LLUMINATED
LIFE
Monastic
Wisdom for
Seekers of
Light
JOAN CHITTISTER
The Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America (Maryknoll) recruits and trains people for overseas missionary service. Through Orbis Books, Maryknoll aims to foster the international dialogue that is essential to mission. The books published, however, reflect the opinions of their authors and are not meant to represent the official position of the society. To obtain more information about Maryknoll or Orbis Books, please visit our website at www.maryknollsociety.org.
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Published in 2000 by Orbis Books, P.O. Box 302,
Maryknoll, NY 10545-0302 U.S.A.
Copyright © 2000 Joan Chittister
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Queries regarding rights and permissions should be addressed to the publisher.
Manufactured in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chittister, Joan.
Illuminated life: monastic wisdom for seekers of light / Joan Chittister.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-57075-878-2 (pbk.)
1. Christian life – Catholic authors. 2. Spiritual life – Catholic Church. 3. Monastic and religious life. I. Title.
BX2350.2 .C526 2000
248.8'94–dc21 99-058636
This book is dedicated
to all the busy contemplatives around me
who have challenged my vision
and deepened my soul
just by bringing the presence of God
wherever they happened to be at the time
and, in particular, to Mary Margaret Kraus, OSB,
past prioress, Benedictine Sisters of Erie,
who exudes what this book is about.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Illuminated Life: Being Contemplative in the Midst of Chaos
Awareness
Beauty
Community
Dailiness
Enlightenment
Faith
Growth
Humility
Interiority
Justice
Kindness
Lectio, the Art of Holy Reading
Metanoia, Call to Conversion
Nature
Openness
Prayer
Quest
Re-creation
Silence
Time
Understanding
Vision
Work
Xenophilia, the Love of Strangers
Yearning
Zeal
Across the Centuries
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
People illumine our lives as little else has the capacity to do. I know because this book, as well as most of the rest of my life, is lived in the light of good friends and competent council. Many have contributed to this endeavor, made it stronger, given it more depth, more precision.
I am particularly grateful to Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB, who prompted this work, as she has so many others of my projects. I am never unaware of the insights and responses of Marlene Bertke, OSB, Jean Lavin, OSB, Rita Panciera, RSM, Anne McCarthy, OSB, Brother Thomas Bezanson, Christine Vladimiroff, OSB, and Linda Romey, OSB, who gave it considerable and contemplative attention.
I am most grateful to Andrea Lee, IHM, President, College of St. Catherine, St. Paul, Minn., for the gracious, comfortable, and recklessly generous contribution of campus facilities and support services that made this writing possible. With the help of the college staff, the community of the Sisters of St. Joseph there, and the personal support of Mary Delaney and the entire Delaney family this work time itself was a rich and contemplative experience.
I am always grateful and ever in awe of the investment of time, competence, and professionalism of Mary Lee Farrell, GNSH, and Mary Grace Hanes, OSB, as they negotiate the mysteries of the publishing world and bring these books to light.
Finally, I know that without the office management and general facilitation of Maureen Tobin, OSB, during these long periods, there would be no publications—and even less reflection time—in my life.
To all these people I present the beginning of ideas worth pursuing more thoroughly, more deeply, always.
Illuminated Life
Being Contemplative in the Midst of Chaos
THIS BOOK TALKS ABOUT YOUR LIFE—the one you fear is not spiritual because of its complexities and concerns. Spirituality, you are certain, is the province of those who manage to escape from the pressures of life. But if withdrawal is of the essence of the spiritual life, then whole generations of spiritual sages have been wrong. This book is about qualities the world's most ancient of seekers say are the cardinal components of a contemplative life. And “escape,” you will notice, is not one of the elements of this long-standing spiritual alphabet. The truly spiritual person, tradition teaches us, knows that spirituality is concerned with how to live a full life, not an empty one. Real spirituality is life illumined by a compelling search for wholeness. It is contemplation at the eye of chaos. It is life lived to the full.
All we have in life is life. Things—the cars, the houses, the educations, the jobs, the money—come and go, turn to dust between our fingers, change and disappear. Things do not make life, life. The gift of life, the secret of life, is that it must be developed from the inside out, from what we bring to it from within ourselves, not from what we collect or consume as we go through it, not even from what we experience in the course of it. It is not circumstance that makes or destroys a life. Anyone who has survived the death of a lover, the loss of a position, the end of a dream, the enmity of a friend knows that.
