Sister Joan Chittister, OSB2013-05-19T09:38:32-04:00Sister Joan Chittister, OSBhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=sister-joan-chittister-osbCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Sister Joan Chittister, OSBGood old fashioned elbow grease.Pope Benedict XVI's Most Powerful Gift to the Churchtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.26954432013-02-15T12:09:47-05:002013-04-17T05:12:01-04:00Sister Joan Chittister, OSBhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sister-joan-chittister-osb/
The Church whose identity has been forever Western and European is less Western every day and barely European thanks to its declining numbers everywhere. A whole new kind of religious pluralism is everywhere now. Religious sensibilities are no longer regional, which means that a new sense of conscious formation must be seen as distinct from either local culture or politics and cannot be privileged by either.
Issues of collegiality are simmering everywhere, the voice of the laity is clear, the integrity of the church itself is suspect. Its total disregard for the contribution of women to it, either as an institution or as a spiritual system, has rent the cloth right down the middle. It is a man's church -- organizationally, theologically and spiritually. But at the same time, secular society rather than the church has taken the lead in promoting the equality and role of women and a lay church which recognizes the spiritual role of women is growing up outside of it.
The attitude of the church toward gays has done as much to distance their families from the church as it has the LGBT community itself. Most obvious of all, the wound to the church as a result of the lingering effects of the sex abuse scandal is deep and costly, in more ways than one.
These are not business-as-usual organizational questions in a changing world. These are issues that touch the very core of what it means to be human, to be holy, to be Christian, to be church. They are not going to go to disappear when this pontificate disappears. They have not been addressed by this pontificate in any way that gives hope for their resolution. But they have been exposed.
The fact that Benedict XVI has very humbly admitted the immensity of the present moment for the Church and decided to step out of it in favor of someone whose energies are fresher and, hopefully, more in touch with the pastoral problems of this transition from one era to another is, perhaps, the most powerful gift of this papacy. Old laws will not save us from this time. Cosmetic changes in the church will not renew it.
As Pope Benedict clearly knows, this will take new energy, deep insight and the willingness to rethink the face of the faith from the bottom up in a world now doing experiments on Mars, grappling with a theology of evolutionary spirituality, coming face to face with all the religions of the world in every city on the planet -- and the implications of that for politics and society, as well as religion -- and breaking down barriers between "Jew and Greek, slave and free, man and woman" everywhere. It will be a contest now between attitudes and new vision. This pope is making way for that new vision. At this time in history, when the world is changing by the day, it is hard to imagine a greater contribution to the church.]]>Prayer for Leadershiptag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.20775072012-11-05T13:05:08-05:002013-01-05T05:12:01-05:00Sister Joan Chittister, OSBhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sister-joan-chittister-osb/
leaders whose hearts are large enough
to match the breadth of our own souls
and give us souls strong enough
to follow leaders of vision and wisdom.
In seeking a leader, let us seek
more than development for ourselves--
though development we hope for--
more than security for our own land--
though security we need--
more than satisfaction for our wants--
though many things we desire.
Give us the hearts to choose the leader
who will work with other leaders
to bring safety
to the whole world.
Give us leaders
who lead this nation to virtue
without seeking to impose our kind of virtue
on the virtue of others.
Give us a government
that provides for the advancement
of this country
without taking resources from others
to achieve it.
Give us insight enough ourselves
to choose as leaders those who can tell
strength from power,
growth from greed,
leadership from dominance,
and real greatness from the trappings of grandiosity.
We trust you, Great God,
to open our hearts to learn from those
to whom you speak in different tongues
and to respect the life and words
of those to whom you entrusted
the good of other parts of this globe.
We beg you, Great God,
give us the vision as a people
to know where global leadership truly lies,
to pursue it diligently,
to require it to protect human rights
for everyone everywhere.
We ask these things, Great God,
with minds open to your word
and hearts that trust in your eternal care.
Amen.]]>Suicidal Silence: What the 'Debaters' Did Not Saytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.19436592012-10-18T17:08:55-04:002012-12-18T05:12:02-05:00Sister Joan Chittister, OSBhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sister-joan-chittister-osb/
On the missing "climate": Only a scathing remark from one candidate about investments in renewable energy being far too large, and from the other, a commitment to more U.S. coal, more U.S. oil, more U.S. unnatural (fracking) gas, more U.S. nukes and, oh yes, more U.S. solar and wind.
And even those remarks did not mention "climate change" or "global warming," let alone "climate catastrophe" and "global scorching."
"Energy independence" has been the shibboleth of both, as if the Earth or the Sacred Breathing-Spirit of the world cares which country's most potent gases decree death for thousands of species and misery for the rest. (We're not yet sure whether the human race is doomed to death or misery.) So long as the Tombstone for Humanity says proudly, "Made in USA," who cares that it is heating the planet beyond livability?
Already we see, taste, feel: Unprecedented droughts and spontaneous fires in Texas. Massive droughts in U.S. corn country and in Russian wheatlands, pushing up the cost of the simplest foods beyond what the poor can afford. Drought-driven famine in Africa. Unheard-of floods in Pakistan and Vermont. A full-page article in the New York Times on the unbearable costs of preventing unbearable damage to the subway and other underground systems as the waters rise. ("New York Is Lagging as Seas and Risks Rise, Critics Warn," Sept. 10)
Is this all utterly new? Only in scale, for now the whole planet is endangered. Indeed, some of our ancient wisdom understands and warns us. The stories encoded in the Bible of greed and self-indulgence leading to disaster are seeds of wisdom, growing from real-life experience, that generations have recognized as mythic truth.
The very first biblical story of human history points toward our own lives: In Eden, God, speaking for Reality, points toward extraordinary abundance in the planetary Garden. "Eat of it in joy -- but show a little self-restraint. Just a little! -- Of one tree, don't eat." But they refuse to restrain themselves, and the abundance vanishes. "The earth will give only thorns and thistles, and to eat you will have to toil every day of your lives with the sweat pouring down your faces."
