Radical Spirit

by Joan Chittister

  This is the change point of life. This is where humility becomes a way of life rather than a threat to personal ambition and ability. I am beginning to understand now that there are ways of doing things other than my own. There are other answers to the question that are more inclusive of the effects of this moment on others—“down to the seventh generation”—as the Native Americans teach. I begin to realize that there are other plans to consider first, rather than my own. Now, by listening to others, I begin to understand the meaning of “discernment” and, led by the Spirit, I come to peace.

  At this point, I begin to see the world through the eyes and the mind of God. All life is God’s will, not simply mine. All peoples are the image of God, not only my kind. All of us have something to say, and in listening to the insights of others, we each get closer to the mind of God. Contemplation of the will of God for us all is the spiritual work of a lifetime, the purpose of life. Otherwise, how can I ever be sure that I am really following the will of the God whose will is therefore everywhere and in everyone else, as well?

  Then peace comes. Why? Because then we are in contention with no one. We aren’t arm wrestling with anyone. We are simply part of the gathering of ideas that will someday serve to make the world a better place. In our time? Possibly not. By me? Seldom. Because of me? Undoubtedly.

  The first and second steps of humility are the path to right-heartedness in life, to life lived between the actual and the spiritual. The desert monastic Isaac the Syrian spoke about it in the seventh century, and his ancient insights get truer by the day. Isaac says, “Knowledge of God and knowledge of self give birth to humility.” When I know who God is—and accept that glory, that ultimacy—then I know who I am. And who I am not. And I am not God. But I am “made in the image of God” in order to mirror God here.

  That God’s will is better for me than my own stumbling attempts to pretend to be more than I am becomes obvious. Isaac was right: It is knowing our place in the universe that makes for humility, that guarantees us peace. And we are neither its glory nor its ultimacy. That puts a lot of things into a more proper perspective, doesn’t it?

  What are the spiritual implications of this step of humility?

  The popular images of the presence of God in life are stern ones. Forbidding ones. They speak of mistrust and punishment, of rules and sins, of dread and control. God the Policeman, God the Disciplinarian, God the Spy are all more common in the common mind than is the tender, caring God, the Good Shepherd. We have all grown up with too many of the control images. But not here. Not in Benedictine spirituality.

  Here, in the very first two steps of humility, all of those ideas of God the Master Rule Giver, God the Autocrat evaporate. Here God becomes our perpetually present Lover—Mother, Father, Refuge—whose will for us is shalom, peace. This is the God who created us—and knows us.

  Not even the Ten Commandments assume the extinction of our human errors. That is impossible in the realm of the human. No, it is rather a belief in the possibility of human growth, your growth and mine, particular to each of us but universal to all of us, nevertheless.

  The presence of God is not about our being under suspicion and disbelief. On the contrary. The commandments themselves are all about right relationships. Their subject matter is manifest: Love God, love your family, love your neighbor, love well, do not seek satisfaction in amassing what is not yours. But most apparent of all, one message rings through every one of them: The will of God for the world—peace and justice—is all you need. When the will of God for the world finally comes, you will have what you need, what you yourself have been seeking all your life. The only bewilderment, perhaps, lies in the fact that we ourselves must be part of bringing the will of God.

  These first two steps of humility repeat the mandate to trust our trustworthy God. They gear us to love rather than fear our loving God, to put down our own will for dominance, so that the will of God for the common good might come. In this simple model lies the peace of God.

  The spiritual implications of such a life are plain. We cannot capture God. No amount of pious record keeping—a rosary a day, Sunday church attendance, so much tithing, or yoga, or meditation, or minyans—can guarantee us depth and authenticity in the spiritual life. Only this merging of two wills—God’s and mine—cements the human-divine relationship.

  Humility is the virtue of liberation from the tyranny of the self. Now we have bigger things to be about in life than personal aggrandizement. The humble, no matter how great, do not spend their lives intent on controlling the rest of their tiny little worlds. On the contrary. Once we learn to let God be God, once we accept the fact that the will of God is greater, broader, deeper, more loving than our own, we are content to learn from others. We begin to see everyone around us as a lesson in living. We find ourselves stretched to honor the gifts of others as well as the value of our own.

  To become open to the rest of the world, to people of other colors, to countries with other customs, to the devout of other religious traditions is the spiritual gold standard of inclusiveness. It says without doubt that I have finally accepted that I am no longer the center of the universe. Conversely, at this point I see that my God is also the God of the universe. I have come to realize that if, indeed, there is only one God, then the message of that God to the rest of the world must be the same as God’s will for me and mine. The well-being that God seeks for me is likewise sought for all others. How can I not speak for their needs, see their values, argue for their rights, work to support their children?

