The Prophets and Us

Introduction by Joyce Hollyday

More than a decade ago I drove to Mount Saint Benedict Priory in Erie, Pennsylvania, the place where Joan Chittister was then prioress, hoping to find some rest and quiet and prayer. I found much more.

I found there the ancient charisms of monasticism echoing in a modern voice: hospitality, justice, prayer, mercy, generosity, joy, the sharing of meals -- and of much, much more; the sharing of lives. Community. I found a place rooted in the richness of tradition and steeped in the strength of womanhood. Within those walls I discovered a rich symphony of the marks of God's presence.

I went back to Erie again, and again. The priory became a second home, and Joan Chittister a mentor and sister. I have learned a great deal from Joan -- not only in her role as a spiritual leader, but also in the moments when she lets her hair down and teaches me about joy -- whether she's rooting wildly for the Cleveland Browns football team or pulling in fish from Lake Erie.

I found signs there in Erie of a reverence and gratitude and celebration of every life, extended toward family, friend, and stranger -- indications that life can be gentle and joyful.

Joan Chittister embraces all that she does living that truth. She is an author, a psychologist, and a communications theorist. She has served as president of the Conference of American Benedictine Prioresses and is currently the director of Benetvision, a research and resource center on contemporary spirituality. She is an international lecturer, just back from Hungary and on her way to Austria. We are glad she was able to work Grand Rapids into that schedule.

Joan has indeed been a mentor for many of us in the movement, especially women, as she has advocated tirelessly for our equality in church and society. Joan is a contributing editor to Sojourners magazine, and a friend and constant support to Sojourners Community. She seems always to have just the right word when we need it.

For all that Joan Chittister embodies; for all that she offers; for all that she is -- we are honored and thrilled to have her as our keynote speaker at our 20th anniversary festival.

Joyce Hollyday gave this introduction of Joan Chittister at Sojourners' 20th anniversary gathering in August 1991 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The Prophets and Us by Joan Chittister

There are two stories that may best bring sojourners and anniversaries and the future of all good but unclear things into sharper perspective. In the first story, the ancients tell about a young seeker who desired to be a prophet.

"I wish to become a teacher of truth," the disciple said. And the master asked, "Ah, yes, but are you prepared to be ridiculed and ignored and starving up to the age of 45?"

"I certainly am," the young disciple said. "But could you also tell me, holy one, what will happen after I am 45? At that time will I become recognized, and revered, and rich?"

And the master, smiling, answered, "No, but by then surely you will have grown accustomed to being poor and ignored and reviled."

The lesson is a clear one. The only way we get to be what we are is by continuing to be it. Time does not change the commitment; it only makes it possible. Commitment is simply the courage to face the rising sun with the promise to be there at its setting.

The second story is about an elder who wanted to teach a group of disciples the meaning of risk. Once upon a time, he told them, a crew of Chinese laborers was flown regularly into Burma to do road work there. The flights were long and boring, and the work was very difficult, so the men took to playing cards. Since they had no money to play with, however, they decided to bet themselves. The one who lost, it was decided, was to jump out of the plane without a parachute. The listening disciples were shocked.

"That's horrible," they said. "Well, maybe," said the master. "But it certainly made the game more exciting. The truth is," the master taught, "you never live so fully as when you gamble with your lives."

That lesson, too, is important at this particular anniversary moment. If we want to win the game of our lives, we will have to give it everything we have and be willing to risk it all. Surely that's what an anniversary like this is all about. An anniversary gives us all the chance to consider anew what being in this particular prophetic moment in life really means and then to decide once more whether we shall settle down now at the point where we have come and quit -- satisfied with our successes or struck down by our losses -- or shall we too pick ourselves up and be willing to throw ourselves away one more time?

"Those who risk nothing risk much more," the proverb says. The answer to those possibilities, perhaps, lies in remembering what sojourning itself is all about and what we risk by taking our lives back and settling down to be quiet and acceptable and safe. The question is as old as commitment itself and the implications of it are not new.

Commitment demands getting accustomed to the pitfalls of the prophet. Going on demands growing always more ready to lose our lives. Commitment demands being willing to be a stranger in our own land. Going on demands being willing to stay where we do not fit. Commitment demands being a sojourner, an alien to everything we've been raised to believe in.