This is the story of the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, of Iowa in 2012. No self-restraint from the corporations that penetrate the sea and scorch the air. So what had been the glorious outpouring of abundance takes on the bitter taste of waters fouled, fish dying, corn plants withering in the cracked and baking earth.
Is it surprising that candidates for president will not face these facts? Again, the Bible is a prescient warning: Pharaoh oppresses human beings. When he refuses to ease their burdens, his arrogance oppresses earth as well. He brings on the Plagues: undrinkable water, mad cow disease, swarms of frogs and locusts, a climate crisis of hailstorms never known before.
Today, the Pharaohs are Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Banking and the powerful politicians who support them or are silent when their Plagues bestride the narrowed earth like a colossus run amok.
And that wisdom from our traditions suggests why the poor are also never mentioned by our presidential candidates. For there is a deep relationship between the behavior of Pharaohs toward the poor and their behavior toward the Earth. Subjugate one, dominate the other. The mode is the same.
Today the Pharaohs are the drug lords of fossil fuel and the overseers of degrading disemployment:
Profiting from the addictions they have created in the disempowered folk who smoke their comfortable and suicidal products, oil and coal.
Profiting from using computers to abolish jobs, rather than increasing workers' free time for families, neighbors and the Spirit.
Profiting by refusing succor for those expelled from their homes by foreclosures, after being tricked into mortgages they can't afford.
Profiting from the multitude of private prisons set up for the jobless who distract their hopeless hearts with marijuana, alcohol, heroin and guns.
The climatologists and the economic statisticians have given us the facts: Many more poor. Many fewer species. The moral decisions remain. Saving the web of life within human societies and among all life-forms is a spiritual, religious, moral, ethical, political question. It requires a profound transformation of our culture as well as our politics. Politicians will not address the danger unless the people demand it. For that to happen, churches, synagogues, mosques should be the first to lift up the ancient wisdom and the modern truths.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director of the Shalom Center, the author of "Down-to-Earth Judaism" and other books on public policy and religious practice and a member of the steering committee of Interfaith Moral Action on climate. Sister Joan Chittister is director of Benetvision and former president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Both are members of the U.S. National Council of Elders.]]>Vatican II, 50 Years Latertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18336872012-09-09T12:28:52-04:002012-11-09T05:12:01-05:00Sister Joan Chittister, OSBhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sister-joan-chittister-osb/
Of all the church, the people most mobilized for change were women religious. Mandated to hold renewal chapters and write renewal constitutions, groups retrained their entire memberships in the theology of Vatican II in anticipation of what would of necessity be a community project. Change was impossible without the support of the entire group. Groups suspended their Vatican I constitutions and instituted experimentation in every area of religious life.
It was an exciting time. It was also a dangerous time, a time of great personal tension and deep spiritual struggle.
The truth is that religious life had been formed in the spirituality of the virgins and martyrs, of sacrifice and perseverance -- virtues men had traditionally required of women -- when what Vatican II called for was the spirituality of priests and prophets, of community-building and witness. It was, then, on the deepening, the broadening, of both personal development and spirituality that the transition to Vatican II religious life really depended. To bring the church into the modern world, it would take women committed to risk and with courage for the unknown. But prophecy and risk are not the hallmarks of large groups. It was not the large groups who started religious life, and it is not large groups that will renew it now. Religious life must travel light into the future, burdened by nothing of its successes of the past, held down by none of its past goals but fresh in direction, vital in its meanings for the people of today.
A movement that loses its creative edge loses its vision and its reason for existence. A movement that is only radical can lose both its popular base and its stabilizing foundation. The continuing task of Vatican II is to sharpen the edge of religious life again. What religious did for past generations, they must now do for the forgotten peoples of our own generation. A whole new global population must be carried beyond the limitations of their lives, become visible to those who see them not, be heard by those who are deaf to their tears.
Conformity is no longer the major religious virtue, togetherness masking as community, and the fear of change is no longer the agenda of religious life. Renewal of spirit, openness to new needs and depth, if not necessarily length, of personal commitment has become the new norm. "Why did you come here?" I asked a new applicant. "Because this is the only group of women I have been able to find that cares about exactly what I do -- community, the gospel of Jesus, and a commitment to peace and justice," she said simply. Interestingly enough, I couldn't help but think that her answer sounded to me exactly like what Vatican II wanted from religious, too: that they would examine their life from the perspective of the "charism of the founder, the needs of society, and the gifts of their members." But if that's the case, religious life is not only new again, it is also a long way from being over.
Excerpted from 'The Struggle between Confusion and Expectation: The Legacy of Vatican II' by Joan Chittister in 'Vatican II: 50 Personal Stories,' ed. William Madges and Michael J. Daley (Orbis). In this new book, 50 distinguished authors, including theologians, journalists, spiritual writers and pastoral leaders, offer their own assessment of the meaning of the Second Vatican Council and its historic documents, drawing in many cases on their personal experience as witnesses or participants. To order, click here. ]]>Following the Path, Finding Your Purposetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.15791312012-06-12T07:02:07-04:002012-08-12T05:12:06-04:00Sister Joan Chittister, OSBhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sister-joan-chittister-osb/The following is an excerpt from, "Following the Path: The Search for a Life of Passion, Purpose, and Joy."
What does it mean "to have a purpose?"
"It's not easy to know what you're supposed to be doing in life."
"Maybe not, but first you have to care enough to wonder."