It is the way we live each of the circumstances of life, the humdrum as well as the extraordinary, the daily as well as the defining moments, that determines the quality of our lives. Rich people are often deeply unhappy. Poor people are often blissfully contented. Old people know things about life that young people have yet to learn. Women have a different perspective on life than men do. Young people have hopes that old people cannot claim. Men have a sense of living that women are only now beginning to learn. Yet, all of them, each of them—each of us—has the latitude to live life either well or poorly. Ironically enough, it is a matter of decision. And the decision is ours.
Centuries ago, some men and women intent on living life beyond the obvious developed a life style, a set of values, an attitude of mind, a way of going through life designed to bring life to life. These monastic wisdom figures reaffirmed for every generation the balance which becoming whole requires. This book is about those values. Those attitudes, those insights, have been tried over time and found to be true. Most of all, they can be developed by anyone in any situation. They tell us how to keep things in perspective, how to live life well, how to see the life beyond life. Those qualities are available to us yet. They make us contemplatives in the midst of chaos.
Time presses upon us and tells us we're too busy to be contemplative, but our souls know better. Souls die from lack of reflection. Responsibilities dog us and tell us we're too involved with the “real” world to be concerned about the spiritual question. But it is always spiritual questions that make the difference in the way we go about our public responsibilities. Marriage, business, children, professions are all defined to keep contemplation out. We go about
them as if there were no inherent spiritual dimension to each of them when the fact of the matter is that no one needs contemplation more than the harried mother, the irritable father, the ambitious executive, the striving professional, the poor woman, the sick man. Then, in those situations, we need reflection, understanding, meaning, peace of soul more than ever. People from all states of life, in all periods of time have known the need, have pursued the presence of God in the most ungodly of times and situations. This book recalls those qualities and applies them to the present.
Religion is about ritual, about morals, about systems of thought, all of them good but all of them incomplete. Spirituality is about coming to consciousness of the sacred. It is in that consciousness that perspective comes, that peace comes. It is in that consciousness that a person comes to wholeness.
Life is not an exercise to be endured. It is a mystery to be unfolded. Life comes from the living of it. The attitudes we bring to it and the understandings we take away from each of the moments that touch us constitute the depth of soul we bring to all the most mundane events of life. They measure the quality of our lives. The truth is that life is the only commodity each of us actually owns. It is the only thing in the universe over which we have any real control whatsoever, slim as that may be.
It is a busy world. A frightfully busy world sometimes. We live in a world the speed and pressures of which consume us, drain our souls, dry out our hearts, damp our spirits and make living more a series of duties than a kind of joyful mystery. We spend time making telephone callbacks, doing the shopping, hauling the laundry, running errands through narrow, crowded streets, grinding through routines, going to meetings, answering question after question, doing repetitive motions, standing in lines of one kind or another, making the long commute, falling into bed late—too late—day after day, night after night. We close our eyes at the end of the day and wonder where life has gone.
We spend life too tired to garden, too distracted to read, too busy to talk, too plagued by people and deadlines to organize our lives, to reflect on our futures, to appreciate our present. We simply go on, day after day. Where is what it means to be human in all of that? Where is God in all of that? How shall we ever get the most out of life if life itself is our greatest obstacle to it? What does it mean to be spiritual, to be contemplative, in the midst of the private chaos that clutters our paltry little lives? Where can we go for a model of another way to live when we have no choice but to live the way we do?
The desert monastics, alone in the wilderness of fourth-century Egypt, wrestled with the elements of life, plumbed its basics, tested its truths, and passed on their wisdom to those who sought it out. Thousands of people saw the difference in their stripped-down, simple lives and trekked out to their small monasteries to ask what it was that could wring such meaning out of such apparent deprivation. The abbas and ammas, the spiritual fathers and mothers of the desert, left words for the ages to live by. Fifteen centuries later, their words still ring through time, calling each of us to take as rudders and as beacons a series of values meant to bring depth, meaning, and happiness to the most cluttered, most pressured, most parched of us.
Illuminated Life is a summons. It invites us to quit looking for spiritual techniques and psychological quick-fixes to give substance to our lives. It asks us to remember again the spiritual direction that has stood the test of time. It asks us to go inside ourselves to clear out the debris of the heart rather than to concentrate on trying to control the environment and situations around us. It leads us to see into the present with the eye of the soul so that we can see into the glimpse of heaven that each life carries within itself. It takes us inside ourselves and leads us back out of ourselves at the same time.
