SOJOURNERS: You said earlier that contemplation sometimes means binding up the wounded person along the road. Would you say more about what you mean by that?
Joan Chittister: If the contemplative life has to bring us to an awareness of the presence of God and a consciousness of the mandates of Jesus, how else can you purport to live a contemplative life? Contemplation is not an excursion into the "airy fairy."
Contemplation is an immersion into the mind of God and the life of Christ to such an extent that the way you live your own life can never again be quite the same. That's why people change. Because they're drawing from a different set of values and a different goal.
The goal is the building up of the kingdom where the widows are cared for, orphans are loved, the measures are equal, dreaming is possible, and everybody is brought to the fullness of life. If you're living the contemplative life, then eventually you have to come face to face with your obligation to be touched by all those dimensions.
That's why Thomas Merton had the most contemporary prayer life in the world. That's why you ought to be able to go to any enclosed monastery and get good counsel about your own life and the circumstances of the world you're living in.
There's a historian who said that the monastery confronts the castle with a question mark. The values that are derived from the contemplative life are the filter through which the contemplative sees the world. And they are consequently the critique that the contemplative brings to the constructs and institutions of a society. These values should never be "other than" or "out of the world." The world should be seen through those values. And the contemplative speaks of the incongruity of those values.
As a result, you have to be part of the binding up of the wounds of the world. And you can do it in many, many ways. You can do it by critiquing the world, if you live in an enclosed community. You can do it by restructuring the world, if you live in an active community or a monastic community. You can do it by providing alternative models for the world. You can do it by working within the world. How you do it doesn't matter, but you must do it. It cannot not be done.
You entered this community when it was more enclosed, and all the sisters were involved in a very similar type of ministry. Some years ago renewal happened, and women expanded their understanding of ministry. And now you are all involved in different types of things. How has that new understanding of ministry affected your own understanding of spirituality?
The community I entered in 1952 was semicloistered, which meant that ministry was brought to you, you didn't really go to it. It's not so much the spirituality that's changed but the demonstration of ministries that has changed.
In the mid-19th century in Germany, the German government passed a law that said it would no longer provide pension monies or support monies for religious communities that did not provide a service to the state. In other words, there were to be no parasites. That's a very good law.
Monasteries in their ancient form had never been parasites. On the contrary, monasteries had been the center and the structure of public activities. It's not a myth that Benedictine, Cistercian, and Trappist communities became centers of order and development when the Roman Empire fell.
When Roman legions and Roman legates no longer existed to coordinate activities or to provide services, the monasteries were the only places giving direction to the people. Monasteries either deliberately moved into a territory in order to provide that kind of service, or the people eventually settled around the monastery.
And the monasteries owned large farms. They were very important in the agricultural development of Europe, and they began to employ people. The abbot became the lord mayor of the village that grew up around a monastery. To this day in small villages in Europe the center and central institution is a monastery.
It's important to remember that at a point in the early Middle Ages, the government and the church were the same body. It was a king who wanted Benedictine monasteries to be everyplace, because he knew that would be good for the empire.
Now in the high Middle Ages, after the economy became urban and commercial, and the poor became more of a roaming band than a landed band, religious communities began to minister to the poor differently. Monastic communities, however, stayed on the land where they were, and were inclined to become more and more self-sufficient and self-contained than they had been in the preceding period in history.
It's out of that cultural, historical background that the German government said that it was not going to give state pension monies to groups that were not performing a service for the state. At that point a number of monasteries, particularly Benedictine monasteries, opened schools. Again schools had been very popular and very common demonstrations of Benedictine ministry until the rise of the university system and the development of both a public and an independent private educational system.
My own community's history started in the mid-19th century. You had the newly developing concept that the monastery is to provide a service to the people of the area which was obviously not going to be agricultural anymore. As a result, especially monasteries of women who had the concept of cloister imposed on them around the 13th century, as a protective device as well as an ascetical device, were then somewhat welcomed back into the ministerial mainstream.
So my community was simply a reflection of 19th-century monasticism in the German setting. We were semicloistered, which means that people do come in for services, but the sisters do not normally go to other places.
We had an entire mission system developed. By 1875 they had developed the notion that everyone didn't have to come into the major monastery. Groups of five to 20 sisters would go a hundred miles away from the mother house in Erie, Pennsylvania, and they would begin a little monastery, not independent of this one. The prioress of this monastery was their prioress, but the life was duplicated. They would live on the school property, and the children would be brought to them. They were still keeping this new model of cloistered life that was civic and ecclesiastical in a new way, with a new intent.
