Radical Spirit

by Joan Chittister

  But Jesus makes plain the price of truth: “I have not come to bring peace but a sword,” he says. There are times when conflict is the only cure for diseases of the soul. Societies mired in discrimination and legal exclusions stand blind to their own moral blindness. They begin to take as moral what are simply injustices masking as legal. They accept legalities, the purpose of which is to mask the dereliction they harbor. In those cases, there is no choice but to expose the sins such shadow boxes are designed to protect. It is not these things we are meant to endure.

  Instead, endurance is the daily face of faith. It believes beyond all reasonable reason to believe that goodness can prevail, that the will of God will come when enough of us accept it, too. It is the living demonstration of belief in the God who created us to become the fullness of ourselves.

  At the same time, endurance is not something that feels good. On the contrary. It is often dull and thankless. It’s like training for a marathon. There’s so much effort and, too often, so few results. It is the exercise regimen of the heart, the measure of the soul.

  Exercise, the dull wearying repetition of stretch and squat and bar lift, has all the glamour of walking across the Sahara alone. It is torture in slow motion. And yet, without endurance, without the willingness to keep on keeping on, nothing the world ever needed would have happened.

  The problem is that what is endured and won in one century must so often be won again in another. Just as the world thinks one struggle has been won, somewhere, somehow, it emerges all over again. We must be eternally vigilant about slavery, for instance, which is now sex slavery as well as economic slavery, and this new threat is one of global and horrendous dimensions. We must never assume that equality has been accomplished as long as the pursuit of power exists. Disease is never conquered without years of gainless research. Nor will justice come without daily efforts. Injustice must be addressed but may well not be achieved for eons, in which case our mantra must become “If not for us, then because of us.”

  Endurance, the unsung champion of the spiritual life, has a great deal more to offer me than social honor or civic support. On the spiritual level, it is self-absorption, the universal I, the egotistic center of the cosmos, against which we struggle day after day.

  And yet, in all these circumstances, both personal and public, it is the awareness of the power of patience and the energy that comes with endurance that make a difference in both the substance and the quality of our lives.

  Most important of all, perhaps, is the realization that endurance and acceptance are not the same thing. It is one thing to work through difficult questions and tangled relationships one small step at a time. It is another thing entirely to accept the abuse or the denigration that may go with them. To understand that changes in male-female status may take years, sometimes even generations, to grow into is only realistic. These ideas are bred into a culture and are difficult, even painful, to uproot. But to argue in the face of clear concepts to the contrary that such changes are unnecessary or useless to strive for is immoral.

  To continue to bar young girls entrance into school, for instance, because there are no toilet facilities on the property—as is common around the world—is totally unacceptable. If school systems cannot or do not provide facilities, international development groups must insist on building them.

  A recourse to principles, a commitment to the will of God for the entire world, is in order. Whenever harm is done to the full development of other human beings—when bodily harm, as in female genital mutilation, is defended as a religious act or a cultural custom—debate is no longer an option. Time is of the essence now, discussion is unacceptable. Why? Because the intellectual future of the next generation, of half the population, is in jeopardy. We may need to endure long and tedious negotiation to repair these issues, but we cannot even begin to think of accepting such things as cultural norms.

  No doubt about it, endurance is the cement of human development, one of the few warranties we have these days of possible salvation of the human race. The ability to say no to myself, to the oppression of others, is the one assurance we have that human beings are teachable, are capable of becoming fully human, can change, can be saved from themselves. Because we have the patience to bear hard things, we can work through the nuclearization of the world, we can transcend racism, we can become a united planet of chain-linked nations, we can become a society of equals.

  By learning to bear hard things well, we secure the future of the human race as well as our own ability to survive. By being willing to put our personal power down in favor of someone else’s vision and experience, we pledge ourselves to benefit from the power and goodness of others. We save ourselves from our own limitations and follies, from our lack of maturity and experience. Most of all, we pledge ourselves to be open to the wisdom figures of life and so become wiser ourselves as we go.

  Without endurance we succumb silently to the demons of injustice. We dry up inside, shrivel in our hope, and belie the will of God for the world.

  On the other hand, a spirituality of endurance frees us from the rampages of destructive pride. It opens us to a community of wisdom figures, guides who, if we will only allow it, are there to lead us through the ravages of our time.

  The fifth step of humility is that “we do not conceal from the abbot or prioress any sinful thoughts entering our hearts…but rather confess them humbly.”

  What is the challenge here?

  After coming to grips with the kind of God we believe in and committing ourselves to living in harmony at every level of life with what that creating God wills for creation, we begin to move beyond even the spiritual narcissism that marks an incessant preoccupation with being spiritual. In the third and fourth steps of humility we open ourselves to the wisdom figures around us and commit ourselves to not running away from the growth moments in life.

  Now this fifth step of humility brings us to the great encounter with the self. It’s perhaps one of the most demanding moments of all. It confronts us with our selfishness, yes, but also with our own standards of perfection.

