Radical Spirit

by Joan Chittister

  God, humility teaches us then, is the part of my life that is really real. It is only the presence of God that will go on forever, that will not abandon me regardless of how often I fall and fail. Only when I acknowledge that I can relinquish my attempts, my self-proclaimed sovereign right, to shape the world to my own satisfaction, to wrench the world to my own designs, to gratify my unlimited desires, I can free myself from myself. I can give myself to something larger than myself. I can endure, as Shakespeare put it, “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” without collapse.

  And I can survive. How? Because God is with us, holding us up, prodding us on, being the strength we now lack. It is that for which we genuflect. For that we are in awe.

  This, then, is the ultimate moment of liberation. It comes with a flash of consciousness. This is union with God. Knowing—in our hearts now as well as in our minds—that God is truly “Emmanuel.” This is what enables us to go into the dark places in life singing Alleluia. Nothing else.

  Now we are ready to take risks we would surely otherwise avoid. Failure is not so frightening now, success not so captivating. Humility tells us that life is not all about us. What counts now is simply being in sync with the will of God for me, for the world. With that surrender goes the toxic effect of allowing my own will to obscure the good that is greater than I can see.

  Most important of all, perhaps, all the childhood images of God—God the Magician, God the Santa Claus, God the wrathful Judge, God the Puppeteer—disappear. We know now that the God of Creation has shared power with us and remains with us to help us see life through. Our role is to do our part, to do our best, to trust the path. Our part is to become everything we are meant to be and so to make the world a better place because we have been here.

  The first step toward liberation from the self is the acknowledgment that God is with us—first, last, and always—even in times of adversity. God, “our refuge and our strength,” we’ve come to understand, can’t be “merited,” can’t be earned, doesn’t need to be won in some kind of ecclesial contest. No, this God is already with us. But when we truly, wholly, sincerely understand that, we are free to live life without the kind of fear that renders us powerless or sick with pride. Now we can live life with a relaxed grasp, doing what must be done, trusting the end to God. There is nothing to worry about, nothing to fear, once I decide to let God be God in my life.

  The first step of humility frees us from the demon of merit theology, which forever marks us as failures. It frees us to grow through life always closer and closer to God. It reminds us always that God is not a goal to be achieved.

  God is a presence to be recognized. Nor is God something that happens at the end of life. On the contrary, God is in every pore of it. This step of humility starts at the center, the core, the desired end of the spiritual life. It starts with the contemplation and consciousness of the Mystery that is the only reason, the only possibility of ever developing a truly spiritual life.

  The second step of humility is that we “love not our own will nor take pleasure in the satisfaction of our desires…that we shall imitate by our actions that saying of Christ’s: ‘I have come not to do my own will, but the will of the One who sent me’ (John 6:38).”

  What is the challenge here?

  Every child in the Western world is raised to make independent decisions. I certainly was. One of my mother’s earliest messages stays with me still: She said, after having been a young widow herself, “You have to be able to take care of yourself, Joan.” Which meant: You have to know what you want and how to get it for yourself….You have to be able to make your own decisions. Or more pointed still: You have to be independent. You need to be self-reliant. You need to make up your own mind.

  So what does that have to do with living a spiritual life, I wondered, if we are to believe that being holy means giving up our own will? Are we really to submit our lives to strangers? And if so, what is holy about that? Who says their decisions will be better than ours? Or is this simply about power? About authority? About control?

  When we were young sisters, every minute of our lives was in someone else’s hands. What’s more, there was no assurance whatsoever that we would ever again make the kinds of decisions other adults in the society—male seminarians included—took for granted. In fact, would we ever regain any significant control of our own lives? So what was spiritual about that? Or was it simply about being women who had been traditionally denied the right to make adult legal and economic decisions in any walk of life?

  When the Twin Towers fell in New York City, on September 11, 2001, hundreds lost their lives because they listened to the announcement that told them to stay at their desks until further notice. And, at the same time, people lived that day because they did not obey that order. I had known for years that there was something wrong with the kind of obedience that denies human responsibility.

  Years before that, I watched police and their dogs try to drive African Americans away from white lunch counters. I also saw a holy man, a religious prophet in our midst, lead thousands of peaceful people to defy the segregation laws that kept in civil chains a whole population who were brought here in physical chains against their will to begin with.

  And on the other hand, a Navy SEAL, Derek Lovelace, died while in water training—hounded and dunked by his supervisor—while no one intervened because their orders were to complete the course themselves. And Lovelace died.

  So, when is any of this holy and how do we know?

  A child of this century, I found the second step of humility much less palatable, extremely less realistic than the first. To recognize that God is God, is one thing. To give up the only thing we have in common with God, free will, seemed to me to be entirely another. What was the sense, the purpose of such a thing? What’s more, my entire world confirmed the question.