"Happiness," Helen Keller wrote, "is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose." In a society bent on individualism, the insight bends the mind a bit. But think a minute. To realize what great stream of life flows in us, to discover who and what we are and then to give ourselves over to the energy and drive of it for the sake of the world at large has got to be the greatest personal insight in life. I knew, for instance, at the age of 14, that I lived to write, was meant to write and that life would never be whole for me without it. I also knew, feared, intuited that I had not the remotest notion of how to make that happen. I was female to begin with and it was perfectly obvious to me, given the fact that my high school library carried books by only three women authors, that women did not write. More than that, I was going to a monastery in a male church that may have canonized women but certainly did not look to them as authors.
It was a glorious and a painful revelation. What do we do with something like that? With the limitations that come built right into life. For women, of course. For minorities surely. For a working class dreamer with no membership at the Country Club, no connections from college to ease their way from one path to another through life? Then what? Is the dream of becoming myself only for those who have the status, the resources, the time to indulge themselves in the search?
Life has changed over the last 50 years, true. Things have certainly changed in this society. But, in fact, in many ways, life seems just as limiting.
It's not so easy anymore for anyone to take for granted that we will be able to find any position in life, let alone the great soul work we think we're called to do. At the same time, it's also more likely that we will assume that anything that comes along is what we're supposed to be doing in life just because we're desperate for a job. As if a job and what we're really supposed to be doing with our lives were the same thing.
Once the banks failed and the housing market collapsed and the hedge funds dried up and Wall Street and its creative bookkeeping systems were exposed, nothing any of us had become accustomed to taking for granted has been quite the same. College is more expensive to come by. Companies have been downsized. Venture capital has sunk. Grants and scholarships and benefits and student aid and social service programs have all shrunk some, if not disappeared.
We all think differently now, from one end of the economic spectrum to the other, from the CEO who once took profit for granted to the busboy who used to be able to take a job for granted. Boundlessness has vanished; limitation has set in.
We see the world differently. We see ourselves differently. The world as we knew it, with all its security, all its options, has simply disappeared. The world we had come to assume would be there forever has simply disappeared. And with it the jobs and houses and luxury vacations and never ending opportunities to get on the economic escalator to get even more of them. The loss of all those things, so suddenly, so globally, so definitively shook the foundations of the society, of course, and yet not all of it may be as bad in the long run as it feels in the present.
Five years ago, for instance, a generation raised on the myth of interminable possibility was being told by life coaches that to be valuable in this society they needed to be able to show a minimum of five different employment positions on their resumes by the time they were 40.
The purpose, of course, was to be able to show flexibility. But with the advent of permanent flexibility went the security of stability, the virtue of settling down somewhere or settling in to the long, slow process of building a new world rather than simply expecting to find it. The very notion of being in a thing for the long haul was so dull, "so yesterday."
That generation learned to move from one thing to another, simply waiting for the big opportunity to present itself -- as everyone knew that it surely would, of course.
Then, people knew, their purpose in life would be clear. Their passions satisfied.
Their happiness secured.
But the social by-product of such a worldview became very clear very soon. There was no reason in such a world to get too serious about anything too quickly. To think too hard or too much about what we were really called to, made for, in life was unnecessary. It was, of course, a dream job somewhere doing just what we wanted to do -- with advancement, with perquisites, with security. We'd find it, eventually. Or better yet, it would find us. It was, far too often, in fact, all about us. The Infinite Culture had trained us for that.
We became a society that learned to try things and move on.
That kind of freewheeling, open-ended, unlimited-opportunity approach to life was a far cry from the era before it.
Before the years of spiraling stock markets and apparently endless expansion, getting into high school depended on knowing in grade school what you wanted to be in life. You had three choices. You could take a general course, a business course or an academic course. But only an academic program qualified a person to seek a college degree. Which meant, of course, that it immediately limited your options in later life if, as a 14-year-old in grade school, you chose instead to take general or business courses in high school.
Life in a limited environment is more about making a living than changing the world. But not for all. In this social and economic climate, the professions became a new kind of call to social nobility. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, like clergypersons in the eras before them, had a lofty purpose that was educationally defined and clearly delineated from the rest of humanity whose basic function was to make a living, to raise a family, to get by.
Now again, in our own time, for the first time in years, many are lucky just to get a job and keep it. But, at the same time, it is a clarifying moment. It is more obvious than ever now that the noble purpose of life has got to be about more than simply getting the next available job. Now, it is clear, a person's purpose in life is greater than, requires more than, the ability to make money. It is also clear, then, that success in life is not limited to the successful.
We have to learn in an era such as this to weigh our gifts against our opportunities, our needs against our demands, our emotional dreams against our material expectations. Now we need, first, to find out who we are -- what are our talents and where do we find the sacred ecstasy of the soul. Then, second, we must find the work, the life, the activities that fit it. We can't drift anymore -- waiting to simply slide into the next best thing in life. Now we need to find out what we love in life and work at it until it teaches us everything we have to learn from it, until we can give it back to a world in need of it more honed, more meaningful than ever.
For some it is reading to children in the local library after work at night. For others it is delivering meals-on-wheels to the homebound elderly or used furniture to the needy. For many it is in joining watchdog groups in local communities to bring order to the streets and honesty to government. To more, it lies in volunteering in hospitals and schools and prisons and public service agencies; to supervising neighborhood playgrounds, to participating in local ecology and housing programs; to entertaining in homes for the aged and at ethnic food fairs. Whatever it is, it is about using our own gifts to gift our world so that all of us together, our part of the human community, can have a better, happier life. And these things are waiting to be done by all of us, at every point on the social spectrum, at every economic level.
One thing is finally clear: merely having a job that buys a house and puts a second car in the garage does not describe the limits of anyone's purpose in life.
Life can be pleasant and privileged and prestigious. But that is not enough. The truly happy life, the philosophers tell us, is about activity. Not just any activity. Not just activity that keeps us busy or has the appearance of importance. The truly happy life is about activity that gives a sense of purpose to life. It is, in other words, activity the intent of which is to do good -- to go beyond our own interests and claims-to the needs of the world around us.
