[1 Priest 1 Nun Video Original Priest
Ted Brathwaite
Edit: Probably an unintended feature of the new thrall rescue system introduced on Siptah. either the new priest was added to the possible rescue list on accident, or the mechanics to pick up rescued workstation thralls was not implemented. I suspect the former (@Community )
For the video, I did remove one mod that i thought might have interfered with the radial menu (immersive armor), but that did not reveal any disrupted or hidden commands to allow placing or picking up rescued thralls.
Life is not meant to be a fumbling, lazy, passive experience; it is made and crafted to be an involved experience, to be lived with intentionality. Our role as Christians is not just to get saved and wait to die. No, God calls us to intentional living. Alas, the Bible teaches by both positive and negative example, and in the pages of the book of 1 Samuel, we meet Eli, a priest and father, who is passive, indulgent, somewhat lazy, and rather content with the status quo.
Elkanah would go up year after year from his city to worship and sacrifice to the Lord at Shiloh. This reveals that Elkanah was a devoted Jew, not simply worshipping in his local shrine up in the hill country of Ephraim, but coming down to the main hub of Shiloh to worship and sacrifice every year.
After they had eaten and drunk in Shiloh, Hannah rose. Now Eli the priest was sitting on the seat beside the doorpost of the temple of the LORD. She [Hannah] was deeply distressed and prayed to the LORD and wept bitterly. And she vowed a vow and said, O LORD of hosts, if you will indeed look on the affliction of your servant and remember me and not forget your servant, but will give to your servant a son, then I will give him to the LORD all the days of his life, and no razor shall touch his head. (v.9)
Hannah, deeply bruised and yet pious, prayed out to God in her heart about something personally devastating, so much so that she declared that if God would bless her with a child, she would give that child back to the Lord. This is the type of devotion and love for God that is incredible to witness, but here Eli bumbles into the picture:
God wants more for us than lives as the Doofus Dad, Doofus Mom, Doofus Husband, Doofus Wife, Doofus Child, or Doofus Single. He calls us to lives of faith, and faithfulness. May he build those in us, and us in them.
J.T. Tarter is the site pastor of Capital Pres Reston, part of the Capital Pres Family of churches in Northern Virginia. He is a graduate of Reformed Theological Seminary, and previously worked in Michigan, serving in the revitalization of a 112-year-old church in metro Detroit, working with college, youth, and worship ministries. J.T. also served in the Army National Guard for six years. He and his wife, Sarah, are kept on their toes by their four children.
The first aim in seeking the priesthood, then, is to stay in the presence of Christ. The vocation makes sense only to the extent that we remain perpetually relative to him, his mystery, his truth, his Church. Christ gives priests a certain interior stability over time. To live in him is to become strong, not unstable. But the stability is dynamic: It only works if the minister remains spiritually poor and docile to Jesus, acting in him and for him. That is something deeper than a checklist of responsibilities or a sincere moral attitude. It is a habit of being that comes from the Holy Ghost. So it is good to start with this realism.
Seminary formation will give you the time to study the basic truths of the faith and to practice communicating them in a sufficiently clear way. The basic virtues you need to work on at this early stage are studiousness and courage. You need to form the habit of daily study of the faith and develop the courage to speak clearly about the faith to others with prudence and love, not stridency or defensiveness. This matters because the crisis in the priesthood today is above all a crisis of faith, and faith (as Aquinas rightly notes) is a supernatural grace given primarily to the intellect, not the heart. It consists in right judgment about the truth of Christianity, and how that truth should inform our lives. A Church and a priesthood without intellectual judgment regarding Christ risks devolving into a Church without faith . . . but also a Church without love, since love is guided and informed from within by an orientation toward truth. The bottom line is that you need to cultivate progressively a true Christian intellectual life wherein you learn to see reality in the light of Christ. This is what will allow you to evangelize, and to steady others in the storm.
