Radical Spirit

by Joan Chittister

  Obedience is not for its own sake; it is for the preservation of the law of God. The Scriptures are clear about those differences. It is about learning to trust the moral compass of our own souls as well as to trust the authority, the insights of another. In the end it is humility, our total commitment to the glory and will of God—not obedience to the minions of any system, not to obedience for its own sake—that keeps us anchored to the mind of God. It is our commitment to the law of God that is our only true indicator and measure of the kind of attention we give to any system on earth.

  The demon of unholy submission leaves us prey to pressures within us and around us that struggle for control. A spiritual life without an understanding that obedience is meant to free us to do the will of God is an incomplete and immature one.

  A spiritual life that learns to listen to the voice of God within is a spiritual life with God as a director. Then we are free; then we are truly authentic.

  The fourth step of humility is “that [if] this obedience [is] under difficult, unfavorable, or even unjust conditions” we not grow weary or give up.

  What is the challenge here?

  Some things in life cannot be avoided. Obedience, the sense of being beholden to someone else, is one of them. These issues start young—with parents and babysitters; with teachers; and with older siblings. Every new relationship along the way, at whatever age, is an exercise in control, theirs over us. To slip out of the noose of subordination, we work at learning to manipulate people by saying what they want to hear from us, for instance; by buying them off with favors or good work. Or we pout and have temper tantrums until we learn that those things don’t really work. At best, they simply prolong the contest until we succumb, eventually, to an uneasy kind of peace that human conflict too often requires of children, of underlings, of subordinates.

  The truth is that there is no real independence to be had in life. We are all attached forever to people who have claims on us—wives and husbands, employers and supervisors, social systems and government regulations, someone somewhere.

  Accepting responsibility for our little part of life, however, doing the deed daily for years, with little interest, minimal support or personal excitement is its own kind of spiritual burden. Going on when there is nothing in the project interesting enough to engage me is not as noble as conscientious disobedience. But it can be twice as agonizing. Accepting directions that come down from some misty height, to do what I do not really enjoy doing, grates on the soul.

  What to do then?

  At that point, the combat shifts from control to endurance. Now, it’s all about not growing weary—and oh, I have been weary enough so many times to understand the difficulty of going on. Then it’s not that authority is oppressive or unfair. It’s that the circumstances never change. The tiny little irritations that go with the situation never end. They become the sandpaper on my soul. I find myself in a No Exit moment: This is not going to change. It is never going to end.

  I know that feeling only too well. My first teaching assignment at the age of nineteen, after one full year of college, was one hundred miles away from home. It was an era when nuns did not have cars or phones or even daily mail. Instead, intercommunity mail was sent in old envelopes marked “Kindness of” the person who was making the trip. If anyone ever did.

  The weeks went slowly by. It was a long wait between periods of human interaction punctuated only by the grind of days in an elementary school classroom that never changed. The rounds of prayers, meals, college work, classroom preparation, and housecleaning went endlessly, monotonously on. All my peers had been sent to other places. Everyone else in the small convent was older, self-contained, intent on their own work, almost totally unaware of me or my very isolated social situation. There was nothing in the way of excitement. Actually, there was nothing but routine, dull and deadening routine. I prayed desperately to be moved. To ask to be moved would clearly have signaled the worst possible credentials for entering the community.

  In addition to the schedule of the place, the local superior’s speech pattern was gruff, not harsh necessarily, but not amenable to weakness either. It was time to think again about the fourth step of humility. What, I asked myself over and over, could possibly be the point of simply hanging on when most of all you want to quit? And what value is there, if any, to staying with something that leaves a person dry and bare inside? The great spiritual questions of my year were upon me, and I had no clue what the answer to either of those questions could possibly be.

  I was too busy trying to save my mind as well as my soul.

  When the next year’s appointments were published in August, my heart sank. I was not moved to another mission; in the end I was sent back to the same place for the next three years. There was no avoiding it. I had to think through this step of humility and find not simply purpose but good in it. To be candid, it was years before I could see in retrospect what had really been happening to me when all I could do was hang on—and hope.

  My first response to what I considered the most disappointing environment of my assignment became the unknown blessing of the time. The first of the next three years, I set about reading all the plays of Shakespeare. The second and third years, I read all the librettos of American musicals. Only years later did I realize that without what I considered that dull and dreary time, I would certainly not have been able to complete that library for years and years and years. The next assignment, when it finally came, captured every dimension of my soul. Life, then, was far too rich and stimulating for me even to begin to think of crawling into a room by myself to read something I did not need to read for any professional reason.

  I forgot all about the grind of simply going on. Life had been resurrected—a kind of Mannheim Steamroller experience of the old made new again. All the pain of the past, I was sure was gone forever.