  Most of all, perhaps, humility frees me from the need to wrestle life to my own designs. My public goal now is not to make others just like me. It is to see that my goals are no obstacles to theirs as they strive to achieve their own share of the gifts of God.

  My clear obligation now is to see that God’s will for people everywhere is not being deliberately thwarted, not being ignored in favor of our own. How can we enslave a people to make our shoes and our children’s toys and our clothes in sweatshops across the world? How can we agree to buy without protest foreign imports that pay their makers—often children under twelve years old—$0.70 a day to send us what we will sell here for $125.00? How can we allow the genetic manipulation of seeds that cannot reproduce so that we become the food basket of the world as well as the arms merchant of the world? How can we count our will to power and wealth a greater good than others’ will for a decent life? And how can we call ourselves humble—spiritual—if we do?

  Equally critical to my own spiritual depth, perhaps, is the fact that in these first two steps of humility is the spiritual lesson that gives emotional stability to life. They enable me to accept unplanned change with dogged, steadfast equanimity, with imperturbable faith. If God is God and I have learned to trust the God of Surprises, there is little now that can really rock, convulse, or upend my emotional ground. I learn to expect the unexpected. More than that, I learn to expect that, in the end, this moment of change, however devastating, will be to my good.

  Finally, I learn from these two steps of humility what religion seldom teaches: that being sinless is not enough. It’s being steeped in the mind of God that is important. It’s coming to see the world as God sees the world that changes things. It’s giving my life so that the mind of God for the world might actually become the way of life for the world. It’s about spending my life so that the reign of God might come.

  In these first two steps of humility, we ground ourselves in God. We learn to sing new songs in life. We sing Alleluia now—God is with us—whatever the circumstances, whatever the outcome.

  We sing full-throated with the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” And finally we sing with the psalmist: “Oh, God. It is you for whom I long throughout the day” (Ps. 63:1).

  Unless we can grasp the idea that doing the will of God is greater for my own peace of mind than doing my own will, we stand to find life a cramping, barren, and unloving place.

&nb
sp; But if and when doing the will of God becomes the compass point of my life, no amount of effort toward it can ever be too much, no road to its accomplishment too long.

  The demon that masters me is the arrogance of self-development. The second step of humility frees me to realize that life’s singular purpose is becoming what I was created to be—co-creators with the God of Life. Now I am free to grow bigger than my focus on my small self would ever otherwise allow.

  The third step of humility is that “we submit to the prioress or abbot in all obedience for the love of God.”

  What is the challenge here?

  I look back sometimes and wonder whether, if I had read the Rule of Benedict before I entered, I would ever have entered religious life at all. The ideas in it were simply foreign to my time and place. They came from a planet with which I had had no experience and even less understanding. “Fear” God, or in some versions “Reverence” God, it said—whatever that meant in an era when keeping the rules was what really mattered, more than developing a consciousness of the presence of God. Give up your own will, it went on. And now, worst of all, it said we were to “submit…in all obedience” to whoever was the authority figure of the time. I remember my first taste of it all. It was the summer I entered and I had been told to come to the convent to talk to the prioress about the high school courses I would still need to take.

  She rattled them off in good order. “Now let’s see, this year you will take American history, English, chemistry, physics, French…” and then I said, “Not French, Spanish.” But she persisted. “Oh no, my dear,” she said. “You will take American history, English, chemistry, physics, and French.” I persisted, too. “But, Mother,” I said, “I don’t like French. I like Spanish.” She raised her eyebrows a bit and said—first convent lesson coming up—“My dear child, we don’t say we don’t like anything.” And I said, incredulous and quick to correct the situation, “Do we lie?”

  The lines had already been drawn. Life, from now on, was not a personal decision; it was a communal process.

  In the first two steps toward humility, Benedictine spirituality deals with the questions Who is God? and What does it mean to do the will of God? Then, here in the third step, the real struggle with the personal pursuit of humility really begins. Here, we are told, it seems, that obedience is to be preferred to either creativity or intelligence.

  Maybe it’s the word submit that rankled. Early on, I could hear overtones of conquest here, hints of degradation. My soul shuddered at the very thought of accepting surrender—even as an exercise in humility. If humility is a kind of orchestrated weakness, I thought, how can it possibly be anything real? Let alone do anything good for the psyche, anything healthy for the soul.

  Trust me: It can take years to separate real humility from the practice of humiliation. But it doesn’t take too long to figure out that they are not the same thing. Small children caught talking in school and made to wear long, ugly paper tongues around their necks for the rest of the day know the difference. Is it punishment? Indeed. Is it psychologically transformative?

  Almost never. That kind of treatment, at most, sets up the kind of fear and resistance that act out later, in other places and in other ways.