A third idea: A key challenge is to allow the grace of God to inform all the root desires of your heart. The priesthood is about having your hearts reoriented by divine love. This is a lifelong process. A priest is first and foremost a heart seeking God, which means he is also a person who is constantly surrendering to God, a sinner always being redeemed by the Cross, and exalted by the Cross. Nietzsche says that the priest is only dangerous if he really loves, by which he means that the delusion of Christianity only takes root if the person is a zealous fanatic. Mystically speaking, Nietzsche is right. The love of God has to guide us if we want to be of any real use to other people. The Church is not an office of sacral bureaucrats. St. Bernard of Clairvaux spoke about the Cistercian monk as a wild caged lion, contained in his monastic cell but incessantly roaring to God. The priest is meant to be a troubadour, not a manager. When a person truly loves God, it is contagious.
Beware the pitfalls of clerical culture: The acquisition of material comforts are not surrogates meant to make up for celibacy, as if expertise in restaurants and international travel are legitimate compensations for life without a family. Try to be the kind of seminarian who will wear work gloves and wash dishes, not one seeking to be served or esteemed. Priests spend time with the disheartened and the lonely, not just the well-functioning or successful (though the latter matter to God as well). Also, be aware of your own emotional life. If you are preparing for the priesthood you need to cultivate healthy friendships. Every seminarian and priest needs friends he can confide in, equals who are typically colleagues, and perhaps at times also married couples who are peers or elders. Our relationships should be characterized by appropriate boundaries, and should of course be entirely chaste (emotionally as well as physically), but not overly formal or robotic. Be earnest and never cede your capacity to say what you think out loud (in an appropriate way).
That being said, if a man is preparing for the priesthood and still wants to have emotionally intense friendships with young women, he is fooling himself. Grace does not destroy nature. If a person has a vocation, he can still experience natural attraction to women, and this is one of the central places that boundaries and asceticism matter in the years a person is preparing for ordination, and afterward as well.
The worldly mentality suspects celibacy of being a matter of repression and inhumane sacrifice of sexual pleasure. But when it is lived rightly, there is a beauty to the priesthood as a human and distinctly masculine mode of self-offering to God. Authentic priestly celibacy presents us with a form of masculinity that is spiritual and elevated. It helps other men be better husbands who are self-sacrificing, and helps women transcend some of the neuralgic complexities of power, resentment, and seduction. In fact, it manifests something profound that can exist between men and women only in Christ: true spiritual friendship.
In one sense, it is indeed something worth worrying about. We must have a clear conviction about the need for human justice and ecclesial integrity at both the national and international levels. If you are in seminary or the diocesan or religious priesthood and you encounter individuals with problems in this domain, you have to be forthright and help bring things to light. The credibility of the Church will not be fully restored until all priests and bishops are subject to a coherent and reasonable set of disciplines, with ascetical norms and a consistent practice. This is happening little by little, despite the real setbacks we see. Outrage has its uses, but so does optimism.
In another sense, as an individual seeking God, you should not worry too much about this. You have an obligation as a Christian to find joy in God above and beyond all the pathetic defects and failures of human beings in the Church. The whole point of ex opere operato is that the celebration of the sacraments renders Christ present to the Church despite all the defects of men. The whole point of the charism of dogmatic infallibility in the Church is that the apostolic doctrine remains clearly identifiable and inerrant even when some of the personnel of the Church fail to live by that doctrine or even believe in it.
The Catholic moral tradition is about happiness, holy asceticism, joy, self-offering, humility, and deliverance. It points us toward the sublime, and promises us the intensity of divine love. If you pursue the priesthood and your vocation is confirmed by the Church, you will eventually stand at the nexus of this mystery, yourself a mediator between God and men, bound forever by ordination to Christ and his cross. The spiritual life of Jesus passes from Golgotha through the priest to the world, in the sacraments and apostolic preaching. It is both strange and severe to stand in that nexus, near the light that is never extinguished, to let it slowly change you, and burn your heart, and that of others through you. But it is a joyful existence as well. I encourage you to surrender to it.
Finally, my dark old soul has been soothed with more honest and gritty words in one of my favourite TV shows, Fleabag. Andrew Scott who plays the priest so very well, getting many of us all flustered as the storyline unravelled, displayed a mic drop speech that went like this;
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