You Can't Avoid Their Gaze

They peer down at you from every vantage point. Whether it is from the fading light of day through the deep resonating colors of glass tinged with careful tinctures of metals carefully chosen for their proper hue or from a perch high above the street upon a parapet or below the sash of a window – the faces of kings, scholars, bishops, saints, and sinners. They all watch you walk along as they have been watching countless others day by day, year after year, through the centuries.

Only true historians would know who the seemingly insignificant ones are. Others are plainly evident: major patrons of the colleges they founded or endowed. Others might be notable alumnae or faculty of renowned learning. Some may have literally lost their heads in religious strife. Others simply faded into obscurity as their ideas lost currency among the learned. Such it is in a community of learning.

A mentor of mine once said, “There is nothing deader than a dead priest.” That gives someone like me true pause for reflection among the many stony faces, many of them priests, forgotten in the mists of time. The way I read it is that to live the life of a priest, one must aspire to live in imitation of Christ, fully, very much in the way St. Paul describes in his Letter to the Philippians: “Let your attitude be as Christ’s, who though he was in the form of God, did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at but emptied himself.” That attitude requires one to say that one’s life is no longer one’s own, really, but belongs to God, to the other. Consequently, at life’s end, one has little left, really, if one has followed Jesus totally, because that is what Jesus had – nothing.   “… even unto death, death on a cross.”

The only remembrances, then, are names scratched next to other names in baptismal registers, on marriage certificates, and burial records. Perhaps there will be a plaque – or like the grotesques that loom over the streets of Cambridge, a face now worn by rain and wind. But the real memorial is in the lives touched, the souls salved, the sins forgiven. These are the places where priests’ spirits live on. “So, gaze on good bishop, soon I’ll see you, too.”