Going on demands being in exile from those we may most love and from places we may most want and from things we ourselves may most yearn for in order to wander with those who are outcasts and unwanted and unloved in the land until they are outcasts no more. Being a sojourner demands that we learn to live someplace between the native-born and the foreigner; between the one with the birthright and the one without it; between those who see life through the eyes of the heir and those who see life through the eyes of the disinherited.

Being a sojourner means that we throw ourselves on the mercy of the powerful for the sake of the powerless. Being a sojourner means, indeed, that we become accustomed to being on the margin and out of line and over the edge of the society in which we live, for the good of those who are truly marginated by poverty; or considered out of line by virtue of their obscenely persistent but absurdly arrogant human hopes in the white, male, tightly established world around them; or forcibly edged out of the fast-track crowd by their color, their age, or their gender. To be a sojourner, in other words, is to know what it means to be without claim on anything.

But sojourners are not nobodies: Abraham and Sarah were sojourners; Isaac became a sojourner; Esau and Jacob were sojourners; Elijah sojourned with a widow; Israel sojourned in Egypt; and each of them, granted sanctuary or food or security, did the will of God that was in them and we all prospered because of it.

It is our turn now -- to be the stranger and to protect the stranger so that creation is not creating in vain. It is our turn now to speak a word in behalf of those who have no voice except ours. It is our turn now to gamble with our lives so that others may live.

Have We Heard the Message?
W. H. Auden wrote once, "To choose what is difficult all one's days as if it were easy: That is faith." And Nazim Hikmet, in the environment spawned by World War II, wrote, "This life is not a joke; you must take it seriously. Seriously enough to find yourself up against a wall perhaps with your hands bound."

But the question is, What can possibly be worth doing with so much passion? What can possibly be left to be done with such commitment? And how do we know that what we are doing has that kind of eternal meaning? The answers, I think, lie in looking again at what the prophets came to prophesy and why the prophets came to prophesy and asking whether or not their messages have been heard.

What is it that was different about Amos and Hosea and Isaiah and Micah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and what do those differences say to us, demand of us, today in our own time? The answers are as old as the human struggle for justice and as current as tomorrow's sanitized accounts of world affairs.

The fact is that Amos prophesied to a world that was totally satisfied with itself. In the time of Amos, Israel was at its most powerful and prosperous peak since the time of David. Its boundaries had extended to an unprecedented degree. As far as the merchants and the military and the monarch were concerned, God was blessing Israel.

Amos, in other words, was totally out of step with his times. Amos had the effrontery to question where the power and prosperity of Israel had come from. Amos cited war crimes and tax foreclosures and "failures at the gate," where the elders met to mete out justice but decided against the poor -- while, all the time, worship went on regularly at the shrines.

"Do not seek out Bethel. Do not go to Gilgal. Do not journey to Beer-Sheba," Amos warned the pilgrims and the pious. "Instead let justice reign at the city gate." And no one listened. Their theology told them that they were special to God; their worship told them that they were good since its regularity alone lulled them into thinking that their relationship with God was intact; and their wealth told them that their lifestyles were the sign of God's beneficence to them.

But that was then. And now, and here, what would Amos see? In a world where First World countries -- ours at the head of the pack -- unleash the wrath of high technology against Bedouin tents and Caribbean islands and Third World countries that never even stood to fight; in a world where with fewer than 200 casualties we can take down more than 200,000 and leave an entire region in ecological ruin; in a world where the aftermath alone of a 43-day "war" [the 1991 Gulf war] took the lives of 55,000 Iraqi children -- Amos would see human brutality gone mad here while church bells ring and organs play and the prayerful pray with confidence to be saved.

But there is no Amos now. Now there is only you and I, sojourner, and the message of Amos to this satiated and satisfied society is yet unheard. So, you see, whatever the cost to sojourners everywhere, we have no choice. We must go on.

Hosea lived in a period and a place where the priests of the temple themselves had become tamed and fattened on the spoils of the system. The temple had gone political. It was the word of the king, not the word of God, that mattered; it was sacrifice and cult and culture that mattered, not insight and wisdom and the justice of the Jewish Tsedakah; it was the practice of religion, not the righteousness of religion, that counted now.

