As a priest, I am an intellectual forever seeking to relate intelligently, and so far as possible also intelligibly, to the very deepest concerns of a largely non-intellectual community. Or let us put it in more positive fashion: what term is there, untained, by condescension, for those who are not intellectuals? Although it is cumberson, let us perhaps say: 'the sal of the earth' - this at least has the merit of being biblical (Matthew 5:13). It is my responsibility to think not only on my own behalf - and not only on behalf of those to whom I am united by a shared education - but rather, in the most rooted and genuinely responsive way, as a representative of the whole prayer community to which I belong; and therefore in the most open, soul-searching communion with the salt of the earth. I am meant to help the members of that community, in the most all-inclusive fashion, poetically articulate their very deepest hopes, fears, regrets and resolutions for the future, in teh face of the highest truth we know, corporately reverenced as sacred. And so, in principle, my job is to be a solidarity builder, helping draw intellectuals and others, the salt of the earth, together into a real communion. That is to say: a communion bound together on the basis of an infinite aspiration to moral seriousness; an infinite demand for true self-questioning thoughtfulness, first of all in the sense of kindness; a maximally attentive liturgical appropriation of the corporate past.
This is no small task, but certainly worthwhile! I'd love to become more adept at the sort of "poetic articulation" Shanks describes, not least because I'd be able then to demonstrate that what I'm doing in attending grad school is actually important--not just to me, but to the church as well.
