Joan Chittister - Following the Path

Copyright 2012 by Joan D. Chittister

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Image, an imprint of the
Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York.

IMAGE is a registered trademark, and the I colophon is a
trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
upon request.

eISBN: 978-0-307-95399-5

Jacket design by Nupoor Gordon
Jacket photograph: William Huber/Getty Images
Author photograph: Ed Bernik

v3.1

I knew years before it finally happened what I really wanted to do in life. In the meantime, I did lots of other things, all good but never quite right, never quite satisfactory. Most people know that feeling, Im sure. Most of us struggle for years to find our place in life. The question is, why is it such a difficult task to finally realize what were meant to do and, if were lucky, eventually discover the way to do it? This book looks at the kind of things that hold us back from becoming who we are and yet, at the same time, prod us unerringly toward it.

It unmasks the impact of other peoples attitudes and values on our own. It considers the effect of both personal and public views on the choices we make in life, the works to which we give ourselves, the paths we pursue from one stage of development to another. It faces the fact that few life decisions are really made alone. In fact, they are often a by-product or a gift of the environment in which they emerge.

It is these things, as well as our own appetite for the future stirring within us, that influence who we are and what we become and why we can do what we do.

I know, for instance, that I might not be writing these lines right now if it had not been for a high school English teacher who figured me out long before I had even begun to figure myself out.

The great truth is that it is the people around us and what they think and see and believe about us that also bring us to the point where we can see and believe those things of ourselves. With their help we finally discover the connection between finding a job and making a life.

For many, the personal decisions that shape the way we live our lives come, far too often, as a result of what significant others in our lives think we should do. Parents, friends, and institutions expend a great deal of effort in the attempt to recruit our lives on behalf of their interests.

All I ever really wanted to do in life was to write. I wanted to think things out and then put those thoughts on paper. Like all the eminent writers whose works I had studied, I wanted to help the great conversations of life go on stirring the human soul to even deeper insights into human possibility.

What I didnt know was how to go about it. There simply was no niche, no professional outlet for a woman writer. There was also no place to simply sit down in the midst of life and do it.

So, I did small things on the side. I wrote small pieces after my real work was done. I managed a kind of professional contribution here and there. But, given the other demands of every day, nothing substantial.

Until.

Until two couples from two different parts of the world simply came out of nowhere in my life and offered the place, the natural environment, the time for reflection, and the concentration it takes to risk writing an English sentence for all the world to read.

Bill and Elizabeth Vorsheck and Gail and Sean Freyne have made a writers life possible for me for over twenty years. I never solicited such a gift from either of them; they each simply offered it out of the generosity of their hearts and their own personal insights. The rest, as they say, is now commonplace, now real.

For that reason, I am doing more than simply inscribing a line of dedication in this book, Following the Path, to them. Their gift has, in fact, taken me far beyond the level of personal gratitude. Thanks to what I see in the importance of what they have done for me personally, I offer these comments as a clue to the significance of supporting others in their own search for passion, purpose, and joy.

What these families have done the world called patronage in centuries past. Thanks to patrons, to people who supported the work of others, art flourished, architecture bloomed, musical forms thrived, science prospered, and writing became the staple of civilization.

The conclusion is clear: the assistance we offer others as they attempt to find and follow the path that takes them to the best of themselves is key to the great adventure of life, our own perhaps, as well as theirs.

For these bearers of belief in my own life, for Bill and Betsy, for Gail and Sean, I am immensely grateful, immensely indebted.

And I am beholden for this particular work, in different ways, to others as well:

Without thinkers, both young and old, who also took their roles in the production of this work equally seriouslyby prodding it into better shape, stretching it beyond its first self, assessing its insightswhatever finish, polish, and level of ideas that mark this final presentation might never have come to pass.

They are Kelly Adamson, Michele Canning, Kathy Felong, Gail Freyne, Christine Lundt, Rev. James Piszker, Sara Pitzer, Sisters Carolyn Gorny-Kopkowski, Mary Ellen Plumb, Marlene Bertke, Susan Doubet, Anne McCarthy, and Mary Lou Kownacki.

I am aware, too, of a real appreciation for my editors, John Burke and Gary Jansen, who were the fountainhead of this idea. Because of their willingness to be part of the good conversations on this topic, so many important ideas were spun.

Finally, I know that without my staff, who each bring the best editing, thinking, dreaming, and challenging ideas they have to every page of every manuscript, without these people and the kind of dedication they give to this work, there would be no books at all.

I am especially aware of my dependence on S. Maureen Tobin, who makes it all happen around me; to Sisters Susan Doubet and Marlene Bertke, who check every word and put it all together, time after time after time; to S. Anne McCarthy, who reads with a critics eye and a scholars heart; and to S. Mary Lou Kownacki, whose conversations on the theme and whose readings of the work are invaluable to the both the poetry and the profundity of the final draft.

All these careful appraisers of its message are an integral part of this writing as surely as if it were their own.

Life is, indeed, a social experiment. What we do for one another we do together. My hope is that those who bring their own hearts and minds and lives to this finished work now will also come to the fullness of themselves so that the effects of that on our society will be infinitely good. For all our sakes.

In Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice,

By the Grand Canal, within

Sound of San Marcos clock tower

Lay Robert Browning, vigorously dying.

Someone brought him Asolando to hold,

His new book; and for a moment he

Riffled the pages; then he said

I have given my life to that,

And tossed it down lightly on the bed.

It wasnt any kind of special moment when it happened. It wasnt my birthday, for instance, or an anniversary of anything. It wasnt even a family reunion or a great community event. I was just sitting somewhere, gazing into space, doing nothing whatsoever of significance or importance or even of any particular kind of enjoyment. I was just sitting, on an ordinary day in the midst of the ordinary things of life, waiting for a friend to arrive. And then it happened. The gentlest sense of wholeness and down-deep satisfaction came over me that I have ever known. It enfolded me like warm mist and calmed me to the core. Every ounce of taut energy so common to the demands of daily life in a technological society had been drained, it seemed. Only the feeling of being totally, quietly, completely alive remained. Then I realized what it was: I was happy. Happy. Thats all. Just happy.