Abba Sisoes said: “Seek God, and not where God lives.” We live and breathe, grow and develop in the womb of God. And yet we seek God elsewhere—in defined places, in special ways, on mountaintops and in caves, on specific days and with special ceremonies. But the life that is full of light knows that God is not over there, God is here. And for the taking. The only question is how.
wareness
A brother went to see Abba Moses in his hermitage at Scetis and begged him for a word. And the old man said: “Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”
WHAT IS RIGHT IN FRONT OF US we see least. We take the plants in the room for granted. We pay no attention to the coming of night. We miss the look of invitation on a neighbor's face. We see only ourselves in action and miss the cocoon around us. As a result, we run the risk of coming out of every situation with no more than when we went into it.
Learning to notice the obvious, the colors that touch our psyches, the shapes that vie for our attention, the looks on the faces of those who stand before us blurred by familiarity, blank with anonymity—the context in which we find our distracted selves—is the beginning of contemplation. Awareness of the power of the present—monastic mindfulness—is the essence of the contemplative life and common to all contemplative traditions. “Oh, wonder of wonders,” the Sufi master says, “I chop wood. I draw water from the well.” I live in the present, in other words. I know that what is, is the presence of God for me. “The first step of humility is to ‘keep the reverence of God always before our eyes' and never forget it,” the Rule of Benedict says. See everything in life as sacred. This neighborhood calls something out in us. This tree stirs feeling in us. This work touches hope in us. Everything in life, in fact, is speaking to us of something. It is only when we learn to ask what the world around us is saying to us at this very moment, in this particular situation, that we tend to the seedbed of the soul.
Awareness puts us into contact with the universe. It mines every relationship, unmasks every event, every moment, for the meaning that is under the meaning of it. The question is not so much what is going on in the room, but what is happening to me because of it? What do I see here of God that I could not see otherwise? What is God demanding of my heart as a result of each event, each situation, each person in my life? Etty Hillesum, Jewish prisoner in one of Hitler's concentration camps, saw the goodness in her German guards. That is contemplation, that is the willingness to see as God sees. It does not change the difficulty, the boredom, the evil of a pernicious, an insidious situation, perhaps, but it can change the texture of our own hearts, the quality of our own responses, the depth of our own understandings. Without awareness, enemies stay forever only enemies and life is forever bland.
Until I become truly aware of the world in which I live, I cannot possibly get more out of a situation than a mere outline of reality, a kind of caricature of time. It takes a lifetime to really understand that God is in what is standing in front of me. Most of life is spent looking, straining to see the God in the mist, behind the cloud, beyond the dark. It is when we face God in one another, in creation, in the moment, that the real spiritual journey begins.
Everything in life is meant to stretch me beyond my superficial self to my better self, to the Ultimate Good who is God. But before that can happen, I must be alive in it myself. I must ask of everything in life: What is this saying to me about life? Why? Because when we cease to look deeply at all the parts of our lives, our souls are already dead.
To be a contemplative I must ask always, of everything: What is there in this of God for me?
eauty
One night bandits came to the hermitage of an old monastic and said: “We have come to take away everything in your cell.” And the monastic said, “Take whatever you see, my sons.” The bandits gathered up everything they found and went away. But they left behind a little bag with silver candlesticks. When the monastic saw it, he picked it up and ran after them, shouting. “Take these, take these. You forgot them and they are the most beautiful of all.”
WHAT MAY BE MOST MISSING in this highly technological world of ours is beauty. We value efficiency instead. We want functionalism over art. We create trash. We bask in kitsch. But beauty, right proportion in all things, harmon
y in the universe of our lives, truth in appearances, eludes us. We paint over good wood. We prefer plastic flowers to wild flowers. We reproduce the Pieta in plastics. We forego the natural and the real for the gaudy and the pretentious. We are, as a people, awash in the banal. A loss of commitment to beauty may be the clearest sign we have that we have lost our way to God. Without beauty we miss the glory of the face of God in the here and now.
Beauty is the most provocative promise we have of the Beautiful. It lures us and calls us and leads us on. Souls thirst for beauty and thrive on it and by it nourish hope. It is Beauty that magnetizes the contemplative, and it is the duty of the contemplative to give beauty away so that the rest of the world may, in the midst of squalor, ugliness, and pain, remember that beauty is possible.
Beauty feeds contemplation, and Beauty is its end. A sense of Beauty evokes in us consciousness of the eternal in the temporal. It calls us beyond both the present and the past to that everlasting Now where Beauty dwells in perpetuity.
Beauty, in other words, lifts life out of the anesthetizing cliches of the pedestrian. An encounter with the beautiful lifts our eyes beyond the commonplace and gives us a reason for going on, for ranging beyond the mundane, for endeavoring ourselves always to become more than we are. In the midst of struggle, in the depths of darkness, in the throes of ugliness, beauty brings with it a realization that the best in life is, whatever the cost, really possible.
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