embedded within the social fabric. They gather that fabric into their own persons. Indeed, their demise highlights the depth of our sociality and how that sociality naturally looks for its symbol in certain figures. We know this too well when the affairs of an entire nation, arguably the most powerful nation on earth, can grind to a halt because of the sexual peccadillos of a President. It might be said that for public persons nothing is private any more. All is public. ‘Private’ is defined as simply that which has not yet caught the attention of the media.
Who then would be a public figure today? Who is without blemish? Who has a private life that exists in ever readiness to becomepublic? Every ordained minister is a public figure. Is ‘private’ for clergy, too, simply that which has yet to gain public attention? But then what scope or room is subsequently given to clergy for making mistakes? What room is given clergy for entering into the messy processes of growth, especially sexual maturation?
As public figures, clergy are particularly vulnerable because the area in which they are most accountable in the public mind, and the area which they are expected by the public to be permanently at the ideal, is the area of life which by its very nature breathes process, is never at the ideal whatever of the rhetoric, and requires experiment and mistake and practice if it is to grow at all – i.e. our sexuality. Moreover, this dimension of life has for such a long period been consigned to be lived out under the celibate cloak of silence, a cloak that most priests assumed far too prematurely and without adequate discernment and formation.
The problem of being denied room for sexual growth is accentuated by the social expectation in the church community itself that clergy ‘have it all together’ especially in reference to their sexuality. This social presumption, in no small part emerging from a laity kept for far too long in tutelage from a removed clerical caste, requires sensitive challenging. Ignored, it further exacerbates the tendency towards a splitting occurring in the life of many clergy. The private life gets split from the public and clergy get trapped into quiet lives of duplicity. The public persona is maintained and it shines quite well. But underneath there is another reality of a trail of broken relationships, of a constellation of half-baked relationships, of any number and kinds of forays into genital satisfaction, of an array of different compensatory behaviours. The end result is a life lived in the twilight of compromise in the hope that the split might be maintained. We pray that the private might not complicate the public too much.
To diverge for a moment, it is worth reflecting that the public are perhaps a lot more tolerant of process and growth than we realise – this is one of lifes lessons given us by the life and death of Princess Diana. There was nothing private about any aspect of Diana’s life. Everyone seemed to know Diana’s foibles and her painful struggle for recognition and for love. But what was unique in Diana was that so did she. She had articulated that struggle herself to the world with an altogether remarkable openness and honesty. She had not hidden from, or tried to avoid, the chaos within herself, but courageously had tried to face it. Far more, she had even stumblingly tried to integrate it into a sense of mission. Commentators all say that this was the secret of the rapport she had with those who suffered. She herself had expressed this insight. People loved her because she was a paradox; people loved her because both sides of the paradox were evident and openly held. It was not as if one side of the paradox was hidden, glossed over, pretended not to exist.
The public can deal quite well with issues of growth and process. Beneath a mock titillation at scandal, it can deal quite well with a private life full of contradiction and vulnerability and mess. The public privately identifies with it. What the public cannot deal with is hypocrisy. The public is not concerned with the private peccadillos of a President. The public is concerned that a President could lie. The public is concerned that its chief lawmaker would break the law.
When they smell hypocrisy the public will expose the private life of a public figure with vengeance. That is why the financial, and even more specifically, the tax lives of politicians are so much under scrutiny. How dare someone
someone make laws about my income when they themselves are rorting the system! Conversely, that is why the sexual lives of clergy are under so much scrutiny and rarely their taxation structure. It is interesting to note how an alcoholic priest is far more acceptable to a community than a priest who might be cautioned about loitering. How dare someone preach morality when his own relationships lack morality! Of course, such vengeance reaches its zenith in the exposure of sexual abuse and other forms of boundary violation.
Whilst the principle is transparent in such extreme cases, more generally, for better or worse, public life does however mean the end of private life. A public figure no longer has the luxury of a private individual life. For politicians it means the end of private financial lives. For clergy it means the shattering of the illusion of a private sexual life. Politicians must be transparent, so must clergy. That is the price of public life.
Such a declaration, however, should not be interpreted as the end of privacy. Personal privacy is a basic right. Privacy is the space allowed an individual or a community to conduct its own affairs without interference from an unacquainted public gaze. Perhaps it might be argued that the more public the figure, the greater the right to privacy. But the right to privacy is not a justification for a private life that has been divorced from its fundamental social responsibility.
The affirmation of a truly ‘personal life’
Even more significantly, the end of a private life does not mean the end of a personal life. Indeed, the more public life is, the more personal it needs to become. When public figures,including clergy, can make the distinction between a private life and a personal life, they are on the way to integrating the public and the non-public dimensions of their lives.
Personal does not mean ‘private’. Knowing something as deeply personal, is also to know it as deeply social and to express it accordingly. So, if ‘personal’ does not mean ‘private’, even though it has the right to ‘privacy’, what does it mean? The ‘personal’ might be considered as that which arises form within the self, belongs to and reflects back into the self. It is that which is distinct from the otherness of ‘public’. The personal relates to that which I do to engage my own sense of self, to nurture and cultivate the sense of self, to grow in my own sense of what it means to be human, and enlivened by divinity. The ‘personal’ relates to the contact that I have and develop with my deepest identity beyond and beneath the social roles I am given. The ‘personal’ is the celebration of what is uniquely mine: my own likes and dislikes, my own most deeply creative self-expressions, the activities which express my own interests which are not dependent on the demands given one by public life.
