When Pope John XXIII talked about "the signs of the times" -- poverty, nuclearism, sexism -- I began to read these new signs with a new conscience and with a new sense of religious life in mind. Most of all, I began to read the scriptures through another lens. Who was this Jesus who "consorted with sinners" and cured on the Sabbath? Most of all, who was I who purported to be following him while police dogs snarled at black children and I made sure not to be late for prayer or leave my monastery after dark? What was "the prophetic dimension" of the Church supposed to be about if not the concerns of the prophets -- the widows, the orphans, the foreigners and the broken, vulnerable of every society?
We prayed the psalms five times a day for years, but I had failed to hear them. What I heard in those early years of religious life was the need to pray. I forgot to hear what I was praying. Then, one day I realized just how secular the psalmist was in comparison to the religious standards in which I had been raised: "You, O God, do see trouble and grief. ... You are the helper of the weak," the psalmist argues. No talk of fuzzy, warm religion here. This was life raw and hard. This was what God called to account (Psalm 10:14). This was sin.
When the Latin American bishops talked about a "fundamental option for the poor," I began to see the poor in our inner-city neighborhood for the first time. When Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. finally stood up in Birmingham, Ala., I stood up, too. I was ready now. Like the blind man of Mark's gospel, I could finally see. The old question had been answered. The sin to be repented, amended, eradicated was the great systemic sin against God's little ones. For that kind of sin, in my silence, I had become deeply guilty.
I had new questions then but they were far more energizing than the ones before them. I began to look more closely at what "living a good life" could possibly mean in a world that was so full of suffering, so full of greed.
I began to realize that "a good life" had something do with making life good for other people. Slowly, slowly I began to arrive at the oldest Catholic truth of them all: all of life is good and that sanctity does not consist in denying that. Sanctity consists in making life good for everyone whose life we touch.