  After all, if an American birthright is anything, it is a charter for self-will. If the West models anything about relationships, it is that they must be framed with the expectation of equality, independence, and sovereignty. If representative government has any goal whatsoever, it is the search for the common will that emerges out of the shaping and polishing of a bevy of individual wills painfully knitted into one. No, giving up our individual wills is not the ideal human response of Western society. Nor, in a sense, I had thought since I was six years old, should it be.

  My life, in other words, was a long way from the sixth-century Italian culture that had spawned a spirituality based on humility. I could understand its place there, perhaps. But here? In my world?

  I struggled with the whole concept—most of all, perhaps—philosophically. Autonomous human beings, unfettered and unaware of their limitations, can be a dangerous species, of course. But history also tells another story, and history was not on the side of control, it seemed. On the contrary.

  The commitment of a strong-willed person is a public bulwark against tyranny, against autocracy, against the multiple and regular onslaughts on political freedom. Because of their insight, their courage, their fully focused resistance to public decisions made without their input or their response, a few of them have saved many of us.

  Strong individuals freed slaves. They enfranchised women. They fought for civil rights, for the protection of children, for justice at polling places, for just wages and medical care for the poorest of the poor. They became the backbone of the nation. They dug out the scandal of the sexual abuse of children with their bare hands. And in our time, they insist on the protection of the poor, the elderly, and the refugees. They struggle to hold the Union together while they pursue the rights of the minorities everywhere. They are living signs of the virtue of free will.

  To be told that for any reason whatsoever, then, it is good to put down self-will is, in the modern world, an anomaly. I know the feeling.

  Where I came from, even elementary school children were taught independence, but in consort with obedience, a kind of moral schizophrenia if I ever saw it. To even
think of attempting to live both ideals at the same time had all the earmarks of a collision course with life. So, which comes first? Obedience or self-direction?

  The tension between those two polar conceptions of the perfect life emerged early in the process of my spiritual development. The whole context became a backdrop for another kind of spiritual struggle. And I felt it keenly.

  The spiritual life, after all, was made up of constraints, and religious life was organized to institutionalize every one of them. It was holy to be “humble”—meaning docile and unquestioning. It was saintly to be pious—meaning devoted to being perfect as someone else had defined perfection. It was the essence of humility to be selfless—meaning largely invisible, quiet, retiring, and not inclined to take up too much public space.

  I remember that when I announced I had decided to enter the monastic life within the next couple of months, my mother’s comment was “Just remember, Joan, if you go there they will not allow you to lie down with your feet up on the sofa again like you do here.” I was embarrassed by what I considered the triviality of such a response to so exalted a decision. Years later, I understood what she meant—and she was right. Somewhere along the line, sofas had gotten mixed up with other, more sublime measures of sanctity. As in, was never putting my feet up on a sofa again a proper measure of real obedience, real sanctity, or not?

  As the years went by, the question became more universal, more important. Sofas became sofas again, neither a standard of sanctity nor a rule in a rule book. That kind of sacred metric, like hats for girls in church, disappeared in the light of more important issues. Just exactly what sanctity was all about in a world where 65 million refugees shuffled from one border to the next—tired, hungry, abandoned, and abused—became a more real test of moral meaning than sofas would ever be again.

  The question of the surrender of self-will, however, is really no easier to answer now than it was then, but the answers have grown more substantive at least. More adult. More worth committing a life to than the mere notion that if something is painful, it must be holy-making.

  My own personal problem with this second step of humility lay in the struggle to determine when and under what conditions anyone ought to even think of surrendering self-will. More than that, how can such an abdication of self-direction ever possibly be holy? And what kind of humility, I wondered all those years ago, were they talking about: abnegation for its own sake, spinelessness as a synonym for holiness, submission as a sign of conversion? Was this break-a-person-down time? And if so, for whose sake, for what good?

  I began to draw some lines in my head: For instance, some clarity, both spiritual and emotional, is in order. First, negation for its own sake is not holiness, I decided. It’s simply harassment of the soul designed to make discomfort or neediness spiritually good for their own sakes. It puts the focus on nonessentials, where the focus does not belong. It emphasizes one virtue—detachment or penance—at the expense of multiple others, like prophetic witness and reckless generosity, voluntary poverty and selfless ministry to a wounded world.

  Surely, I decided, negation has little or nothing to do with either humility or the constraint of an errant will. It can easily encourage us to hide behind the trappings of false holiness rather than actually do what holiness demands.

  Spinelessness, the adulation of weakness in the face of evil when strength is what’s required, only makes a person more interested in social approval than in following Jesus. The inability to speak up for the truth, for justice, for the end of social corruption is not humility. It is, at best, a mask that hides our inability either to make a decision or to take a stand in the face of sin.

  Or worse, the willingness to submit to superiors on issues either unjust or meaningless only masks a disingenuous—a false—capitulation of personal responsibility.