Now there are two important dimensions of that response: The community stays monastic throughout, and it gives service throughout. So when Vatican II issued the call to renewal, renewal of ministry was as legitimate a subject as renewal of prayer life, renewal of community life, renewal of personal life, and we began to look at how to stay monastic and do service.
Out of that review came the notion that you didn't simply have to teach, that other kinds of service are needed. And perhaps Benedictines don't become Benedictines to become teachers, they become Benedictines to become Benedictines. What we're about now is doing ministry, providing necessary service, in line with a Benedictine vocation which is communal in its expression and its spirituality. The point is that the structures have changed, the spirituality has not.
Your community made a decision to embrace peacemaking as a vocation. How does that fit with your own tradition, spirituality, and understanding?
That is a really important development of your last question. At one time our ministries obviously had become highly institutional. When this review of 20th-century ministry began to develop, we discovered that there were multiple gifts in the community that matched multiple needs in this locale. We began to pursue them and to enable them to develop. And as a result of the study of Benedictinism and monastic spirituality, we began to ask ourselves what ministry or ministries are most appropriate to a Benedictine charism?
The one continuing thread from earliest time until now in the Benedictine tradition is the tradition of peacemaking. We know historically that early Christians did not participate in the military. And though historians struggle with whether the major concern was that they could not participate in the emperor worship common to soldiers in the Roman Empire or whether the primary concern was that Christians do not kill, the fact remains that the data reflects unquestionably that the early Christians simply believed "Love one another" and "Thou shalt not kill" were absolute mandates.
Now at the time of Marcus Aurelius, in the second century and then again with the legitimization of Christianity by Constantine in the fourth century, many Christians were not schooled in that history, and so a lot of Christian soldiers were soldiering. There was one military law in the Roman Empire. Conscription was not a law of the empire. Mercenaries fought most of the wars. But the one law that did exist was that the son of a Roman officer was required to become a soldier.
Martin of Tours' father was a general in the Roman legions, but his son showed no disposition to that whatsoever. He indicated to his father that he believed that soldiering is not acceptable for a Christian. And so the boy was kidnapped at his father's own direction when he was 15 or 16 and taken off to the barracks to be trained as a soldier.
But the more he was trained, the more reluctant he became. Until finally, the records show, when he was ordered to the front he simply took off his sword and presented it to the Roman commander. When they accused him of being cowardly his answer was, "I am no coward. I do not do this out of fear, I do this out of faith. And to prove my point, tomorrow you may send me to the front, but I will go without my sword." So they let the boy leave the legions.
For a while he demonstrated his opposition to this use of Christians or to this practice by Christians, and eventually he started a religious community. Now, monks were recognized pacifists. You simply couldn't commandeer a monk into military service, and everyone knew it.
That pacifist tradition is still honored by governments. We don't draft monks, priests, or clerics, because we recognize that from time immemorial this is a peacemaking tradition. In the Middle Ages, monks were the first groups to raise the notion of rules for modern warfare. It's the monks who first attempt to promote the peace of God, and then to promote the compromised position of the truce of God, which says: If you must fight, then all we ask for is an agreement that you don't fight on Thursday, because Thursday is the memorial of the Ascension, and you don't fight on Friday, because Friday is the memorial of the Passion, and you don't fight on Saturday, because Saturday is the memorial of the Entombment, and, of course, you can't fight on Sunday, because Sunday is the memorial of the Resurrection.
It was medieval monasteries and monks who tried to control this open season on human beings. It was the medieval monks who did a great deal to develop the whole notion of chivalry. If you are going to be a soldier, there is even a way to be a Christian soldier. And during this period a lot of the writings on this topic came out of the monasteries.
Now if you're Benedictine, and the most ancient motto of the order is "Pax," and you live in the 20th century where you are now capable of replicating 1,600,000 Hiroshimas, then surely there is some special obligation on the part of the Benedictine to address that continuing issue.
