Donald Trump: High Priest??

I finally remembered something I learned a long, long time ago. 

Like many, I have been truly mystified that tens of millions of my fellow Americans, including especially church-going people, are willing to re-elect as President a man who is a grotesque mockery of everything holy.  A rapist, a liar, a thief, a bully, a scofflaw, a snake-oil salesman.

How could this be?  What could they possibly be thinking, anyhow? 

And then I remembered.

Early in my career, I served as a college chaplain and a parish clergyman.  One time, a middle-aged woman arranged an appointment with me for pastoral counseling.  I greeted her in my office, gestured for her to take any of the options for seating around the coffee table—two chairs, and a small sofa.  She chose the sofa.

After some preliminary pleasantries, I asked her what brought her in today.  At that, she opened her purse and pulled out a small book of prayer.  I recognized it as the Presbyterian “Book of Common Worship” which contains the rituals that pastors routinely employ—ordinations, prayers for a graveside gathering, communion rites, funerals, matrimonial services.

She had bookmarked a page to which she opened it.  From my chair, I could see that it was the marriage ceremony.  She then patted the space on the sofa next to her, and said that she wondered if I would just sit beside her and read that service aloud with her.

Of course I did not.  Instead, I just quietly asked her to tell me what was going on here.

An hour later, she had unfolded an excruciatingly painful story of her having spent her late teens and early twenties as a prostitute.  For two decades now she had borne unspeakable shame and guilt, wracked by the horror of this truth ever possibly coming to light to her husband, her children, her friends and the entire community.  Whichever way she turned in her tortured mind and soul, she couldn’t escape its chasing her down.

Then she had a demented inspiration.  What, she wondered, what if…maybe, like, what if she could sort of, you know…become kind of enmeshed with, bonded somehow with a minister, a pastor, a priest, a rabbi--someone seemingly holy, anyone who might conceivably emanate and bestow divine forgiveness that would blot out her miserable self-hatred and rescue her from her living hell.

That’s what was going on.

Anyone who has been privileged to serve as a religious leader has had this kind of experience, because human beings harbor what I refer to as “the priest wish”—the persistent hope that there does exist on earth someone who will make everything better for them.  Someone who will sweep away whatever barrier blocks their having what they think they want.  Someone who will make everything all right for them. 

Knowing that people are projecting this kind of wishful power onto you makes some religious leaders unscrupulous.  They exploit this misplaced worship to enrich their egos and bank accounts and celebrity.  And of course, this is not a new phenomenon.  Patti and I returned from Egypt last week where the staggering scope and scale and expense of the temples there provide monumental evidence that symbiotic relationships between religious leaders and religious followers have lasted thousands of years.

Apart from the billionaires who believe that a re-elected Donald Trump will make them even more ludicrously wealthy (which he actually will), I now realize that the tens of millions of ordinary folks who will vote for him cast that ballot as an expression of their own personal priest wish.  They harbor a lamentable yearning that a self-proclaimed savior will somehow exercise some magical power—a power Trump incessantly proclaims—that will make everything okay in their lives.

The consequence of this unholy marriage is heartbreaking.  They have agreed to trade their own God-given birthright for a mess of rotting pottage offered by a fraudulent imposter of a high priest. 

I used to think that anyone’s voting for Trump was incomprehensible.  Now I do comprehend it. 

What has become newly incomprehensible is the full scope and depth of the tragedy that will befall them and everyone else if they get their wish.