  It took years before simply being able to endure became a factor again in my spiritual life. I did not at that time really see any basic or general or lifelong value in simply treading water anywhere. Better to be honest, I had by then come to believe. Better to be honest and quit. But I was wrong.

  Actually, I came to realize then, it was better to find something else to do in the middle of the grind. Something that I really liked—like the reading regimen that had rescued my soul before. And so I did. That way, not only did the time go by fruitfully but I also began to enjoy my life more. I settled in. I quieted down. I lived a steady and deepening life. I discovered that simply being where I was, concentrating on the inner life rather than racing around looking for a more attractive exterior life, was itself a contemplative exercise.

  I began to see that there was more value to simply being than first met the eye. I learned to make bad time good time, an enterprise that has made the entire rest of my life richer. I don’t tap my feet in waiting rooms anymore. In the first place, I have something with me worth doing at all times. In the second, I know that there is no such thing as wasted time, unless, of course, I waste it. And finally, I have discovered in whole new ways that God’s will is indeed best for me.

  Little did I know then that endurance is itself a bulwark against the empty pride that comes with the delusion of autonomy. Little did I think back to what I had thought logical about the second step of humility: If God is really the Great Good of life, then the will of God is also best for us. And what is the will of God? Easy. God’s will for us is what’s left over when we have done everything we can possibly do to get out of doing what we’re doing right now.

  I learned that God’s will was worth enduring—until the purpose of it could become transparent again and its gifts expose themselves. I learned that this is exactly what the fourth degree of humility is all about: learning, growing, living through the transition parts of life, and so becoming freer all the time.

  What is the underlying issue?

  “O snail, climb Mount Fuji, But slowly, slowly…” the haiku master and lay Buddhist priest Issa writes. Some might c
all that a Japanese version of the fourth step of humility. Psychiatry might call it a recognition of the place of patience in life. The monastic might see it as a call to the virtue of endurance. But if endurance is such a universal part of life, what is the human question that drives it?

  The haiku, in its short, sharp way makes three points:

  In the first place, there are great, important things to do in life however small, however frail we feel, however stacked the odds are against us.

  And yet, at the same time, there is more to life than speed. What’s the use of speed? The mountain is not going to go anywhere as we climb it. Conditions might well change as we go and demand a revision of both our plans and our schedule.

  Finally, of course, the difficulties involved in the project must be confronted head-on, but it’s unlikely that they can be resolved immediately. After all, a mountain is a mountain with everything that has to say about what can be learned as we climb and everything that will need to be endured as we go.

  Obviously, what is needed for the long haul is not heedlessness or a series of senseless attempts as we get more and more tired, more and more frustrated, more and more stressed. What is needed is patience.

  It takes patience to come to know God. We must give ourselves a lifetime to do it.

  It takes patience to appreciate every stage of the climb—the hard beginning, the lofty but unreal schedule, and, most of all, the wearying repetition of the process. We must be willing to immerse ourselves in each of them.

  It takes patience to overcome the impulse to frustration, the kind that comes from demanding from ourselves instantaneous results. Frustration ruins the journey by pushing on blindly, past the joy of the goals met and the sense of achievement in the understandings gained, and the comfort of security that comes from forming friendships along the way, and the joy of reaching one plateau after another. By allowing frustration to cloud our vision, we miss the scenes and views, the flora and fauna on the way.

  This snail’s journey is clearly, like the fourth step of humility, a call to live life with a quiet mind. Then, like the psalmist, we can “wait in patience for God’s promise is forever” to help us do what must be done in us. This climb toward humility points us to the effect of frustration on the spiritual life and the spirit of patience it will take to succeed.

  Frustration is what seeks to put us back in charge of our lives. It is the direct antithesis of humility. It stamps the foot of the soul and demands to be in control again. As a result, I abdicate the opportunity to learn something new either about myself or about life in general along the way. “I give up and grow weary” instead. I give up and grow angry or depressed instead. Just when I might have wrestled my egoism to the ground, I simply stop trying. The process is abandoned. My own growth is abandoned. I have put impatience with the will and ways of God where spiritual maturity should be.

  Even more basic to self-understanding when these moods wash over me is the fact that it’s not really any one particular thing that is my problem. What frustrates me is anything that obstructs my intent to wrench the world to my will. Down deep, frustration is not about the project at hand. It’s my will that this is all about. It’s about my internal insistence that my will be satisfied at all costs and immediately. Then I become a whimpering, silly kind of thing where only the strong can possibly prevail.

  But there is a second question that demands at least as much reflection as the first, and perhaps even more depth. And that is the question of whether or not being patient in the face of injustice is not apathy. Why would anyone, let alone Benedict of Nursia, one of the greatest masters of spirituality in the history of the Church, advise endurance? Why call for patience even if this obedience is “under difficult, unfavorable, or even unjust conditions”? The answer demands serious consideration. What is the place of endurance in situations of abuse like bad marriages, demeaning professional environments, institutional oppression, and systemic injustice?