If we ever want to be happy, then, we need to move beyond the level of simple material satisfaction to the development of the spiritual dimension of what it means to be human. We not only need to find out what we do best and do it to the utmost. We need to ask ourselves again why we were born. What is it that we have that the world needs and is waiting for us to provide?
That is the star we must follow to its end. Then we will not only hear the silent applause of all those who benefitted from our having lived but we will find the whole of ourselves now wholly developed, waiting for us, as well.
Happiness is not about money. It is about who we are and what we do with it for the sake of the rest of the world. We need to learn that giving ourselves to something worth doing is more important, more valuable, than giving ourselves only until something better, something more exciting, something more lucrative comes along.
We need to learn to lose ourselves in what we were born to be in order to become something more than simply all the trappings of self. Then we will have become completely human. Then we will have come to be about something more than the baubles of life which, without it, will soon begin to define us.
"The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it." --William James]]>A Prayer For The Times: Litany of Women for the Churchtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.15333442012-05-21T12:30:36-04:002012-07-21T05:12:12-04:00Sister Joan Chittister, OSBhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sister-joan-chittister-osb/
born of a woman in the midst of a world half women,
carried by women to mission fields around the globe, made known by women to all the children of the earth, give to the women of our time
the strength to persevere,
the courage to speak out,
the faith to believe in you beyond
all systems and institutions
so that your face on earth may be seen in all its beauty,
so that men and women become whole,
so that the church may be converted to your will
in everything and in all ways.
We call on the holy women
who went before us,
channels of Your Word
in testaments old and new,
to intercede for us
so that we might be given the grace
to become what they have been
for the honor and glory of God.
Saint Esther, who pleaded against power
for the liberation of the people, -Pray for us. Saint Judith, who routed the plans of men
and saved the community, Saint Deborah, laywoman and judge, who led
the people of God, Saint Elizabeth of Judea, who recognized the value
of another woman, Saint Mary Magdalene, minister of Jesus,
first evangelist of the Christ, Saint Scholastica, who taught her brother Benedict
to honor the spirit above the system, Saint Hildegard, who suffered interdict
for the doing of right, Saint Joan of Arc, who put no law above the law of God, Saint Clare of Assisi, who confronted the pope
with the image of woman as equal, Saint Julian of Norwich, who proclaimed for all of us
the motherhood of God, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who knew the call
to priesthood in herself, Saint Catherine of Siena, to whom the pope listened, Saint Teresa of Avila, who brought women's gifts
to the reform of the church, Saint Edith Stein, who brought fearlessness to faith, Saint Elizabeth Seton, who broke down boundaries
between lay women and religious
by wedding motherhood and religious life, Saint Dorothy Day, who led the church
to a new sense of justice,
* * * Mary, mother of Jesus,
who heard the call of God and answered, Mary, mother of Jesus,
who drew strength from the woman Elizabeth, Mary, mother of Jesus,
who underwent hardship bearing Christ, Mary, mother of Jesus, who ministered at Cana, Mary, mother of Jesus, inspired at Pentecost, Mary, mother of Jesus, who turned the Spirit of God
into the body and blood of Christ, pray for us. Amen.
Find more prayers at Monasteries Of The Heart ]]>We Have Risen With Himtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.14122462012-04-09T16:28:20-04:002012-06-09T05:12:01-04:00Sister Joan Chittister, OSBhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sister-joan-chittister-osb/Excerpted from "Journey Into Light: Lent 2012"
Today, at an empty tomb full of light, begins the gathering of the community, of a small and fragile assembly of believers left to their own devices, of disciples whose faith has been shaken by the dashing of the dream. They come, their hearts darkened by sorrow, and leave full of a light they do not understand but cannot ignore. Something has happened here. Something they didn't plan and could not foresee. But something that will change their lives, give it focus, fill it with a new kind of passion, give it a purpose that will never end.
The cross has given way to the tomb now. The sense of yesterday's shattering loss has given way to new hope in them all. Life has changed entirely. Overnight. What they sought has not ended. Not really. Instead it has simply been given to them to complete.
The crowds have swollen now--you and I are in it, too, in fact. With our families, our ancestors, our friends, our children. But the experience is the still the same: There's no doubt we're in awe. Obviously there has been an impact. Most of all, the confusion is extreme. Yes, I have been touched. Yes, I would like to change. Yes, I know I'm called to do something. I simply do not know what. Or how.
How, after all, do I follow the poor Jesus in a world where money is the goal? How do I follow the just Jesus in a society where women and minorities live by different rules and classism is on the rise? How do I follow the loving Jesus in a world fueled by nuclear weapons in a rich society where one whole class of people do not eat two meals a day?
It is a matter of taking the Light from the tomb and re-igniting it ourselves, wherever we are, however we can. It's about seeing where the darkness waits for the Light that is Jesus and taking it there. It's a matter of doing something more than agreeing that things must change and making some change in them ourselves, where we are, in our own lives and in the lives of others around us.
It's about leaving the tomb to participate in better world movements, to serve soup at a soup kitchen, to begin art projects for children, to provide shelter for battered women, to stand with others for economic justice, to get engaged in the process of co-creation ourselves so that others may rise from the tombs of their lives, too.
"Do this in remembrance of me," Jesus said at the Last Supper. This morning, in the shadow of an empty tomb, with the Resurrection behind him, he left the remembering, the blessing, the sharing of life for us to do.
We do not sing "Alleluia" today simply because Jesus rose from the dead but because, if we take Lent and Easter seriously, we have also risen with him, following his healing, blazing, shattering light to ignite it in his name where we are. Alleluia.]]>The Light of Lenttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13000072012-03-07T15:19:42-05:002012-05-07T05:12:02-04:00Sister Joan Chittister, OSBhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sister-joan-chittister-osb/Please join the HuffPost community in "A Lenten Journey" for reflections throughout Lent, and join our online Lenten community here.
