wfn.org | [PCUSANEWS] More meat than mince

[Deeanna Alford <dalford@CTR.PCUSA.ORG>]

 03286
July 16, 2003

More meat than mince

Church isn't meant to be non-prophet, nun tells Women's Gathering

by Alexa Smith

LOUISVILLE - In her sermon during the final plenary of the 2003 Churchwide
Gathering of Presbyterian Women last weekend, Sister Joan Chittister didn't
mince words.

Making nice is just not her style.

Chittister, one of the first journalists to criticize the Bush
administration in print for its war-making, has insisted repeatedly that it
does matter whether the government decided on the basis of bad intelligence
to invade Iraq, and that it does matter whether U.S. officials lied about
the urgency of destroying what apparently may have been non-existent
weapons of mass destruction.

In Louisville, she took on the Church, capital "C" - without naming names.

She told her audience that too many religious institutions - run by
establishment-comfy, offering-conscious clergy or pietistic bureaucrats  -
would rather "bind up wounds made by the system, but do nothing to change
the system that is doing the wounding."

In other words: Real ministry means exposing the underlying causes of
suffering, not being satisfied merely to be present - to use a "churchy"
term - with those who suffer.

Chittister challenged her listeners to do better than clergy and church
leaders who fear that speaking prophetically might cut into their offerings
and their numbers: "Our ministry must be not only to comfort, but to
challenge the state, community and church," she said. "Not just to attend
to the pain, but to advocate for change; to be not just a vision, but a
voice; not simply to care for the victims of the world, but also to change
the institutions that victimize them."

That is what is required of Christians who balance contemplation and
action, who refuse to simply "play church" or be tempted to settle for
bureaucracy, weekday mysticism and office management, she said.

In a gathering of more than 4,000 women that was otherwise subdued,
Chittister's words brought her listeners to their feet. The diminutive nun
was applauded loudly and long as she stepped out of the spotlight and
offstage.

The reason people tend to sell prophetic witness short? It costs too much.

"The church became part of the establishment," Chittister said over a
breakfast of eggs benedict the morning after she preached. Somehow, she
said, personal spirituality and action - especially political critique- got
separated in the minds of U.S. churchgoers who often confuse Americanism
with the Bible, and good citizenship with unquestioning loyalty to the
government.

On the other hand, she said, Jesus was a contemplative who practiced
active reflection and demanded more from his disciples than personal faith;
he wanted commitment to the process of bringing about the reign of God.

"I never read a Bible story where it says, 'Jesus didn't want to rock the
boat, so he decided not to say anything that day.' Or, 'Jesus went home
with the rich man and decided not to say anything more,'" Chittister said.

Chittister, whose father was a Presbyterian, is a Benedictine Sister of
Erie known nationally for her opinionated column, "From Where I Stand," in
the National Catholic Reporter. She is engaged in international peace work,
now with the Global Peace Initiative of Women Religious and Spiritual
Leaders, which is funded by the United Nations. Her role is leading the
Women's Partnership for Peace in the Middle East, which brings together
Israeli and Palestinian women.

Chittister became a national voice as a Benedictine prioress, spiritual
director and social psychologist who refused to splinter her diverse
perspectives and insisted on applying the principles of spiritual awakening
to the political realm.

Preaching on the Transfiguration story from the Gospel of Matthew,
Chittister told Presbyterian Women that on Mount Tabor that night, Jesus
identified himself with Moses and Elijah - not David, the king, or Aaron,
the priest, Biblical characters that represent royalty and ritual.

"Jesus identified himself on Tabor ... with Moses, who led people out of
oppression, and with Elijah, whom King Ahab called 'that troubler of
Israel,' the one who condemned the compromise between true and false gods,
the one ... who exposed to the people the underlying causes of their
problems," she said.

"Jesus, the minister, identified himself not with the kings and priest of
Israel who had maintained its establishments and developed its
institutions, good as they were," she pointed out. "No, Jesus, the healer,
identified himself with the prophets, with those who had been sent to warn
Israel of its unconscionable abandonment of the covenant."