  There are three major obstacles, I think, that must be confronted if we are to come to both physical and spiritual health in the face of spiritual and physical stress.

  First, what is, is. To continue to pour salt on our own souls in the face of the natural impediments of life is to open ourselves to physical as well as spiritual discontent. Even chronic illnesses. What we continue to tell ourselves as we go—the self-talk that provides the script for our lives—determines our attitudes toward life in general. It dins into us that life is endemically unfair, perhaps. Or impossible, maybe. Or determined to defeat us, for all we know. It eats at the bedrock of faith. It distances us from the God within. It fails the test of trust in God. And, ironically, it makes the next challenge, the next project, the next long-term obstacle on the way to the will of God even harder to reshape because we have defeated ourselves even before we started.

  Interestingly enough, what is now called the Stanford Marshmallow Study exposes the effect of patience in the present and its impact on the future as well. Working with children four to five years old, children too young to come to the situation with preconceived ideas, the researchers struck a deal. Each child was given a marshmallow. She or he could decide to eat it now or to wait fifteen minutes and get a second marshmallow for not having eaten the first.

  Then the participants were followed throughout life to determine how they managed the twists and turns, the normal frustrations and failures of the average life. In each case, the years of scientific follow-up showed, those children who had delayed instantaneous gratification for the sake of long-term rewards in the initial experiment fared better on every scale of life development and achievement.

  Clearly, patient endurance eases the kind of stress that modern medical science says actually kills people.

  Second, there are simply some things in life that are not amenable to change or are totally outside our control to change. Disability, for instance. Imprisonment, for instance. Death, for instance.

  It is only patient endurance in the face of such non-negotiables that enables us to withstand pressure with good mental health, let alone spiritual faith.

  Patience and faith lead us on after moments like these still trusting in the future, still committed to living life to its psychological fullest, despite its physical boundaries.

  Finally, there are things like slavery and war, sexism and racism, poverty and disgrace that can only be chipped away one generation, one life at a time. But to do that well, we must learn to endure. We must see the injustice, the difficulties before us, the unfavorable conditions in which we live and then work for years, if necessary, to make the future safe for others. That sense of purpose alone makes life rich and worthwhile, successful and significant, however limited the gains, however long the journey.

  Generations of women have lived in oppression, raising children against all odds and working tirelessly, sometimes underground, for equality and justice. Generations of men have worked at jobs that broke them physically in order to provide for families they were left with few hours to enjoy and too little money to enable them to relax. Ever. Only after the formation of unions and the things like the Fair Labor Standards Act could men feel the fullness of dignity that comes with good, hard work well done. The African Americans who led the antislavery movements did not live in vain. Nor did they give up or succumb to the pressures around them. The Peace Movement inches closer every day to bringing the world to understand that pacifism is not passiveness. All of them climbing Mount Fuji slowly persist in making change one inch at a time.

  Indeed, Scripture tells us clearly: God’s time is not our time. We know neither the day nor the hour. It is ours only to go on working for change when going on seems fruitless and madness runs amok that is the true sign of both faith and commitment.

  The point is that patient endurance climbs on, putting our lives in God’s hands. We do consistently and faithfully what must be done to make this world a better place. No, we may not get the credit for doing it, and that in itself drains our effo
rts of the corrosive of pride. We trust only that our creating God will gather all the small pieces of effort and someday bring them together in a great new view of the world. Then we discover the power of patience.

  Most of all, we are freed now from the infantilism of frustration. We are free to pursue the good—however long it takes to come. After all, it is the good we are about, not personal gratification. It is serenity, not security, that is the gift of patience.

  The ancients explain it this way:

  “How many snowflakes does it take to break a branch?” the snowy owl asked a snowflake.

  “I don’t know for sure, but it must be about a million,” the snowflake answered back.

  “And how many have fallen now?” the owl went on.

  “Oh, I suppose about five thousand maybe,” the snowflake calculated.

  “Then why do you go on with such a fruitless task?” the snowy owl persisted.

  “Because,” the snowflake answered with a touch of exasperation, “I want to do my part.”

  What are the spiritual implications of this step of humility?

  The place of patience in life is an important one. To confuse patience with compliance makes us all co-conspirators with all the evil in the world. On the other hand, to preach patience when what we really want is the right to be apathetic is about as far as we can get from the sharp, clear light of reason.

  Nevertheless, the temptation to avoid shining the light of truth into the dark spots of life abounds. “These things take time,” people say when what they really mean is “I don’t want to do anything to change it.” Or “We have to be careful not to rock the boat,” when what they really want is to avoid the consequences of conscience.