The ‘personal’ needs privacy but does not become ‘private’. We might recall the Rogerian dictum, “that which is most personal is most universal”. When I am authentically engaged with the ‘personal’ then, even though alone, I have a sense of communion, of being one with humankind in some way. When the ‘personal’ has been truncated to the merely private then that sense of communion is not there but rather a residue of fragmentation and alienation and even guilt.
Understood in this way, the ‘personal’ grounds the public dimension; being real/true to oneself is what will enable the priest to sustain the public dimension of his life. Whilst it remains in tension with it, it is not in conflict with it. The public dimension in turn acts to deepen the ‘personal’. The two dimensions exist in a healthy tension, always one with the other.
Strategies of integration: self-awareness
There is perhaps only one route to such an integrative tension: the highway of self-awareness. It is in self- awareness that the personal dimension of the priestly life achieves its richest and fullest expression. It is from self-awareness that the niblic dimension draws its freedom. We need to know what belongs to where, what is coming from where, and for whom are the different elements of our life and personality. Without self-awareness the entire tension becomes a muddle without calibre.
It is easy to say one needs self-awareness. Most priests would pride themselves on ‘knowing themselves pretty well.’ But self-awareness is a never-ending project it is not static. It is never complete. Self-awareness is a fundamental commitment to the personal dimension of life. It entails the deepest attentiveness and sensitivity to all that is occurring within the Iife of the individual. It demands a reflective and interpretive consciousness to all that is undertaken.
Self-awareness brings emotional literacy: the capacity to read feelings and reactions at any given time, With this literacy the priest can grow in his capacity to know what belongs to himself and what belongs to others; he knows why he has the reactions he does and the intensity of emotion accompanying them. Such a literacy can bring an individual to significant companionship with himself to a being at home’ with himself. Such self-friendship brings self-acceptance. One’s vulnerability is known and is not excluded from the process of integration. Such self-acceptance does not require the surgical removal of the darkness form life. Rather, integration entails knowing such woundedness, holding it, and making choices not just from a part of one’s self but from the whole self. Genuine self awareness brings with it emotional congruency which inhibits the possibility of public incongruency.
Developing Passion
Self-awareness is the foundation for integration. Nonetheless, it is not sufficient unless it yields a sense of that which lies beyond the self. Self-awareness must work to release passion. Passion, too, becomes instrumental in creatively holding the public and personal dimensions of priestly life. Passion is the fulcrum of mission: it galvanises the disparate energies and appetites into purposeful direction. Perhaps, in some ways, today priests have lost their passion — and hence their difficulty in maintaining the tension between the public and personal dimensions of their life. Without passion we drift along in some complacent mediocrity. Public profile becomes perfunctory. With passion, however, there is direction, meaning and strategy. I am reminded of that wonderful quote of Howard Thurman’s in Gil Baile’s Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. In response to lengthy talk about what the world needs, he says, “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive!” We might quickly add, so does the Church.
One of the places in which passion can first emerge is in prayer. Genuine prayer creates the space in which one’s deepest desires rise to the surface. Prayer, as the basis for passion, gathers all the disparate experiences of life. Both the public experiences and the personal are given room for dialogue with each other. The public dimension acts to deepen the personal; the personal grounds the public in more transparent ways.
Respecting Boundaries
The issue of boundaries within pastoral life is problematic for the priest whose ministry is chiefly exercised in and through the relationships and friendships he forms with people. The priest’s integration of the personal confronts him with the dynamic of what is now termed ‘dual relationships’. Often clear boundaries can be drawn between social and pastoral relationships. On many occasions, however, the parameters are not clear. Certainly, a priest’s social life should not be drawn from the pastoral situation in which he is located. Dual relationships are fundamentally flawed and disrespect the effective tension between the public and personal dimensions of a priest’s life. In a pastoral context, the priest is always present precisely as a public figure and therefore in a situation of power, whatever the attempt to exercise such power with evangelical transparency.
The test of priestly professionalism will be found in what relationships exist for the individual outside the pastoral situation and how such relationships are engaged and sustained. It will also be discovered in the establishment of ministerial supervision which is an active process of reflection on ministry and on the professionalism of relationships within it. Supervision, distinct from spiritual direction, is process by which an individual priest is helped to differentiate what belongs to the personal and what pertains to the public in any given pastoral situation. It aims to endow both the personal and the public dimensions of life with integrity and accountability. Such accountability is essential if the public dimension is not to be confused with the personal. Such is further enhanced by a professional code of ethics for ministers.
Conclusion
In a reflection on spirituality and leadership, the writer Parker Palmer recently gave this definition of leadership:
“A leader is a person who has an unusual degree of power to project on other people his or her shadow, or his or her light. A leader is a person who has an unusual degree of power to create the conditions under which other people must live and move and have their being – conditions that can either be as illuminating as heaven or shadowy as hell. A leader is a person who must take special responsibility to what is going on inside him or her self, inside his or her consciousness, lest the act of leadership cause more harm than good.”
In the struggle to integrated the public and personal dimensions of priestly life, we are taken on both a deeply personal and broadly social journey. Both the personal and the social are pivotal, never one without the other. If we merely pirouette between them, or focus on one to the exclusion of the other, fragmentation and not integration becomes the order of the day. May the personal journey and the social be undertaken anew by priests today so that they might live into a whole life animated by the integration we see in Jesus himself.
David Ranson
Reprinted from The Furrow 53 (April 2002), 219-227.
