these hands

Fr. Dwight on the hands of a priest. Read it, it's a great meditation.

The hands of the priest are the sign of the priest--in the ordinary the extraordinary is seen. Through his humanity God's divinity wants to shine. This is the mystery of the sacrament of ordination. Holy Church teaches that through ordination an ontological change takes place in the man. A new dimension to his humanity is unlocked. He opens out into becoming something he was not before. His ordination is a completed gift and yet also a gift that has to be completed through a life of dedication, prayer, sacrifice and suffering. This is the mystery of ordination that I have experienced: through a lifetime of following Christ I have come across priests and bishops who, from a human perspective, have been failures, losers and boors. I have come across priests who were venal, short tempered, scheming and back stabbing. I have come across priests who were child molestors, perverts and alcoholics. And yet...

And yet I also saw in each one a man who wanted to be fully conformed to the image of Christ--a man who longed to be all that God created him to be. A man, despite the cynicism and sin and fear and frailty, who longed for heaven, whose heart was once filled with faith, and who still, despite all things, longed for faith again. I insist that I saw, even in those priests, the image of Christ--supernaturally planted there by their baptism and their ordination. It may have been faded, smeared and bleared by their fallen humanity; it may have been so twisted and perverted by their weakness and human evil, but something gold was there--something glimmered in the darkness like a diamond lost at night. Something supernatural was there in a way far deeper and more mysterious than I can put into words.

All I can say is that it is a mystery--and a mystery is something that can be experienced even if it cannot be explained. This mystery of divnity working its way through our humanity like yeast in the dough is a mystery that will not be fully understood until the final day. Then we will see how even the horrors were part of the glory. Then we will see that even the most terrible terrors were woven into the divine plan. Then we will see that for the elect nothing was lost and everything was redeemed. For those who are called, and who follow Christ all will be transformed, and everything will be harvest.