Sometimes, it is only in darkness that we can really see clearly. I look up at the sky on an Irish mountainside and the night is alive with light -- piercing, penetrating, gleaming light. If I looked at the same sky from the middle of Dublin or London or New York, the false light around me would grey the sky to the point where the stars are not even visible, let alone brilliant, demanding, magnetic.
It's a principle of life, this notion that the blackness of the night gives a particular power to the smallest of stars thousands of light years away. It's also a principle of life that the effect is as riveting of the soul as it is of the eyes. When life gets dark, it gets our attention like little else can. When bank failures spread across the country, we all began to see greed as we had never noticed it before. When the earthquake tumbled Japan, we saw the danger of nuclear plants like we had never noticed them before.
In the face of injustice, moral collapse, religious corruption, and hypocrisy, there is something in the soul, some natural impulse, some deep-down spiritual reflex, that simply rises up, full of the flame of integrity, to respond to it.
You can see it happen to Jesus in the Temple. He has come up to Jerusalem for the High Holidays. He has come to the most sacred place in Judaism and found it soiled by those who were meant to be protecting it.
Those who did not have animals to offer in sacrifice there could buy them on the spot. But the prices were unjust. Gouging was the name of the game. The vendors were dishonest like any roadside operators standing outside any shrine anywhere. But these were even worse. They stood inside the sacred place itself and did their dirty business -- exchanging money at dishonest rates or selling overpriced turtle doves to a people who wanted to participate in the ritual but could not afford to purchase cattle or sheep. And they were doing it right under the roof of the Holy of Holies. Acting like servants of the Temple, they were defrauding people who were only trying to be observant Jews.
All the light in heaven exploded in the middle of the soul of Jesus and he rose up, flaming anger at the sight of the desecration. He was completely focused on such a living contradiction of the spirit of the God who had freed this people from slavery and were now enslaving others themselves. And all in the name of God. But Jesus didn't just decry the practice; he drove it out of the Temple he loved.
The light of truth in Jesus is a blinding one: It is not enough to regret evil, he shows us. We must do something, each of us, to denounce it, to deter it so that tomorrow's dawn may be a brighter one for us all.
If the question is, What's the light of Lent here? The answer is a simple one: The light of Lent is the beacon that enables us to see under the obvious, the systemic, the hypocritical in both state and church to the evil they mask from us. It is the path to integrity, to righteousness, to the Spirit of God.]]>Light and Darktag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12999942012-02-29T13:19:35-05:002012-04-30T05:12:01-04:00Sister Joan Chittister, OSBhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sister-joan-chittister-osb/Please join the HuffPost community in "A Lenten Journey" for reflections throughout Lent, and join our online Lenten community here.
Light and dark are the colors of life. No life is ever all of one or all of the other. On the contrary. Life is the interplay, the dialogue, the interpreter between the two.
But being able to read the languages of light and dark around us, knowing which we're seeing when, is a cultivated spiritual art. It is the difference between being spiritually mature and being a spiritual child, between being wholly alive and only partially alive.
It was the mystics, lost in the presence of God, who could say "alleluia" in the midst of great sufferings of the soul -- the sense of rejection that came with desolation or the public ridicule that came with official rejection of all kinds. It was the mystics who could see the light of God in the middle of periods others would have called dark.
It was a sense of Divine Light in all things that kept the Jewish convert Edith Stein strong in the face of death at the hands of the Nazis; and Joan of Arc unyielding to the churchmen who condemned her for following her conscience rather than being obedient to them; and Galileo faithful even in the midst of rejection by a church intent on smothering modern science in the name of faith; and Dorothy Day implacable in her pursuit of peace in a country that called her "communist" for doing it.
Spiritual leaders like these remember what so many of us far too often forget:
Christians are not people of the cross. Christians are people of the empty tomb, the ones who know that every step on the way to the Light is Light.
But somewhere along the way, as plague and war and greed overtook the world, Lent, we came to believe, was a kind of dark place, the wilderness of the soul. The place we go to see ourselves in all our limitations, all our failures, all the struggles that come with growing into the fullness of the self.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
Jesus goes into the wilderness to prepare for the launching of his public ministry, not to bewail his fate. With wild beasts as companions and angels to minister to him, we begin to see the desert, the dark place, the icon of all the challenging places in life, fill and overflow with light. Satan may be tempting Jesus to look in other directions for life, yes, but the Light that flows from this gospel to us is clear: Jesus is not going to go to the cheap and easy in life. Jesus is not going to curl up inside himself and simply let evil have its day. Instead, his message is radiant here: There is no other direction in life that can possibly make us whole than total dedication to the will of God for the world.
Will it cost us? Probably. Can we do otherwise and still live in the light that is flowing out of this desert? Absolutely not.
Jesus is about to spend his life on these things and the energy of that decision fairly crackles in him. No dark time this. Surely, as followers of Jesus, we need to do the same: to see the Light in him and follow it ourselves.]]>In Search of the Divine Femininetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10973432011-11-17T10:13:16-05:002012-01-17T05:12:01-05:00Sister Joan Chittister, OSBhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sister-joan-chittister-osb/
However much we mock the idea, the truth is, ironically, that every major spiritual tradition on earth carries within it, at its very center, in its ancient core, an awareness of the Divine Feminine. In Hinduism, Shakti -- the great mother, the feminine principle -- is seen as the sum total of all the life-giving energy of the universe. She is the source of all. In Buddhism, Tara is seen as the perfection of wisdom, and in Buddhism, wisdom is life's highest metaphysical principle! Tara is considered the light and the prime source of Buddhahood and so of all Buddhas to follow.