  After all, it’s not possible to reveal our sinful self—to face the demons that have mastered us—until we decide what sin really is and which sins have us in captivity now. At this moment.

  The question now is, On what standard of perfection do we operate? In what do we strive to be perfect?

  One of the more shocking elements of monastic life for me in the 1950s and ’60s was a practice called the “manifestation of faults.” That custom had begun as a kind of spiritual direction program between seekers and the monastics of the desert centuries before. By the mid-twentieth century, at least where I was, it had clearly deteriorated into nothing more than a recitation of personal failings in monastic life. The entire community gathered in the refectory after supper every Friday night while one part of the group or another would “speak fault.” It was a highly formal event. Every sister had been given a list of common “faults”—spilling food and water, wasting soap and electricity, breaking silence, walking fast—which she was required to recite. If she had received a personal correction during the week, for instance, for “laughing loudly at recreation,” she added that as well, and ended by begging the superior for a “penance.”

  Every week it was the same: The Chapter of Faults opened with a prayer and a reading from the gospels. After each sister “confessed” and asked for a “penance,” the community said a psalm together and the process was over for another week.

  Frankly, nothing of any moment ever happened there. The entire event was sheer formula. It was, in fact, an irritation for sisters and superiors alike, an uncomfortable and basically useless event. Many sisters, in fact, brought books to read while a line of other sisters droned through the list of peccadilloes. Everyone there knew that the things to be said were without moral substance. Nor were they erasable from the catalog of human behaviors, even if anyone had seriously set out to do so.

  It was a community custom
salvaged from the spirituality of the early monastic communities and, I was sure, meant to fulfill the call to transparency implied in this fifth step of humility. But by now it had simply become part of the schedule, a piece of the furniture of religious life. No one there ever said anything we all didn’t know and weren’t “reciting” ourselves. No one, I’m sure, was ever saved by the process, but some might certainly have been plagued by it, if for no other reason than its utter emptiness. Its meaninglessness.

  The Chapter of Faults was, at very most, nothing more than a symbolic admission of human sinfulness. It was hardly any kind of genuine confession. “Spilling water, losing pins, and spotting scapulars” never rose to the level of morality or reflected the gentle depth of spiritual direction either.

  Instead, this formalized process had only come to confuse the entire issue of what it was in the human heart that actually obstructed a person’s relationship with God. Was the chapter about the foibles of human nature? The matter being recited was certainly not conscience matter. If anything, it blurred the lines between the moral, the immoral, and the amoral. What were we doing and why were we doing it? I wondered. Was this nothing more than a ritual of control and submission?

  And yet it was from these fragments of the past, like shards of pottery discovered in an ancient archaeological dig, that I came to understand what it was that was missing in my own life. And even in the lives of the people around me. People everywhere, in all walks of life, I began to see, were just as trapped as I was. Only differently. Women labored under the rubric of what it meant to be a “good woman,” a supermom. Good women baked cookies. Really good mothers did not get jobs outside the home. Good fathers worked hard, harder, hardest to get less and less out of life. And worried more and more as the years went by about not having been a “good father.” It was a world full of shoulds and musts and social standards parading as theology.

  We all had standards of perfection developed out of social norms and made to seem moral. We all substituted a set of false norms and called it perfection.

  As the years went by, as a prioress myself concerned for the spiritual development of seekers in the twenty-first century, I began to recognize what this ancient wisdom literature, the Rule of Benedict, was signaling us to remember. The message was achingly clear: Everyone carries a burden too heavy to ignore. Each of us has something to confront, something that is scarring our soul, something for which we have yet to be forgiven, or have not yet grappled with, even by ourselves. Each of us needs someone else to help us with it. Only one thing was clear: A practice like this was not the help that was needed, perhaps, but the reality was surely worth struggling with.

  There is in each of us a gaping hiatus of the soul, a rupture of the wholeness which we seek. This is the silent secret with which we struggle all our lives. It takes the shape of an unresolved relationship, perhaps, a broken piece of our integrity, maybe, a wound for which there is no balm, a compulsion that holds us captive and limits our growth.

  Somewhere we have experienced something which we have not shared, a burden of soul we have yet to confront. There is something burrowed within us that is stopping us from being the fullness of ourselves. There is something we regret that we cannot yet unburden because no one now understands what happened in that time so far away. There is no one, not one, left from there to forgive us or free us or strengthen our faith in the place of struggle in our life. The time, the distance, the deaths between then and now have covered over what needs to be uncovered if I am ever to be new again.

  For me, it was a home life forged in conflict, in religious differences, in addictions too binding to share, too foreign to trust to a group like my sisters in the Chapter of Faults. No one here would even be able to imagine the kinds of stories I would tell.

  We can paper such things over with work and pray they will go away. Yet, all the while, these past realities have something to do with every day and decision of our present lives.