  The truth is that something feels wrong about setting up a human being, let alone an adult, to kowtow, to acquiesce, to surrender. Then to call that spirituality, or even piety, let alone virtue—obedience—is simply distasteful. American sailors on their knees, hands behind their heads, that’s surrender. That’s not virtue. The control of women by men in the name of marriage is not love, that’s abasement. The verbal denunciations of gays, blacks, women, minorities in coarse and vulgar language is not freedom of speech, it’s degradation. And none of those things lead to humility; they lead to anger, to ignominy, to war. Not to the love of God.

  Most of all, it seemed to me to be play-school humility. The so-called humility that pretends a submission that does not, should not, be required of any adult, is an unseemly indicator for a relationship between equals. The whole idea smacks of indignity, a lack of respect for another human being. Roman society, the society for which this step of humility was first written, was a highly stratified one: Romans on top, foreigners and slaves on the bottom. To call the mighty to such a low state might well have been a great equalizer then, but now? Among equals?

  I simply could not understand how the kind of humility that requires capitulation from anyone could possibly apply to a spiritual state. And if it did, what kind of a life could that possibly be in our time? In a time that boasts that its ideal is personal freedom and political equality? And more than that, to a religious society whose theology says of itself, “We—human beings—are made slightly lower than the angels”?

  There had to be something wrong with that kind of humility. And there is. That kind of humility is not humility at all. It is the defacement of the face of God in the other. It wants submission rather than growth. It wants compliance where commitment to another whole attitude toward life must develop instead.

  What’s wrong with it, I came to understand over the years, is that “humility”—invisibility—of that ilk is imposed. There is nothing free about it and so there is nothing real about it. It is a game played by the powerful on the powerless to demonstrate superiority. And people who comply with such a charade erase themselves from the responsible part of the human race.

  For years I accepted the idea that such invisibility, both personal and psychological, was simply part of the kind of asceticism that real religious fervor required. It had something to do with effacement of the self. Its purpose was the kind of obedience to the will of God that the first and second steps of humility implied. But was getting permission from a superior to walk over to a parish school I’d been ordered to teach in—as we were expected to do monthly—really the serious content of the vow of obedience I’d taken? Or, even now, is treating undocumented refugees like pawns rather than as human beings really “Christian”?

  For me there were questions all along the way about this concept of obedience that never quite went away, all of them compounded by a rising consciousness of the oppression of women in society. Except for one problem. This Rule had originally been written by a man for men. For Roman men—with all the assumptions of independence their status in society implied. There had to be more to it than simply the oppression of women. It had to have something to do with the development of the spiritual life itself, female or male. And to be real humility—whatever that was—it had to have something to do with cultivating a relationship with the loving, caring, life-expanding God of the first and second steps of humility.

  Suddenly I knew the problem: How could I say that I really believed the will of God was best for me if I refused to accept the fact that the will of others could be good for me, too? It was the spiritual conundrum of all time. How is it that the growth of my own soul lies in its relationship to the plans of others?

  Then, a light in my soul went on: Learning to defer to those who were entrusted with the chrysalises of our lives has more to do with growth than with repression. Voluntary deference is about learning to see the place of others in our lives as necessary to the ripening of our own.

  For me, the examples came quick and sure over the years: I would never have chosen to teach grade school if I had been making my own decisions. But it was four years of grade schoolers whose questions and false starts and open hearts taught me how to teach.

  I would never have tried to teach high school after being crippled by polio for fear I would not be able to connect with older students. But it was those very limitations and the very physical help I got from them during that period that brought me back to full strength in both body and personality.

  I would never have been a writer if my life had not taken the twists and turns that being part of community life demanded. What I loved to do—but fully expected never to be able to do—began because others put me in positions that required it.

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t of this braiding of relationships would come a lot of other things that had to be dealt with, of course: frustration, sometimes; impatience, often; even resistance, at times. But it was learning to deal well with others—and to survive despite the fact that it all seemed to be too much—that would put me in touch with the wisdom of the universe. We are all meant, I learned at long last, to work it out together. We are all meant to learn to listen to one another. Over and over again.

  So here, in these interactions with the equally powerful independence of others, would come the limiting, the stretching, of my own. It was that obedience, that learning to listen to visions of life quite different from my own, that would test and try my respect for the God-life that lives in others as well as in me.

  It also requires that I learn to trust that others have my good in mind as much as I do. Aye, there’s the rub: Psychologists long ago developed the Trust Test in an attempt to convince their clients that whatever bad happened they could expect help enough to save them from the worst of it.

  So they put people in two circles, one behind the other. At a signal known only to those in the front line, client one fell backward. The person behind client one was meant to stop the fall, despite the fact that she or he did not know when it would happen. One person, in other words, had to trust that someone would catch her before she hurt herself in the free fall. The other person had to stay alert to the needs of the first.