And who doesn't know that it is no small thing to see a church go political; to discover that pastors prefer full collections to full homilies; to find out that ministers preach the civil religion more than they do the Christian religion; to come face to face with the fact that it is the political church that puts the flag of the country in the sanctuary and yellow ribbons on the crucifix in the Cathedral church. It is a political church that buys its tax-exempt status with silence and holds prayer breakfasts instead of protests while civil rights legislation is eroding away.

It is a totally politicized church that cedes the teaching of the just war theory to the commander in chief of the country while a physician -- a mother -- goes to jail for having a conscience about it and teaches more about conscience in one fell swoop than the church did in six months.

But there is no Hosea now. There's only you and I, sojourner, and the message to a domesticated church is yet unheard, and unjust wars go on being justified. So, whatever the cost to sojourners everywhere, we have no choice. We must go on.

A Candle in a Burned-out World
Isaiah lived in a period of massive military power. For the first time in history, technological sophistication of enormous proportion had entered the arena of national conflict. Equipment unheard of till his time enabled attacking armies to build ramps to the tops of city walls. Battering rams of awesome weight could now be hurled against the city gates. Archers armed with fine-honed bows stood in disciplined ranks ready to do a professional job of war.

Whole cities could now be breached. Whole populations -- the women and the children, the grandmothers and the old men, the sick and the blind, the peaceful and the unwary, the confused and the pliant, the frightened and the handicapped -- could now all be slaughtered in the name of national honor.

And in the face of it all, while Isaiah ran through the city naked for three years to save a Judah that, in the long run, fell prey to its own arrogance anyway, Israel "ate, drank, and made merry" -- sure of its divine election and sunk up to its heart in divine reprobation; complacent in its wealth; disdainful of its poor; violent with one another.

The leadership called it "progress." The priests called it "blessing." The wealthy called it "good times." But Isaiah called it "sin" and withdrew to teach a small band of the faithful to think as he did so that when God's plan to purge that sick society had been fulfilled there would be a small candle still burning in a burned-out world. God knows we need Isaiah now.

Isaiah would be at home in Detroit. He would recognize Washington, DC. He could find his way around Chicago very well. He would fathom the meaning of the small abandoned farms and the closed-down factories of this country in ways that most Americans do not. He would smell the cash-crop money and Third World debt payments and ill-gotten oil and Persian Gulf war profits that are maintaining the powerful of these places from miles away. And he would be sickened by it.

But Isaiah is not here. If there is going to be any hope of creating a new mentality, this time it is we who will have to seed it; this time it is we who will have to nurture it; this time it is we who will have to reap it ourselves.

Indeed, the problem is that there is no Isaiah now. There's only you and I, sojourner. And the call for demilitarization is yet tragically, pathetically unheard. So, whatever the cost to sojourners everywhere, we have no choice. We must go on.

The prophet Micah, the elder, came from the territory designed as a first line of defense for Jerusalem and watched people being commandeered into forced labor camps to build the public works projects that served the rich. "They are skinning people alive," he said, "pulling the flesh off their bones, eating my people's flesh, stripping off their skin, breaking up their bones, chopping them up small like flesh for the pot, like meat in the stew-pan."

And Micah blamed the sages and the elders for it because they did not take leadership in behalf of the poor. They prophesied for profit not for truth, he said. They talked religion and philosophy, but they did not live it. In fact, they used religion to buoy up a system long condemned by both their ideas and their laws. By their very distance from the questions of the world around them, they led the people astray.

And what has changed? The elders of this country, its experts and consultants, its economists and elected representatives, talk in charts and make predictions and give percentages and develop platforms that show without fail more success for the successful, more wealth for the wealthy. But they put no faces on the bottom of their graphs, no wisdom in their messages.

No, instead they preach the evils of welfare for the poor and practice the evil of welfare for the rich. They talk free enterprise and save Chrysler and Donald Trump and the S&Ls. Because, they say, "They can't do it themselves." And then they talk free enterprise some more and cut funds for Aid to Families with Dependent Children and subsidized housing and loans for education and grants for the arts. Because, they say, "Those people should do it themselves." The question for us is, For whom are the sages and elders speaking today from their oaken offices and leather chairs? And why?