  The struggle within us has left a scar. This memory that we hide in the cave of our heart does not go away. Instead, it leaves us full of pain, aching for wholeness. No number of masks and confession games heals it.

  It is an emotional catharsis, a spiritual insight, that is needed here, not a legal or ecclesiastical one. An emotional catharsis comes from following the pain to its source, by admitting the breach of soul, and by being willing to reframe its effects. It comes from facing the hurt that is eating away at the heart. It is abated by acknowledging the rupture I have caused or nursed or repressed or left to turn to cement in my soul. It demands then that I commit myself to making life new again. It is not about spilling food and water.

  It is a great moment.

  Since those early days in religious life, I have known many new beginnings. All of them were personal. All of them were real—meaning they had an impact on me as a person. All of them required that I begin again to figure out what life was about, what I was meant to be about, where I was on the path. And each of them led me to more freedom, more depth.

  Changes at every level of life are commonplace to me now. I have been able to survive so many of them. So, I know enough not to expect to be able to stem them. They are out of my control or beyond my present understanding. But they are not without gift. They become the seedbed of the soul, these regular skirmishes with life. Eventually, I came to know, old struggles fade and life rights itself again, a testimony to sorrow and confession. Or the experience of strong contrary opinions keeps the self at the task of rethinking life, of staying open to its possibilities, of being willing to go on imagining new ways of being alive.

  Whatever the evolution of life, old struggles morphed into new possibility. And I grew, however slowly.

  Point: Sin, brokenness, as the Church has always said, can be a “happy fault,” an invitation to a new beginning. It calls us to reflect on the way we live and think and direct our lives until we can change our bearings once again. It is this unending grace of change that is the tether to which we cling as the waves of life shred the sails that have brought us to this point.

  But silent admission is not enough. For that, the steps of humility have a clearer message. Growth is a process, an unending process, they teach us: Reflect on the pain. Discern its origin. Find models whose own experiences can help to reconstruct its meaning. And, most of all, understand that confession—the unburdening of the past—is never too late. On the contrary, confrontation of the unfinished parts of ourselves and self-revelation is forever the key to freedom from the past as well as freedom for the future.

  What is the underlying issue?

  It is one thing to talk, as the Rule does, about self-revelation as a step to humility. After all, who would doubt that? What’s left of hubris, of image, of pretense once we begin to expose the secrets of the soul? But, we have a right to wonder if superiors won’t use the information against us. If friends won’t reject us. If even the wisdom figures among us might not turn away from us. Those are fair concerns and deserve a great deal of thought before we begin to talk to anyone whose own spiritual depths are uncertain or whose ability to keep a confidence is in question.

  And yet, the far more important question in a day of private communications that are now forever public is, What happens to the person who does not deal with the secrets of the heart? What kind of energy can a person bring to life who allows the past to clog the arteries of the mind? How confident can a person be who lives with the stress of exposure? How emotionally stable is a person who spends life ignoring the Achilles’ heel that could well spill over into embarrassment—or even break down—at any time? And finally, how capable of helping others are those who harbor their own need to hide from themselves?

  At the end of the day, on the edge of public rejection, only humility can save us from the terror of exposure. After all, once having exposed ourselves, we can never be hurt again by the risk of ruthless revelation.

  Psychologists are confirmed in their opinion that what we spend our liv
es trying to keep secret is what stands to poison us most. It’s not so much what other people say about us that endangers us. It’s what we cannot admit about ourselves—even to ourselves—that most threatens to undermine our confidence, our competence, and even our sense of self-esteem. If we ourselves are not sufficient to ourselves, if we struggle with a sense that something is missing in us, who else can we expect to possibly find us worthy?

  The research is clear: Secrets affect the secret keeper’s quality of life. They take the spirit that should be expended on both giving and getting the best out of life and turn it inward.

  Secret keepers become preoccupied with themselves: with their fear of public nakedness and their efforts to make sure that the secret never oozes out accidentally. When conventional wisdom insisted, for instance, that adopted children should never discover that they were adopted, let alone the identities of their birth mothers, more energy was spent on hiding than on living. Families lived in mortal combat with the hidden enemy: truth.

  I, on the other hand, had been brought up knowing my real name, knowing that there were two sets of lives in my living, understanding that identity was a very slippery thing. And as a result, having no secret to hide, no shame to conceal. What could have been a barrier became freedom from fear for me.

  With the fear of public unmasking comes low self-esteem, a homegrown, built-in mistrust of myself. The impulse to brick myself in, safe from the rest of the world while my world gets smaller and smaller, is by my own design. I have become a prisoner of myself.

  The issues we’re afraid to share, the things that rankle in the soul but never get seriously examined, the researchers tell us, trigger an even greater search for meaning. We become rudderless, without compass, stuck in our aloneness with nowhere clear to go. The secret that lies within has control now.