And in the Hebrew scriptures -- the ground of the entire Abrahamic family, Jewish, Christian and Muslim -- the spiritual foundation on which you and I stand -- the God to whom Moses says, "Who shall I say sent me?" answers not, "I am he who am;" not "I am she who am;" but, "I am who am." I am Being! I am the essence of all life, I am the spirit that breathes in everyone: the source that magnetizes every soul. I am the one in whose image all human beings, male and female, Genesis says clearly, are made. "I am" is, in other words, ungendered, unsexed, pure spirit, pure energy, pure life. And that assurance we have, note well, on God's own word: "I am who am."
Let there be no mistake about it: woman or man, man or woman -- the full image of God is in you: masculine and feminine, feminine and masculine godness. Hebrew scripture is clear, and the Christian and Islamic scriptures, as well. God is neither male nor female -- God is of the essence of both and both are of the essence of God.
Actually, lest we be fooled by our own patriarchal inclinations to make God in our own small, puny, partial male images, the Hebrew scriptures are full of the female attributes of God. In Isaiah (42:14) the Godhead, "cries out as a woman in labor." To the psalmist (131:1-2) God is a nursing woman on whose breast the psalmist leans "content as a child that has been weaned." In Hosea (11:3-4) God claims to be a cuddling mother who takes Israel in her arms. In Genesis (3:21) God is a seamstress who makes clothes out of skins for both Adam and Eve. And in Proverbs, God -- she, wisdom, Sophia, "raises her voice in the streets," "is there with God 'in the beginning,'" (8:22-31) "is the homemaker who welcomes the world to her table" (9: 5) shouting as she does, "Enter here! Eat my food, drink my wine." Clearly, after centuries of suppressing the female imagery and the feminine attributes given in scripture in order to establish the patriarchy of lords and kings and priests and popes and power brokers as the last word and only word of every failing institution in humankind-no wonder we are confused about who God is. But God is not! Scripture is clear: God does not have -- and clearly never has had -- an identity problem. Our images of God, then, must be inclusive because God is not mother, no, but God is not father either. God is neither male nor female. God is pure spirit, pure being, pure life -- both of them. Male and female, in us all.
From Joan Chittister's chapter "God our father; God our mother: in search of the Divine Feminine" in the recently released, "Women, Spirituality and Transformative Leadership: Where Grace Meets Power" (Sky Lights Paths Publishing).]]>The Mandala: Why Do Monks Destroy It?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9704792011-09-20T15:21:08-04:002011-11-20T05:12:02-05:00Sister Joan Chittister, OSBhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sister-joan-chittister-osb/Editor's Note: Buddhist monks from Tibet who spend their lives going from place to place, from occasion to occasion, making sand mandalas, sacred cosmograms, that originated in India over 2,500 years ago, are coming to Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania this week. A few years ago, after witnessing the mandala process, Joan Chittister wrote a reflection for the National Catholic Reporter. This is an edited version.
The creation of a mandala, the representation of the world in divine form, perfectly balanced, precisely designed, is meant to reconsecrate the earth and heal its inhabitants. But it is more than a picture. Sand painting is an intricate process. It requires millions of pieces of sand to make a mandala five by five feet square. It requires a team of monks working anywhere from days to weeks, depending on the size of the mandala, to create this floor plan of the sacred mansion that is life. It requires the interplay of vivid colors and ancient symbols.
The monks bend over the piece for hours on end, dropping one grain of sand after another into intricate symbolic patterns. The purpose is to call the community to meditation and awareness of something larger than their own small world.
But the process itself, as laborious, as precise, as artistic, as stunningly powerful as it is, is not really the message.
When the mandala is finally finished, however long it takes for the monks to deal in this divine geometry of the heavens, they pray over it -- and then they destroy it. They sweep it up, every last grain of sand and give handfuls of it away to those who participate in the closing ceremony as a final memory of sublime possibility. Then they throw the rest of the sand into the nearest living stream to be swept into the ocean to bless the whole world. And that's it. It's gone. In an instant, after all that artistry, all that work, it's over.
They destroy it. Why? Because the underlying message of the mandala ceremony is that nothing is permanent. Nothing. All things are in flux, it says, beautiful but ephemeral, moving but temporary, a plateau but not a summit. All things are called to balance and enlightenment and the fulfillment of the Divine image in them, yes, but in flux. Always in flux.
There is nothing in the meaning of the mandala that denies or undermines the Christian story or its message, of course. But there is something shockingly profound to hear it coming from a wisdom written on the other side of the world. It gives a new note to an ancient truth. It strengthens the ties of humanity a world away.
Most of all, perhaps, it makes us all think again about what we think we're going to make permanent. Like our own domination of the world. Our privileged place in the community of nations. Our sense of status. Our surety of specialness among all the peoples of the world. Our place of comfort and security in the face of all the poor on the planet.
This Buddhist missionary message is clear.
Nothing is permanent, neither their state in life -- nor ours. The fact is that the politics of permanence is a sham. It has never lasted, and it never will. We may be seeing the dawn of that reality right now in the stock market, in oil prices, in jobs, in cost of living, in the national infrastructure.
From where I stand, it looks to me as if these monastics from another world may have as much a message for us as we ever did for everyone else. Hopefully we'll be as able to hear their message now as the rest of the world did ours and learn from others as they clearly have from us. Heaven knows, by anyone's geometry and symbols, we have mighty need for the "wisdom and compassion" they're trying to preserve. ]]>Beyond 9/11 To A Broader View Of The Worldtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9420262011-09-07T17:33:46-04:002011-11-07T05:12:02-05:00Sister Joan Chittister, OSBhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sister-joan-chittister-osb/
I don't know what shocked me more: the audacity of someone using two of our own planes to set up a conflagration seen round the world. Or the irony of the indifference to the international implications of the situation by a man who was teaching the subject.