The world is badly in need of Micah again. But Micah is not here now. There is only you and I, sojourner. And the message of the moral responsibility of public figures is apparently yet unheard in the board rooms of the world where judgments are made that make the wealthy wealthy and keep the poor poor. So, whatever the cost to sojourners everywhere, until the poor are heard as clearly as the rich, you and I, sojourner, have no choice. We will simply have to go on.

Raised Up For Every Generation
Jeremiah prophesied in the face of the national religion that the national religion was wrong, its pieties insincere, its notion of essential goodness and guaranteed presence of God patently absurd. God chose Zion as dwelling place, the Jerusalem taught, and so, they said, would never abandon it. The presence of God at a shrine, Jeremiah taught on the other hand, was conditioned upon the character of the soul of the people. And nations without character, Jeremiah taught, are eventually destroyed. Only those, he said, who learn from the destruction would really revive the soul of the nation again.

Jeremiah could indeed have done well to have lived in the United States. We teach a theology of election, too. "One nation under God," we teach. "In God we trust," we teach, and then we make a mockery of the mind of God for people by creating sweat shops that bleed people on one side of the border to engorge people on the other and never give a thought to the loss of our electiveness.

We pay $5 a day to the Mexican women who make computer boards and sell them for $500 to corporations owned by white men 50 miles away and never repent -- given, of course, God's special mission for us. We pick up union plants in Detroit and put them down in the Philippines where unions, thanks to us, are forbidden until, in the end, the little people of both nations bear the real cost of the move and the wealthy of both nations reap the real profits and assume the approval of God. And we will continue to call ourselves holy. Chosen. Elect. "A city on a hill." "The New Jerusalem."

"A fair world -- a radiant one," the Jewish proverb says, "but, oh, for whom?" Jeremiah, it seems, would say that radiance shall be reserved in the final analysis only for the remnant -- for those who see the corrosion of such a society and refuse to accept its norms and its values and its goals and its systems until, finally, the prophets of the time speak up, speak out, and speak on as the prophets raised up for every generation are meant to do. Without the prophets and martyrs of every generation, an ancient Jewish legend teaches, the world would collapse.

But there is no Jeremiah now. There is only you and I, sojourner, in a world where the message of corruption and injustice is taught as business and charity. So, whatever the cost, sojourner, we have no choice. We must go on.

THE PROPHET EZEKIEL, who was himself a Jerusalemite, made the mistake of seeing "God's glory" shining brightly above Babylon, bathing pagan and prophet alike when, Jerusalemites knew, God's name and glory shone only in Jerusalem and only for themselves alone. With that vision it became plain to Ezekiel that God was not a commodity to be captured; God was a presence to be revered in everyone everywhere. The message was a hard one that cost Ezekiel his old way of thinking, his old way of being religious, his old way of seeing God.

It was, for all of us as well, the beginning of a new world view and a new world order that came with power even if not with speed. With that vision went the criteria for crusades and the virtue of holy wars. With that insight, too, went the idea that God is American and that America is uniquely God's. With that argument, too, went the justification for converting Indians at the end of a sword and segregating blacks and "killing a commie for Christ." With that vision went the authorization of enemy-making as a virtue.

But we badly need Ezekiel yet, right here in hometown U.S.A. Our bones are dry and we need a new spirit put within us. Obviously, the hoary head of American militarism, sound and growing, is everywhere. But, like an iceberg, militarism is simply what shows above the murky waters of our war-sickened selves. Enmity is what rages in the current below. Enmity is our real enemy. Enmity is self-destructive. Enmity poisons the human soul.

Indeed, an enmity mentality waits only for what we ourselves recognize as truth and declares war when it doesn't come -- at the expense of the other, and at our own. As Augustine said, "The weapon with which we would attempt to destroy the enemy must first pass through our own hearts." Now is the time for us, as it was for the Jerusalem of Ezekiel, to stop the national disease of enmity, or it may well be too late to save the soul of this country from the enemy within.

But Ezekiel is not here, and Jeremiah is not here, and Isaiah is not here, and Micah is not here, and Hosea is not here, and Amos is not here. There is only you and I now, sojourner, who can bring presence to these things.