The first chapter of this ancient rule says, "Listen to the precepts of the Master, incline the ear of your heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of your loving Father, that by the toil of obedience you may return to him from whom by the sloth of disobedience you have gone away. To you, therefore, my speech is now directed, who, giving up your own will, take up the strong and most excellent arms of obedience to do battle for Christ the Lord, the true King." It's a military metaphor used to indicate that the militia Christi, the soldier of Christ, doesn't fight the way everybody else fights. And that if you are of Christ, your soldiering is different.
Given that kind of history and that awareness of the continuation of an institutionalized pacifist tradition, and a moment in history when the shift was from an institutional ministry to multiple ministries done in the name of the community, we had to deal with the question, "What ministry are you able to do in the community that you would not be able to do as well alone? What is the community ministry?"
For us, that community ministry was hospitality. That community ministry was community. That community ministry was prayer - to be a place of prayer for other people to be able to dip into and out of as they needed. But it was also a ministry of peace. We decided that what we needed in this day and age was not a particular service that we gave through institutions that we developed, but a corporate commitment to a policy to which we would all give witness no matter what individual ministry we were engaged in at that time.
Out of that came our corporate commitment in this community to nuclear disarmament, and especially the relationship of sexism to militarism. We simply educate ourselves consistently and regularly about the effects of militarism in this country, and particularly the effects on women of machismo as a distortion of the culture and of relationships. And wherever we are, we make every attempt to bring that agenda to consciousness in that place.
For example a second grade teacher may develop a whole project on peace cranes, so that second graders in the United States send the great Japanese symbol of peace to second graders in Japan. Our nurses work at developing a consciousness in the medical community about the effects of radiation and ask for seminars on the effects of nuclear radiation and what the medical establishment would be able to do in response. Our peace and justice center, .frankly, preceded our community definition of the corporate commitment, but was our earliest and most obvious community answer to this relationship of the Benedictine tradition to the pacifist tradition. All of those things just came together then for all of us.
Thoughts on Prayer
I have the sense that your community's prayer life and ministry life are very integrated, and that they grow out of each other. I often hear people who describe themselves as Christian activists ask, "Where do I find time for my prayer life, or how do I integrate prayer into ministry, or how do I find balance in my life?" Could you address that?
I certainly can, because if there's any question that we go through regularly, it is that one. In the first place, I can tell you that after years of experience of community living, and with all the change that came with renewal, and all the major issues that we are grappling with in this world, you do not find time for prayer. Nobody finds time for prayer. You either take time for it or you don't get it. If I am waiting for it to be given to me, it shall never be given.
I think if I reach that point I have begun the last trek down a very short road. Because the fuel runs out. The energy goes down. I become my own enemy. I can no longer remember why I ever decided to do this. And if I can't remember why I decided to do it, I can't figure out how I can go on with it. Because I'm tired, and the vision just gets dimmer and dimmer.
On days when I have worn myself out most in behalf of peacemaking and women, I have gone to bed knowing that when I get up the next day, we will still be a militaristic society, and sexism will still reign. So if I take an additional 30 minutes away from the problem, not only will the problem still be there, but I will probably be able to spend the next day on it, which I couldn't have done otherwise.
The balance problem depends on what you call balance. The worst thing that ever happened to balance is the light bulb. When the light bulb was invented, all of us got a balance problem. You've got it if you're the local pacifist, you've got it if you're the local bishop, you've got it if you're the local store clerk. There used to be a time when you had to quit because the sun went down. And there's not much you can do with tallow candles that will shake the ankles of the world.
We have turned night into eternal day. And most people don't even realize that we never allow night to come. We just keep pushing back the confines of night. So balance was once built into us circadian creatures by some very natural processes. We have managed to defeat nature, and it is defeating us.
Balance, then, is no longer necessarily daily, or even necessarily cyclical, unless I make it cyclical. Therefore, I have to have great appreciation for the concept of Sabbath, of holy leisure, of taking time for rest and reflection, so that my activity time has more quality.
I'm sure everybody in the world who doesn't know me has some terribly clear picture of Joan Chittister as high-level activist. Wrong. I can't get anywhere at all unless at about 8 o'clock every single normal night of my life I'm in my room reading for two-and-a-half to three hours. And by normal I mean the three or four nights a week that I'm not traveling or speaking or involved in community events. Or I may spend those nights just being. I am capable of being. That inserts balance into my life.
I don't have to run from 6 a.m. to midnight every day and fall into my bed just long enough to get up and run again. There is a necessary cycle of reflection and integration that provides energy for the rest of life.
