Radical Spirit

by Joan Chittister

  I simply could not imagine how to be perfectly immersed in God. Perfectly attuned to God. Perfectly satisfied with a life more intent on perfection than on life itself. I was looking for a spiritual life that was more grounded, more real, less ethereal. I wanted to move on, to find more of the sacred in life rather than cut it off in the name of Life. Something in me insisted that I needed to become fully human before I could even think of being perfectly holy. Why? Because striving to come to fullness is the nature of the human condition, and without that how can anyone be truly holy?

  When I was younger, I didn’t question that perfection was possible. The truth, I learned as life went on, is that there is, indeed, always something lacking in us. We are not born perfect. The very process of human development—slow, stumbling, inquisitive, fickle all the way from infancy to old age—is proof of that. And I was living proof of that. I certainly did not become perfect as the years went by, however clear religion class had been about the process. I’m not even sure I wanted to be perfect if being afraid to try, to taste, to fail, and only then to try again was what it was all about. On the contrary, I seemed only to get further and further away from a spiritual ideal that felt to me like a living death. Every day, every new failure, left me less and less convinced that the ideal was even possible.

  One situation in particular riled me every single day.

  The prayer schedule provided for exercises in examination of conscience once at noon and again at night. Each of them concentrated on what we had done wrong that day. No one ever suggested that we might thank God for having helped us do anything right. So, I knelt in my pew, head down, and accused myself of things I considered too small, too meaningless, on which to waste my time. The Novice Directress, for instance, was particularly stressed by the fact that I walked too quickly, too loudly, on my leather soles in the hollow-sounding halls. Don’t forget that one at examen time, I knew.

  This “life of perfection” in a world of human imperfection was beginning to look like an excursion in neurosis. Surely the spiritual life was about more than walking heavily—a failing we were taught to confess weekly—along with dropping pins, spilling food, and making mistakes during community prayer. The boundaries between the moral, the immoral, and the amoral began to slip away, to blur, to become almost meaningless.

  No, this great confrontation with God in the first step of humility had to be about more than making petty mistakes as we went about the routines of life. Clearly, the spiritual life had been reduced to a kind of psychosocial obsession someplace along the line. It was all about what we did and how. But what was that doing to the level of spirituality we were developing as a result? How could this possibly be the stuff of which sanctity was made?

  If truth were known, every day of that regime I failed in more and more ways. Everything called “good” here was foreign to me. I spoke out of turn, ruminated incessantly, and broke silence repeatedly—which I learned quickly was a more reprehensible matter than the fact that what I was saying might be considered virtuous. So I said one thing in public and thought other things in private. I stayed on the path to religious life but spent a lot of time thinking about all the other paths I could have, and maybe should have, taken. I got smaller and smaller in my thinking, and my world got narrower as well. I felt like I was constantly underwater, my lungs bursting for want of breath, my heart stopped in midair. Most difficult of all, I was beginning to accept the fact that the “spiritual life” was a thing for spiritual children who counted childish things as its common currency.

  “Love not your own will,” the chapter on humility stressed. And I tried to stretch to those heights. But love what instead, then, I thought, in this place of puny pieties? “Our actions everywhere are in God’s sight,” the Rule reminded me, “and are reported by angels at every hour,” looking for sins and vices. The more I read, the more I felt trapped in the centrifuge of the self. I became a constant subject of my own smallness. Or, as a friend of mine told me years later, “I left the Church because if I stayed there I never could be anything but a failure.”

  What kind of spirituality was this? And what kind of God were we dealing with?

  Where was the greatness of the spiritual life? Surely I had seen it once. In fact, I had tracked it in the wake of figures before us who had blazed an arc across the sky of life for all of us to follow.

  Where, for instance, was the grand-heartedness of a Teresa of Avila, who had turned religious life upside down in her era—and sent my vision of it soaring in my own? Or a Martin of Tours, who refused to fight in the Roman imperial army in order to follow the peacemaker Jesus? Or a Joan of Arc, who argued conscience against the Church itself and had been willing to die for it? Or a Mother Catherine McAuley, who laid her life down to educate illiterate girls? Or a Mary Ward, who was condemned for trying to renew religious life outside of the spiritual architecture of her time but prevailed in the long run regardless? Or a Dorothy Day, who spent her life trying to recall the Church itself to the Gospel? These, and hundreds of others like them, had set my young soul on fire before I entered the monastery. But now here I was. This spiritual tradition, they told me, had lasted for over fifteen hundred years, yes. But was there anything left to it beyond the palest shadow of a guide to a kind of holiness crafted and gone dry in ages before? There had to be more to it than this equation of humility and spirituality with humiliation and repression. I simply could not see in this chapter on humility a God great enough to follow.

  Little by little I began to realize that it was not the spirituality of humility of which this chapter purports to speak that creates a problem. It was the notion of the kind of God to whom we owe homage that created the barriers. It was not the spirituality of humility that was my undoing. It was the image of God I had brought with me to the chapter that was my undoing.