Later, I chalked up that incident as an icon of our continuing national 'indifference' to the rest of the world. That must, I thought, surely be one of the reasons we never saw an attack coming.
But now the problem had come home with a vengeance. Not from another country but at the hands of a small, mixed group of Muslims who had decided to split the world in two.
I had been working with Muslim Imams and scholars for years. These were good holy people whose world view we were only now discovering. But I also knew that "Muslim" meant little more than some dim specter of the Crusades to most Americans or, at best, their expulsion from Spain. Both of which were very Catholic things. Deep down, this would not be identified as a national issue. This could become a great deal more serious than that. This had all the signs of becoming a major religious problem in a pluralistic world.
My own Benedictine community moved immediately to reach out to Muslim families in the area, to accompany Muslim women shopping, for instance, to open the monastery doors to their own needs, to call and check and comfort and pray publicly for people who now feared for their own safety in even so mild a place as Erie, Pennsylvania.
The Global Peace Initiative of Women, of which I was co-chair, moved just as quickly to cement our Muslim relationships: to work with women from Iraq, Syria and Palestine; to engage the activists and contemplatives of all the communities in our interfaith network for peace and justice with renewed energy. We allowed neither time, nor space to harden the natural distance between us. We would not choose sides. We would continue simply to be a very public witness and single face of the equal love of the God of Differences for us all.
Those simple gestures spanned all our dialogues. Those kinds of things everywhere, I think, stopped our small worlds from tipping over and breaking apart. They brought love and reason to the danger of knee-jerk fanaticism.
But we still have a great deal to do.
First, oddly enough, egalitarian USA does not deal with differences easily. Having worn the medieval habit once characteristic of Catholic nuns, I remember the catcalls, the frowns, the exclusion and distancing that came with it outside the Catholic community. It will take ongoing effort to see that those differences are not allowed to separate Muslims from other Americans now.
Second, what we do not understand, we are likely to fear. We need as much understanding of Islam as we can get. We need more study of world religions in our schools and more respect for different religious creeds, customs and practices even in our churches where rejection of the other is too easily bred in the name of faith.
Third, we must begin to be as concerned about the agendas of the rest of the world as we are of our own. If we have learned anything in the debate about the national debt ceiling, it must surely be that we are all in this together. What affects them will also, eventually, affect us. Indifference can no longer be an American virtue.
As the story of the Tower of Babel teaches us, God intends that we learn from one another. Let us begin.
This post is part of a collection of interfaith reflections on 9/11 and the decade that followed. ]]>My Prayer for Pentecosttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8721302011-06-10T13:33:36-04:002011-08-10T05:12:01-04:00Sister Joan Chittister, OSBhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sister-joan-chittister-osb/ May the Gifts of the Holy Spirit
bring fire to the earth
so that the presence of God
may be seen
in a new light,
in new places,
in new ways.
May our own hearts
burst into flame
so that no obstacle,
no matter how great,
ever obstructs the message
of the God within each of us.
May we come to trust
the Word of God in our heart,
to speak it with courage,
to follow it faithfully
and to fan it to flame in others.
May the Jesus
who filled women
with his Holy Spirit
fill the world and the church
with new respect
for women's power and presence.
Give me, Great God,
a sense of the Breath of Spirit
within me as I...
(State the intention
in your own life at this time
for which you are praying.)
Amen.]]>Rule of Benedict for God Seekerstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8491952011-05-11T07:52:07-04:002011-07-11T05:12:01-04:00Sister Joan Chittister, OSBhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sister-joan-chittister-osb/"Your way of acting should be different from the world's way."
The search for God is a very intimate enterprise. It is at the core of every longing in the human heart. It is the search for ultimate love, for total belonging, for the meaningful life.
It is our attempt to live life and find it worthwhile, to come to see the presence of God under all the phantoms and shadows -- beyond all the illusions of life -- and find it enough.
But the search depends, at least in part, on the complex of energies within us that we bring to the challenges of this seeking. We do not all hear the same tones at the same volume, or see the same visions in the same colors, or seek the same goods of life in the same way.
The search for God depends, then, on choosing the spiritual path most suited to our own spiritual temper and character. For some seekers, it is in withdrawal from society or by immersion in nature that God is most present. For others, the face of God shows most clearly in the face of the poor, or is felt most keenly through the support of those with whom they share a common spiritual regimen.
For many, it is a bit of both, a balance of community, contemplation and commitment to the people of God. It is the search to belong to a group of fellow travelers who will hold us up when we fall, and urge us on to greater heights when we are afraid to strain for more.
These are the seekers who are looking for others who seek what they seek, who care about what they care about, and who set out with them to make life richer and the world better than they know they could ever do alone.
But whatever the nature of a seeker's lifestyle, the search for God depends, as well, on the spiritual maturity it takes to move from one level of spiritual insight to another -- rather than cling to the spiritual satisfaction that comes with earlier, less demanding, practices. The search for God depends on the desire to grow to full stature as a spiritual adult, to come to know the God who is as present in darkness as in light.
It depends on the willingness to let God lead us through the deserts of a lifetime, along routes we would not go, into the Promised Land of our own lives.
Most of all, the search for God depends on fidelity to the demands of the search itself. It is the constancy of commitment which we bring to the spiritual path that prepares us to recognize and receive the fullness of it.
There is, as a result, more than one way to go about the journey to God.
We may seek God alone, in the silence of our own hearts, where our attention is centered in a keen and conscious way on developing an ear for the leavening penetration in our lives by the mind and Word of God. This is an extremely private and individual spirituality that emphasizes personal prayer and contemplation of the presence of God in life.
But it is not the only way to God and, in fact, not the most common way.
Another kind of journey to God leads us to seek God with others in a covenantal common life, whereby the physical joining of our lives together we become a daily witness to create in the world a community of strangers bound together by the will of God.
