Joan Chittister
By Roland Ashby
The times are such that they demand that each of us find our inner prophet, says one of the great prophets of our age, Benedictine nun Joan Chittister. In her recent book, The Time is Now – A Call to Uncommon Courage, she quotes the late Jesuit priest and prophet Daniel Berrigan, who spoke out against the Vietnam War: “The prophet is one who speaks the truth to a culture of lies.”
The prophet, she writes in The Time is Now, is the person who says no to everything that is not of God.
No to the abuse of women.
No to the rejection of the stranger.
No to crimes against immigrants.
No to the rape of the trees.
No to the pollution of the skies.
No to the poisoning of the oceans.
No to the despicable destruction of humankind for the sake of more wealth, more power, more control for a few.
No to death.
But Sr Joan adds that while saying no, the prophet also says yes:
Yes to equal rights for all.
Yes to alleviating suffering.
Yes to embracing the different.
Yes to who God made you.
Yes to life.
Prophetic spirituality, she explains, “is the spirituality of awareness, of choice, of risk, of transformation. It is about the embrace of life, the pursuit of wholeness, the acceptance of others, the call to co-creation.”
She adds: “It is a way of living with our eyes wide open and our hearts full of fervour for all of life. It is a spiritual legacy that embodies the commitment of Jesus the Prophet ... It is a call to live not only in praise of God but in union with God’s will for the world. In short, prophetic spirituality is about living our faith on the streets of the world, rather than just talking about it.”
The world, she warns, has gone “badly askew”. “It is a world scarred with violence, institutionalised fraud, rapacious human degradation, political suppression, economic slavery, and rampant narcissism. It is a world in wait. It waits for some wise and wild voices to lead us back to spiritual sanity ...”
Voices like Mother Maria Skobtsova, an Eastern Orthodox monastic, who, Sr Joan says, “lives at the core of the prophetic mindset”. “[Mother Maria] wrote, ‘I am your message, God. Throw me like a blazing torch into the night, that all may see and understand.’ There is very little else to say about the real prophet, the truly prophetic action, than this. It is this Word that rings in every soul. It is the call to be a truth-teller.”
While Sr Joan says prophetic spirituality is an active spirituality, she also acknowledges that for her it is grounded in contemplative Benedictine spirituality. In an interview with me in February 2010* she told me that Benedictine spirituality has given her the strong conviction that “We need to put on the mind of God in order to bring the goodness of God to the evil around us.
“The whole notion of putting on the mind of God, seeing the world as God sees the world, and seeing evil and injustice as your responsibility to do something about, is the essence of, and the reason for, contemplation in the Benedictine understanding.
“It’s a spirituality that comes from being steeped in the psalms seven times a day, and being immersed in the Scriptures through Lectio Divina – the process of squeezing out of every word, phrase and scene of Scripture its meaning for you at the present time.”
She told me that she perceives the lack of equality for women – inside and outside the Church – as one of the injustices for which she must take responsibility to do something about. “As long as you leave women out of the social equation then you have a society that sees with one eye, hears with one ear, and thinks with one half of the human mind, and it shows.
“I’m passionate about it because I’m passionate about the future of the human race and we cannot make many more corporate mistakes on this planet and maintain it. The whole human community has to be brought to the table.”
*The Time is Now – A Call to Uncommon Courage is published by Convergent Books.
*You can see the full interview with Sr Joan in Roland’s book ‘A Faith to Live By – Conversations about faith with 25 of the world’s leading spiritual teachers’. See: https://www.amazon.com.au/faith-live-Conversations-twenty-five-spiritual/dp/1925208117