  But as the years went by, slowly but surely, the greater vision came back into focus. I finally uncovered the references to the psalms that this chapter on humility cited as its luminarias along the way to the expansion of the soul. The concern of the psalmists to whom Benedict’s Rule points in this chapter is a God much bigger than the one forged by the popular notion of perfection. It is that God who eventually became the beacon and the rudder of life for me.

  What is the underlying issue?

  If fear of God is the kernel and core of Benedictine humility, then the questions that must underlie our understanding it are these: Who is this God to whom we owe “fear, reverence, awe, genuflection”? How did Benedict of Nursia himself understand God? And, most of all, what does that say about the spiritual life in the Benedictine tradition, let alone to our own singular and often dispiriting journeys to God? And how shall we know if our concept of God and Benedict’s concept of God are in sync?

  One way to study the mind of Benedict—seldom marked, too often overlooked by modern readers of this ancient Rule—is to follow closely the Scripture passages Benedict draws on to give us a picture of God. Then there can be no misunderstanding about who it is to whom we owe both awe and homage. In fact, in this chapter Benedict chronicles God in action for us. He allows Scripture itself to explain this first step of humility by carefully citing the verses of the psalms that confirm his vision of God and the holy life.

  Benedict’s God is a defense from the storms of life, not a threat to human thriving (Ps. 7:10). This God sees everything, yes, which means that this God sees more than our weaknesses. This God sees, too, our needs, our pain, the struggle of being human (Ps. 38:10) and rewards those whose hearts are right and whose souls are righteous (Ps. 18:24). It is to this loving God, this merciful God, that we are to bring thankfulness, praise, veneration, awe—and genuflection (Ps. 50:21).

  Clearly, to Benedict, God is a mighty God. This God knows what we are and stands with arms open to receive us—always and regardless. This is a poignant vision of God, a comforting one. This is a God who wants love, not fear, to be the bond between us. And real love, every lover knows, never goes away. Ins
tead, it creates a kind of invisible but crystalline scrim toward which we are forever reaching out, however great the distance, to grasp the all of it.

  Benedict is very clear about the character of God. This is a not a God of wrath, not a God who is indifferent to the world, not a ghoul of a God who spies on us in hope of watching us fall from grace. Most of all, this is not a “gotcha God” who simply lies in wait to punish us when we do. On the contrary.

  In this light, God, the Doer of Magical Miracles outside the natural order, disappears. Instead, the God of Creation frees nature to take its course with us as we, too, test and taste and grow in wisdom, age, and grace. Having experienced life in all its glory, all its grief, we grow to the full height of our humanity. It is a slow process, yes, but in the end our choice for God is valid, is holy, because it is real, considered, not forced, not extorted. This God wants for creation the fullness of all the good that is in it.

  Most of all, this caring God loves us and so refuses to interfere with our judgments or prevent our experiments with life. Instead, this God does us the respect of simply standing by, of being there to hold us up, of confirming our trust by leading us through the dim days and long nights. How else to explain the depth of soul of those who have survived great calamity, endured the brutal death of a child, struggled through crippling debilitation, torturous addictions, and yet come out of all of it praising the God who carried them through? Once we have known the strengthening presence of God in our own lives, we feel even closer to the God of Life after the tragedy than we did before it. No doubt about it: This God trusts humanity to work its own way to the fullness of its soulfulness.

  Then the real miracle of Life—this right to choose our own destiny as well as the way we get there—with all its learnings, all our lessons, welcomes us home to new life and fresh understandings of God’s way with God’s creatures.

  This first step of humility—this mandate “to keep the presence, the fear, the reverence, the awe of God always before our eyes…and never forget it”—does not crush us in the dust. Instead it makes us vulnerable to God. We are now accessible to the call of God. We are ready to live in the presence of God. We are open to the will of God both for each of us and for the world. God and God’s will now stand to make an imprint in our lives.

  Most important of all, this bald statement about the presence of God in our lives upends what the world knows as “merit theology.” Benedict simply dismisses the whole idea that we are created to try to “merit” God. I remember only too well the number of novenas I counted in hope of good grades, the number of First Saturday masses I attended on free days to get out of purgatory after I died. I remember, too, the Friday night football game at which I pushed a hot dog out the other end of the bun till it fell to the ground below the viewing stands. The point was to avoid insulting the Protestant boy who took me there but at the same time to save my soul from the mortal sin of eating meat on Friday.

  If I passed these do-or-die tests, this merit theology approach to God suggests, I would get God. If not, too bad.

  The truth is that no one can merit God. We don’t earn God a prayer, a legalistic hurdle, a devotion at a time. We don’t need to earn God because the basic, life-giving truth is that we already have God. God is here. With us. Now. In this. Forever. What is important is for us to seek God—to come into touch with God—who is already seeking us. That is union with God. That is the marriage of two souls. Trying to earn God only keeps us Rule-centered failures, because no one can do it perfectly.

