And then, of course, if you take the assembled congregation as the primary icon of Christ, you have Christ offering himself to himself, which does rather make a nice icon of the Trinity in its relationship-within-unity way.

I was careful not to put an actual number on my list of sacraments... 2? 7? 43?

I chose to set aside icons because "being an icon" is not exactly a great job description in this context. Hopefully we are all icons after our 'created human in the image of God' fashion, whether in a context of friendship (go, Aelred!), mentorship, teaching, learning, feeding, etc.

Fr. Ernesto, I agree with you that my question ("allows") focusses only on one aspect of that often unmanageable dilemma of, as they say, right livelihood. I think it's a shame that our primary image of priesthood (rector of St. Somewhere) too often becomes normative. There are plenty of good (and unemployed by the church) priests out there as chaplains, counselors, etc. ... but those jobs are frequently devalued as the ecclesial equivalent of the corporate "mommy track."

Nonetheless, it's still a question worth asking because seminary does involve considerable costs of various sorts. It seems clear to me that our model of theological education may have to change dramatically, in light of the closing/consolidation/retrenching of a number of Episcopal seminaries in the U.S., and I'm not sure that evolution can occur without simultaneous changes in how we understand ordination (and making the corresponding changes in diocesan procedures). I can tell you from experience that many of my own adult students (I teach philosophy for artists, not to put too fine a point on it) deeply desire a forum in which they can explore their religious understandings... I'm sure some of them would love to be able to take a few classes in Beauty or Theological Aesthetics or Ethics. These students are churchgoers, but they aren't getting all of what they need spiritually from their Sundays. (Nor would I expect a priest to be wildly knowledgeable in every field, of course)

Perhaps the question is really about sacraments. You have opened up the image of sacraments beyond the usual short list to include art, companionship, etc., and I have to agree with that. The church, though, recognizes only its own liturgical cultic actions (sounds sort of pejorative, which I don't intend, but I'm trying to be precise) as sacramental windows to the divine (setting aside icons and saints for right now!). So if the church pushes its vision of the priesthood in such an imbalanced direction, we have to ask ourselves some equally reductive questions about participating in its institutional structures of ordination, I think.

Coming from Texas, the land of the original Sam Maverick, we were told that the point of his not branding his cattle was not that other people could grab 'em but that any unbranded calf he found he could claim as his. The truth of the matter seems to have been that he just wasn't that into cattle ranching, left his small herd, received in lieu of a cash payment for a debt, in the hands of an unmotivated or corrupt manager, and events played out predictably... neighbors poached a few, the manager probably sold some without authorization, and overall, the size of the herd stayed about the same for the ten years of its existence. So much for bucking the system.

I think the critical question here is whether ordination allows you (or anyone else) to do something that you could not do otherwise. Obviously there are straightforward answers to that issue if you have chosen to work strictly within a particular tradition and you feel a call to do something canonically reserved for ordained people. But even in fairly clericalized traditions (setting aside many monasteries as a kind of extreme case), there are many nontrivial callings that do not require some form of community-acknowledged initiation. In other discussions we've talked about the role of the community as well-- can that acknowledgment of calling occur "validly" outside of church institutionalized structures? You seem here to have laid that aside (temporarily)... in favor of another question-- can I align my economic life in some structural way with my sense of spiritual calling? Can I do it with only acceptable risk?

Can I quit my day job to be an artist? Or does part of my art depend upon acknowledging that there is no mortal "there" there totally outside of the necessities of the body?