Nor does Jesus stay on the mountaintop, as Peter is prepared to do.
Instead, he comes down to the plain below, to walk among crowds of
suffering people.

Chittister said Christians are called to do more than be pietistic or
merely to move among the hurting. Ministry, she said, means exposing to the
wounded the underlying causes of "all the wounding in this world" - and
doing so in the face of opposition from those "institution-saving types for
whom saving the system is much too often a higher priority than saving the
people."

She told her audience: "Service people can pay for, and many people do.
But ministry, real ministry, is priceless, and can be done only in the name
of Jesus, not in the name of careers, professions or promotions."

The root causes of suffering in the world are many, she said, and too few
ministers speak about them.

Churches minister every day to hurting families on the verge of financial
collapse, she said, but no one speaks about the loss of industries to Third
World countries whose people are reduced to industrial slavery.

Seldom mentioned are seniors losing Medicare benefits; the one in six
Americans who can't afford insurance; the fact that more money is put into
weapons of mass destruction than in human development.

"Let's put it this way," Chittister said. "If you were to count one
trillion $1 bills, one per second, 24 hours a day, it would take you 32
years to finish counting. But with that trillion dollars, you could buy a
$100,000 house for every family in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and
Iowa and you could put a $10,000 car in the garage of every one of those
homes. Then there would be enough money left to build 250 $10 million
libraries and 250 $10 million hospitals for every city in those states. And
after that, there would still be enough money left over to put in the bank
and, from the interest alone, pay 10,000 nurses and 10,000 teachers and
still give a $5,000 bonus to ever family in those five states. That's what
one trillion dollars will buy in this country today.

"But Star Wars, the 'death star' weapon being sold as a defense system but
which most credible scientists say can't possibly work, now - this morning,
while we sit here - has already cost more than that. And, the Brookings
Institution tells us, nuclear weaponry alone already carries a price tag of
over $5 trillion."

Such demons, Chittister told her listeners, are not driven out by insight,
vision, contemplation and compassion, nor by organizational niceties, canon
law or clericalism.

"This kind is driven out only by prayer," she said, "by 'putting on the
mind of Christ,' not by putting on more titles, or roles, or uniforms, or
offices, or money.
This kind is driven out by soul-sightedness, only by risk, only by
courage, only by a care that supersedes cost, only by a heart devoted to
causes rather than to symptoms.

"This kind is driven out only by the spirit of Moses and Elijah, whom
kings expelled and professionals despised and the temple feared, but to
whom the people looked for truth."

Chittister said in an interview that women's ministry can be powerful in
such times, precisely because institutions seldom support them well. In her
own tradition, she said, religious women have received paltry salaries, but
managed somehow to build their own institutions and still pay their bills.

Economic independence from the larger church, she said, allows them to
read the Gospel without wearing ecclesiastical fetters. Pastors, she said,
will tell you in a heartbeat that a hard word may be costly in terms of
money or support."Preaching the Gospel is something you do without counting
the heads," she said. (We are called) to be a leaven in the society, not to
be the population."

In her sermon, Chittister drew knowing laughter from her female listeners
by reminding them of the poor treatment of women by institutions they
serve. She criticized churches where God may be called "rock, tree, key,
wind, door and dove in centuries of litanies without bringing the church to
perdition, but ... can never, ever call the God who is endless being,
eternal womb, mother.

"How can we think we minister to women and erase them from the very
pronouns of the church?" she demanded.

 Chittister said she has tried for decades to learn how to faithfully mix
contemplation and action, piety and politics. The church has tried dogmatic
clericalism, she said, and discovered that it doesn't work. Also
insufficient is simple sharing of the suffering of others, a kind of
misguided solidarity.

 She said she is now counting on the concept of co-creation, the idea that
the church is creating a new model for living inside the shell of the old.

"If you are seeing the world through the eyes of Jesus, Moses and Elijah,
you understand that you have to do something about what you see, " she
said. "You contemplate what is going on ... seeing it with your soul.
"Then you do something."

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