And presence may not be much, but it is all we have and it may be all that matters. "I am sending you to a defiant and stubborn people," God says to Ezekiel, "to tell them 'this is God's word,' so whether they listen or not they will at least know that a prophet has been in their midst."

We must, perhaps, come as these did to see presence itself -- no matter how powerless it seems -- as the reason for our existence. Because, in the long run, Christian presence is all any of us have to bring and it is everything we will be judged on -- not our success, not our achievements, not our positions -- only our presence, and its lasting ring of truth will mark the final merit of us all.

A Voice Above the Storms
Finally, then, we must be proud at this moment to be associated with a small band of Sojourners who take their smallness lightly, but take their presence seriously, because we have come to know that the power of smallness is an essential element of the scriptural mandate. It was a small group at the foot of the cross, but they are all we remember of the scene, and they are the ones who burn that moment, and its message and its meaning, into our hearts.

It was a small group of holy women who went to the tomb, though they expected obstruction, to remind us that having done what had to be done, when they got there they found the stone had been rolled away. And they are the ones who to this day give heart to any frightened few who must face an insensitive many.

It was a small group to whom the angel of the ascension said, "Why are you standing there looking up to heaven ...?" Who remind us that it is time again, now, to go on; who remind us that our strength is not in numbers; who remind us that our strength is not just in knowing Christ, our strength lies in speaking him.

Indeed, Margaret Mead wrote once, "Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. In fact, that is all that ever has." And the Indian philosopher Modamyetz taught us, "Be not a whisper that is lost in the wind; be a voice that is heard above the storms of life."

In this new world where walls are falling and treaties are being written; at this new moment when forces of control are facing the forces of change, a small band of Sojourners must be a new voice -- more finely tuned than ever, more challenging than before, for fear that complacency seduce us or false faith corrupt.

Sojourners must be a clear voice calling us to see the causes of conflict; calling us to create constructive responses to conflict; calling us to unmask the silent conflicts that make the poor poor and the oppressed silent and the powerful unseeing and insensitive.

Once upon a time a disciple asked the master, "Holy one, can you do anything to help me gain enlightenment?" And the elder said, "Ah, yes, my friend. Simply give me your certainties and I will give you back confusion."

Like the prophets, Sojourners must call our certainties into confusion. Sojourners must give a name, a human name, to the barbarism of apartheid in South Africa; to the violence of poverty in Haiti; to industrial slavery in the Philippines; to political manipulation in Central and South America; to the heresy of sexism and the violence it breeds in families, in nations, in society, in sacristies and synods and seminaries everywhere.

Indeed in this new world, at this new moment, in this new time Sojourners -- a little band of sojourners, a mighty band of sojourners, small of size, great of heart, determined of conscience, and dedicated to courage -- is clearly more necessary than ever.

It is with those things in mind that I celebrate this 20th anniversary. It is with those things in mind that I congratulate a little band of Sojourners in the name of those of us who know that all that we have done is little and nothing, but who also know that we are, nevertheless, doing all we can. I celebrate in the name of all who remain confident that, in some graced way, every single word of conscience that is said is somehow, some way, bringing us all to the "fullness of time" when all will be one because a few insisted all along that we were.

On days when small voices seem lost and the end seems unreachable and the very idea of peace and justice seems insane, I for one will remember this moment when together a small band of us saw the invisible again, heard the small voices of the prophets again, and pledged together again the fine art of going on.

And three ancient truths prod and provoke and energize us as we go. The first, from the Zen, reads: No seed ever sees the flower. The second, from the Talmud, teaches: You are not obliged to complete your work, but you are not at liberty to quit it.

And, finally, the Greeks record a conversation that calls us all: "Thucydides," they asked, "When will justice come to Athens?" And Thucydides answered them, "Justice will not come to Athens until those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are."

My anniversary prayer for Sojourners is that having gotten accustomed, after 20 years, to being poor and ignored and reviled, they have the patience, the prophetic voice, and the holy indignation to go on gambling their lives away so that somehow, somewhere, someday, others may have life, and have it more abundantly.

Sr. Joan Chittister was prioress of Mount Saint Benedict Priory in Erie, Pennsylvania when this article appeared.