I had a spiritual director who used to say, "The empty vessel must be filled." And those of us who think we can go on forever pouring ourselves out without at the same time filling ourselves up need to read the seventh chapter of Benedict on the rule of humility. The first degree of humility is to allow God to be God. And we're just not going to be able to do it without becoming a more contemplative part of this ongoing cycle of development.
So, what does all that mean? It means that prayer, in my opinion, is absolutely essential both to consciousness and to serenity. And that our important work will be done with more impact and import if we bring to it our best selves. And our best selves come when we are calling ourselves to conversion in the scriptures, and constantly putting on the mind of Christ. Balance is something we have to achieve for the sake of the long haul.
You're talking about prayer mostly in terms of nurturing ourselves. You made a comment earlier that our prayer isn't about changing the mind of God. But we are people who are very connected to the world's suffering and believe in a God who hears the cries of the poor and those who clamor for justice. And we believe that God hears our cries for justice as well. We offer petitions and intercessions. Can you talk about that kind of prayer in relationship to our ministry, in relationship to the suffering that we see?
The scripture tells us very clearly that God hears the cry of the poor. And God notes it and records it and watches. And on the basis of that hearing, God will some day judge what we did with the cries we heard.
Prayer asks for the strength to respond, for the insight to know, for the grace to do, and for the courage to endure. And I believe God gives us all those things. When we become conscious of those needs, we have the promise, "Ask and you shall receive" and the assurance of God's presence with us.
We're not talking to the great cornucopia God. If that were our theology, we would soon have to begin to doubt our God. The grace has come, the strength has come, the awareness has come, the courage has come, the repentance has come, both for us who are rich and for the poor who know that their ultimate salvation is in God. In the meantime, you and I are praying for the grace to get through our own smallness so that we too can hear the cry of the poor, and change our own lives accordingly, because God is hearing and God will judge on the basis of those cries.
I think many of us who are active in ministry and in touch with people's suffering find it easy to offer petitions and difficult to offer praise. We have so many visions for change that it's difficult to see what we have and be thankful.
That comment is related to our previous discussion on the place of joy in the Christian community and the notion of recognizing the signs of hope. Hope is a phenomenal Christian virtue. And not to be able to praise is not to be able to hope.
That's one of the ways in which the poor evangelize us to such a depth, because in many instances they're not complaining about the things we're complaining about for them. They know what the necessities of life really are. They know when they have them, and they know how demanding of praise those things become.
So if we lose sight of praise, either we are not seeing the presence of God in our world, we have failed to note the distinction between needs and wants, or we are on the brink of thinking that only what we call good is what God calls good. Or we've lost a sense of time. We want everything in our time instead of in the fullness of time.
Scripture says that the great good - Jesus - only came in the fullness of time. We don't know when the fullness of time is for anything. We must live in praise that we've done what we can to contribute to the coming of the fullness of time.
So, should there be intercessory prayer? You bet. And does God wait to hear or respond to the needs? Yes. And are we both breaking open ourselves and the consciousness of the cosmic in intercessory prayer? Of course. But we are also recognizing in praise that we've received a lot of things that we never thought to pray for, because God is God and loves us and continually builds up our hope in the fullness of time by the things we weren't even smart enough, holy enough, to recognize that we needed.
There's a great Sufi story about a seeker who was tramping around the world looking to find the true God. She was examining all religions and all communities and all manifestations of religion to determine when she had discovered that perfect manifestation of God in life. In one of her trips, she stopped at the monastery and she said to the monastic, "Tell me, does your God work miracles?" And the elder said, "Well, it all depends on how you define a miracle. Some people think that it is a miracle if God does the will of people. But here in this community, we think a miracle is when people do the will of God."
That's my theology in a nutshell. Of course we cry out to God with what we believe are our needs, knowing that God will always respond to our needs. But the question is, what do we really need?
The purpose of that is not to rationalize suffering. And it is not intended to deter us from dealing with suffering on the human level. On the contrary, we deal out of our concern for the fullness of the kingdom, knowing that the fullness will come in God's good time.
Joan Chittister, O.S.B., was prioress of the Mount Saint Benedict priory in Erie, Pennsylvania, president of the Conference of American Benedictine prioresses, and a Sojourners contributing editor when this interview appeared. Joyce Hollyday was associate editor of Sojourners when this interview appeared.
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