Joan D. Chittister - Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir

J OAN D. CHITTISTER, OSB, HAS BEEN A LEADING VOICE IN contemporary spirituality and church and world issues for over twenty-five years. A widely-published author, columnist, and noted international lecturer, Sr. Joan is the author of over twenty-five books, is a regular columnist for the National Catholic Reporter and has published numerous articles on issues involving women in church and society, human rights, peace and justice, the Catholic Church, and contemporary religious life. Her most recent book, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, was named Best General Interest Book for 2003 from the Association of Theological Booksellers.

She is presently serving as co-chair of the Global Peace Initiative of Women Religious and Spiritual Leaders, a group that formed from the Fourth UN Conference of Women in Beijing to facilitate peace efforts between women, especially in the Middle East. She is also a founding member of the International Committee for the Peace Council, an interreligious group of leaders working for peace.

Sr. Joan is past president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the organization of leaders of Catholic religious women in the United States. She served as prioress of her own community, the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pennsylvania for twelve years.

Sister Joan is the executive director of Benetvision: a resource and research center for contemporary spirituality in Erie, Pennsylvania. Recipient of eleven honorary doctorates, she received her Ph.D. in communications theory from Penn State University.

O NCE UPON A TIME,THE STORY GOES, A SEEKER ASKED a monastic, What do you do in a monastery? And the old monastic said, Oh, we fall and we get up, and we fall and we get up, and we fall and we get up again. The story tells a poignant tale about the difference between faith and despair, between perfectionism and human development. Its a story about growth. Its an indicator of the sanctifying nature of mistakes and miscalculations. Its a signal of the misunderstandings that grow up in every generation about what life and spirituality are really all about.

This book traces both the falling and the getting up process that takes us all into the center of ourselves to find the reason and the strength to bother going on when we fail so often.

It is a discouraging process sometimes to need to begin over and over again to complete the process of spiritual growth, which we tend to believe should be linear when it is, in fact, circular to the core. Its also an embarrassing process in a world that likes to think of progress in degrees of advancement rather than in measures of depth.

It is, at the same time, an exhilarating process this coming to awareness of the life within and the God within that life. It is the discovery of the freedom that comes with beginning again, with finding new truth, new ways of being alive, new moral standards that are broader and deeper and more liberating than any amount of disciplines or rituals or negative asceticisms can ever be.

This is a book that examines the multiple threads that make up the lifelong warp and woof of the spiritual experience. It gives no single set of rules. It describes no mystical secrets. It guarantees no certain system of spiritual advancement. It simply looks at all the dimensions of life as we live it today and asks what, if anything, is holy-making about any of it.

It asks whether life as we know it has anything to do with life as ancient spiritual writers declared it to be good.

It is, in other words, an excursion into the questions and soul-searching of one person but it is not, if it is true, only one persons story. It is every persons story. Yours as well as mine. And it is not traveled alone, this path to purpose and perception. It happens in conjunction with all the experiences and truths of all the rest of all the people of my world.

To test that concept, I asked a number of peopleAnn Halloran, Anita Banas, John Perito, Gail Grossman Freyne, Daniel Gomaz, Virginia Swisher, Sandra DeGroot, Kathleen Stephens, Thomas Bezanson, Mary Ann Reese, Maureen Tobin, Mary Lou Kownacki, Marlene Bertke, Mary Miller, Anne McCarthy, Ellen Porter, and Linda Romeyto read the text with these concerns in mind: Do you recognize these questions? Do you own the answers? Do you honor the truth of them?

I am forever grateful to the honesty, the insights, and the outpouring of personal experiences prompted by my own. These readers gave breadth and depth to what would otherwise be simply the meanderings of one persons otherwise totally disconnected experience. That is no small hallmark or proof that we all share the same human condition and so we can all hope to come through the questions of life sound and sane and maybe even spiritual.

Im grateful, too, for Mary Lou Kownacki and Jeremy Langford, my editors, who recognized that I had pressed beyond a book on the history of spirituality to the ways of spirituality itself. Finally, I am grateful to the staff around meMaureen Tobin, Mary Grace Hanes, and Susan Doubetwho continue to make my writing possible and keep the rest of my life sound, sensible, and somewhat mentally healthy while I do.

This book ends nothing. My one hope is that it will begin in others the process that it reflects in me. All the uncertainty, all the confusion, all the waiting for life to clarify and the spirit to grow are more than worth it.

Finally, Im grateful to Theophane Seigel, OSB, long-ago mentor and model, who showed me that life was more about questions than it was about answers, more about seeking than simply about dying in the dry smugness of questionable certainties. She taught me to do what today demanded, knowing that to be truly mature, truly spiritual people, we had to be about the development of better insights for tomorrow.

Im being prodded into a new piece of soul work. What would it mean to live, welcoming all?

Sue Monk Kidd

Sue Monk Kidd comes from the same place I dofrom a theological ghetto. The only difference is that hers was Baptist and mine was Roman Catholic. Each of us, every tradition, has to some extent been arrogant, exclusive, and controlling. Now two women like ourselves have found God outside the denominational pale as well as in our own churches. Thats dangerousboth for the denomination and for us. But for me, at least, there is no going back to any totalitarianism that calls itself religion.

Joan Chittister, Journal, June 15

I WAS AN IRISH CATHOLIC CHILD OF A ROMAN CATHOLIC mother and a Presbyterian stepfather. A mixed marriage, they called it euphemistically. What they meant was that we were right and he was wrong. We had the truth, and he did not. We had faith, and he did not. We would go to heaven. He? Well, heaven, for himfor them, for Protestants, I had come to understandwas at best uncertain. Sad, I knew, but true, nevertheless. Except that down deep in me, even then, the justice of that statement went begging.

The problem revolved around the fact that my step-father was a good man. He was honest and hardworking and unpretentious. Hed even earned a Bible for perfect attendance at Sunday school. Who was this God, then, who would burn the good and the believing like him because, though they kept the same rules, they kept them differently? I forced the question down deep inside of me. It could not be spoken out loud. Its answer was not to be quibbled with. But the question stayed with me all my life. That question and many another like it.