In our time, in a society that is both mobile and connected at the same time, there is still another possible way to make the journey to God: in a Monastery of the Heart.
Here we choose to seek God in step with others, even though not always in common with others -- each of us on an apparently separate path and yet all of us in veritable community with one another on the way -- as lifelines, as mentors, as guides, as models, as brothers and sisters in whose loving company we choose to make our common journey to God.
The Rule of Benedict recognizes the major differences among seekers' paths and alerts us as well to the subtle distinctions among them, so that we can begin our own spiritual journey aware of the complex character of each separate lifestyle and prepared to bring our selves to the way best suited to the enterprise for us.
Going the road alone, for instance -- developing a solitary spiritual discipline -- is a rare but well-worn tradition of spiritual figures both known and unknown. Those who go this road to God, Benedict tells us, have come to a point in the spiritual life where, already well-formed in a proven and established monastic tradition, they move beyond the structures which maintain it in order to go deeply into the struggle with the self -- both physically and mentally -- that comes with solitude.
These seekers, Benedict says, "Have passed beyond the first fervor of monastic life ... They have built up their strength and go to the single combat of the desert. Self-reliant now, they are ready with God's help to grapple single-handed..."
Theirs is the path that strips away the common supports of life -- the companionship of a partner, the counsel of others, the strength of a community, the traditions of the group -- and throws them on the designs of the Spirit and deep, deep concentration on God alone.
These seekers feel the impulse of the God within. They give their lives to the God who beckons them inward, sure that the One who calls them to such a life will also guide them through it -- alone but not lonely.
The major concern with this lifestyle is the human tendency to turn in on ourselves and to forget our obligation to build up the entire human community. "Whose feet," St. Basil asks, "will the hermit wash?"
In its stead, Benedict says simply, are those who live immersed in a community, accountable to its standards, cemented in its values, and responsible for making the human community ever more human, always more of a community.
In whichever of the lifestyles we find ourselves -- the spiritually solitary of any stage of life, the intentional living groups of every size, the networks of similarly committed individuals whose community life is stable but not necessarily daily -- we are on tried and true pathways to God.
We are all seekers of the God who is here but invisible to the blind eye; who calls to us but is unheard by those who do not listen; who touches our lives wherever we are, but is unfelt by those whose hearts are closed to the presence of God -- who is everywhere, in everyone, at all times.
When we seek to wed all three lifestyles in our own time -- solitary, intentional and communal -- we seek to be in a Monastery of the Heart.
Then our Rule is this one. Our spiritual guide is the Word of God. Our formative community is with those of one heart with whom we join on this way in a Monastery of the Heart -- to find the God who emerges with inexorable fidelity in human form.
Excerpted from 'The Monastery of the Heart: An Invitation to a Meaningful Life.'
]]>Readings for Holy Weektag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8509792011-04-19T10:34:17-04:002011-06-19T05:12:01-04:00Sister Joan Chittister, OSBhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sister-joan-chittister-osb/Monday: Holy Week is the church's great celebration of life in all its dimensions: communion with others in the Spirit, the call to suffer if necessary for the sake of the gospel, the sometimes loneliness of total commitment and the glory of living in the Christ, whatever the cost. It is a week to recall your own cost of living the Christian life and drawing strength for the journey from the One who has lived it before us and now fills us with His own eternal life.
Tuesday: The starkness of the community chapel -- the large wooden cross, the vacancy of the planters, the loss of colors, the sense of barrenness that the loss of the familiar brings--are simply external reminders of the internal emptiness that develops when we barter the real richness of life for the trinkets of living.
Wednesday: During Holy Week, the community will say Tenebrae, the two days of prayer that revolve around the lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet. For the Jews, the lamentations are five poems that mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 586 B.C. For the Christian, the lamentations refer to the destruction of Christ. The important thing about the lamentations is that though they face squarely the problems of the present, they are alive with hope in the future. We all have lamentations in life, sorrow for things we've lost or the discovery of the emptiness of all life's seductions. The important thing now is to fill ourselves with hope.
Holy Thursday: Today we get the sign in the breaking of the bread that the spirit of Christ is with us always if we live in human community and are dedicated to the teachings of Christ. To celebrate the eucharistic life, the community will serve a special meal to the poor today. Then, the sisters will come together with friends and family tonight to celebrate in a special way what it really means in life to share bread with one another, to serve one another, to wash one another's feet, to be full of the spirit of Christ always, everywhere.
Good Friday: Today the community conducts a public praying of the Stations of the Cross for peace. We walk seven miles in silence, starting at St. Peter's Cathedral, the public symbol of the Church that teaches us to lay down our lives for the other. We will mark as stations places like the Federal Building, a symbol of the militarism of the country; the soup kitchen, a symbol of those made poor by the militarism of the country; a topless show bar, a symbol of the violence against women that machoism and militarism glorify. In all these places, life is empty of God's glory and Christ is crucified still.
Holy Saturday: Tonight at the Easter Vigil the community will light the Easter fire. We will be filled up finally with the story of salvation and the glory of what it means to have our once empty selves filled with all the goodness, all the purpose, all the vision, all the glory of life. We will know again that being monastic in mind, being single-minded about life, being given to one thing and one thing only -- the glory of God -- has all been worth it.
Easter Sunday: The Navajos wrote, "We felt like talking to the ground, we loved it so." Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "The earth laughs in flowers." Benedict of Nursia wrote, "Say alleluia always, no matter the time of day, no matter the season of life." The use of the Alleluia dates back to the earliest of liturgical formularies, both Jewish and Christian, as an endless chant of joy. In the Christian community it was an expression of praise and a foretaste of eternal gladness. "We are an Easter people," Augustine wrote, "and Alleluia is our cry." The monastic knows the truth of Easter. Life is all filled up. We don't need anything else now. And nothing else will suffice.