  Point: Control, invisibility, and silencing under the hubris of humility reduce the adult to the level of spiritual childhood and calls that holy. There is no humility in allowing anyone to take away my need to claim my own conscience. I was there, so I’m sure of that. I was slow at coming to protest the Vietnam War. I was slow at speaking out about segregation and racism. I was slow at being honest enough to say that the Church’s position on women is wrong. Clearly, I had learned to obey, but I had not learned, as this Chapter of the Rule reminded me, to do “the will of the One who sent me” (John 6:38).

  Indeed, a number of things mask as humility that are at best ways to gain favor, save my circle of friends, keep public approval. It’s here, I learned over the years, that the second step of humility comes to free us from the smallest part of ourselves.

  I am still learning, of course, but at least now I have a better picture of what it would look like to be truly humble.

  What is the underlying issue?

  The monks of the third- and fourth-century Egyptian desert were known for the spiritual guidance they shared with one another. In addition, thousands of laity trekked out to their simple cells in search of spiritual advice. Of the sayings collected by these avid disciples, one stands out for its insight into the second step of humility. “A brother asked Abba Poemen,” they say, “How ought we to act in the place where we dwell?” And Abba Poemen answered: “Show discretion towards a stranger; show respect to the Elders; do not impose your own point of view, then, you will live in peace.”

  According to Abba Poemen, obviously, the issue is how “to act in the place where we dwell.” And the answer is clear: Do the will of God. But how to know what that is eludes us.

  The thinking upon which the second step of humility rests is fascinating. The second step says, “Do not love your own will…” It does not say, Do not have one. On the contrary. We must learn young not to be afraid to think separately from those around us. In fact, our own interpretation of the way our piece of the world goes round is actually our gift to it. Only when we have at our disposal all the possible ways of reading any situation can we begin to assess its effects, let alone fashion its future possibilities. And that, in fact, is where God’s will emerges.

  Abba Poemen’s saying enables us to do it all. He tells us to show attention even to strangers. He wants us to listen to other people, no matter how foreign. He wants us to open our minds to new and fresh ideas. He wants us to attribute wisdom—discretion—to everyone, for fear we stunt our own spiritual growth by failing to attend to the judgments of others.

  He wants us, too, to show respect to the elders—to those who endured the heat of the noonday sun long years before us and so formed the world we’re living in now. Clearly, he wants us to realize that we did not invent the wheel. It came from the hands of others—generations ago. Before deciding to change it now, he cautions us to understand why they did what they did then as well as what they think we ourselves ought to be doing now.

  The counsel of the ages is clear. As the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Basho¯ says, “I do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; I seek what they sought.” In that practice lies our respect for those who have gone before us. It is not that we must continue what they did, for those ideas or customs may have long ago dimmed. But we must respect their vision, their efforts, their values, their ideals, their perseverance, their gift to yesterday that makes today possible. To those who would destroy everything that went before them, humility damps the urge. Only by standing on the shoulders of the past can we begin to see the amount of perseverance it takes to do the will of God for the world; in fact, to do anything of value for the world.

  Then Abba Poemen shows us all what the end of the teaching implies: “Do not impose your own point of view, then, you will live in peace.”

  The real issue, then, is this: Of course the second step of humility follows from the first. If we love God above all else, we shall certainly love God’s will above all else. But where does God’s will really come from, and how can we recognize it?

  The answer, Abba Poemen thinks, is very simple, very straightforward. We discover the wi
ll of God, he intimates, by collecting all the wisdom we can—past and present—and then making good judgments ourselves. Which point of view, we must then ask ourselves, comes closest to God’s loving will for the world now and here? Which point of view brings justice and equality, peace and possibility to the world at large? If not now, certainly in times to come.

  The issue under the need to do the will of God is what it means to choose human community in the face of rampant and rapacious individualism.

  This second step of humility moves us out of ourselves in order to appreciate the insights, see the needs, respect the values, and honor the wisdom of the whole world.

  It tells us to listen to everyone in the family, to the lowest workers on the totem pole, to the multiple needs of a pluralistic society. And then to proceed accordingly.

  It is a straight line from the mind of God to the needs of the world. With need as our filter, the will of God for the world cannot possibly be difficult to determine. When children are starving around the world, the systems that permit such a thing, enable such oppression, in fact, must surely be confronted. And changed. Authority must never trump justice.

  The first step of humility is about internalizing the presence of God. The second follows from the first: The presence of God requires our response. God is not a thought now. No, now, given the second step of humility, God is a way of thinking. We are not just talking about the God of Love now. Now we are beginning to talk about what it means to love God.

  Submission to the will of God, of course, requires that I finally learn to relinquish my rabid devotion to self-will. The entire world, the whole universe, is the treasure house of the will of God, the mind of God for us all. It means that when I find myself liking my ideas and my plans better than others, struggling to impose them, cutting people off in conversation before they can even lay out all of their ideas, the caution light will go on in my heart. I will then begin to think again—only this time I will be thinking about everybody else’s ideas and answers, plans and visions, needs and hopes for life. Not simply my own.