  “To live in fear—in reverence—of God” attunes us to the presence of Life in life and renders us ready to detect its message in both good things and bad, in both simple things and difficult. It makes us bold enough to invite this God of Wonder to break us open to possibility and potential all our lives. It reminds us daily that the creation we see around us—electric in its energy, stolid in its eternal reproduction—has been created “for our weal and not our woe” as Scripture says (Jer. 29:11). So that we can grow in it and because of it. What more can life really be about? What should we fear in the face of a God who is, as the psalmist records in this Chapter of the Rule, our “shield, our defense”? What is there in the universe that can undo what the anchoring of ourselves to Life guarantees and God promises us through the psalmists?

  This sense of awe for the God of a creation that is dynamic, ever-changing, always growing, this coming to know the God of possibility, frees us to trust life. Whatever happens to us now, this awareness that God is the center of everything makes anything and everything possible, makes anything and everything bearable. We know now that we are not in this alone. No, we cannot wrench life to our own designs because we did not create it and, therefore, cannot twist it to our schemes. We can, however, give it over to the God who is “Emmanuel”—who is indeed “God with us”—and so use this mundane present moment, too, to grow to full spiritual stature.

  In the modern world, as we probe outer space and threaten to blow up the planet, the temptation to act like gods, even in our most personal, most private lives, is a common one. We have earned our arrogance: We have split the atom and plotted the human DNA. We have traveled faster than sound and made artificial hearts for babies. We are capable of feeding the globe and poisoning its land at the same time. The question is whether or not in the process we have smothered the basics of life: the awareness of what it really means to be human, to function humanely, to make humanity humane again.

  No wonder then that in the chapter on humility, Benedict embeds a warning. He prompts us against the kind of pride that fails to pray that “God’s will be done in us” and so warps the will of God for the world. He reminds us, as we go on remaking the world, of Scripture’s warning: “There are ways which some call right that in the end plunge us into the depths of hell” (Prov. 16:25).

  The lesson of this first degree of humility is that life well lived, life lived to the very height of our abilities, is life that pursues the will of God for the world.

  The first step of humility, then, presents us with the problem of being able to distinguish pride from arrogance, humility from humiliation. Humility, ironically, is about coming to understand that spiritual simplicity is not about the debasement of the self. Nor is it about the aggrandizement of the self. So what is it?

  What are the spiritual implications of this step of humility?

  Once upon a time, the ancients say, a disciple traveled far and wide to find a spiritual master who could lead him to the fullness of the spiritual life.

  “What is it you seek?” the Holy One asked him.

  “Master,” the young seeker replied, “how can I ever be emancipated?”

  The Zen Master answered: “You must ask yourself who it is who has put you in bondage.”

  The seeker is us. The missing spiritual master in this instance is the humility it takes to rest our lives in the consciousness that only God is God. Not us. And definitely not anything else in life that we have allowed to become our god rather than God.

  The tendency to make shrines to ourselves, however, so easily becomes the norm of our existence. Our profession, our money, our social status, our need for public recognition begin to control us. Somewhere along the line we begin to sink into the routine, the system, ourselves. We settle down with the job, the family, the career path. And we grow inordinately blind to what rules us internally, or at least oblivious of our crying need for a spiritual center beyond ourselves. Yes, it’s a natural phase in life, this exaltation of the ego. It is part and parcel of the process of human development, in fact. The only problem is that if and when we don’t grow out of it, as we should, it renders us bereft of an adult spiritual life. We become, instead, spiritual infants, adolescents suspended halfway between maturity and self-indulgence. And then we wonder why our lives, full of everything, feel so empty.

  As a result, we go through life dragging our chains behind us, trying to be what we are not, trying to do what can’t be done, trying to elbow our way t
o the endless top of something. “I know more about ISIS than the generals,” Donald Trump told the world. It was a display of false superiority that made people actually question his bid for the presidency of the United States. But such exaltation of the self tempts us all. It shatters the very internal peace we seek, and we don’t have a clue why. Only when we are ready to admit that our chains of self-centeredness and hauteur are largely of our own construction are we ready to grow.

  But the chains that bind us have many faces beyond raw arrogance. We chain ourselves to wealth that impoverishes our spirit. We give way to the sense of superiority that separates us from the rest of the human condition. And, most subtle of all, we lack a consciousness of the presence of God in life. It’s then that we make ourselves the divinity within. And that message breeds the disease of privilege in us.

  We tether ourselves to the part of ourselves that whispers in our ear that we can simply take what we do not have by right. We can take the lands of the poor for cash crops, for instance. We can steal just wages from women with impunity. We can destroy any one and any thing we label lesser than ourselves because of color, sex, race, or physical difference, for instance. We can make sex slaves out of little girls and submit animals to torture in the name of research. Worse, we can be indifferent to all those things because we are our only real agenda. We can make ourselves our own gods, for whom we require the awe of the rest of our world.

  Chains such as these are forged in fear or resentment or pathological egotism, perhaps. But whatever they are, one thing is certain: The things that inflame our pettiness, our angers, our frustrations with our worlds hold us prisoners of ourselves. And that is exactly where humility comes in. It is in the first step of humility—this call to consciousness of the presence of God in life—that we can put down the burden of eternal self-aggrandizement, of unlimited power, of ceaseless demands, of unabated appetites.