In the Heart of the Temple: My Spiritual Vision for Today’s World
Joan Chittister
Bluebridge Books
Joan Chittister, feminist, Roman Catholic religious and passionate Benedictine, has been railing against her church and its patriarchal traditions and practice for a long time. Her writing has provided comfort and inspiration to women of all Christian denominations who grow weary. Her 30-plus books display an ardent devotion to a Christianity that is on the side of the poor, in harmony with creation, non-violent, non-hierarchical, inclusive, egalitarian and feminist. Yet she lives and works within an ecclesiastical tradition that has over its history, she continually notes with chagrin, embraced the polar opposite: wealth, power, violence, sexism, totalitarianism, exclusion and exploitation.
This is a collection of Sister Chittister’s essays drawn from speeches, lectures and writings over a 14-year period beginning in 1989. In his forward, the Lutheran scholar and essayist Martin Marty recalls the broader context for these writings, which is her life: that of an impatient, irritable and irritating young religious, who "expected Christians to fly," whose first visit to Rome in the years immediately following Vatican II resulted in what she thought was the loss of her faith, who metamorphosed into the Joan of her later years, less idealistic, more mature in her struggles with disappointment and pain, more tempered by hope. These essays track some of that change that she would not call mellowing, but she might call wisdom or maturity.
This is not to say that the fires of her anger are dimmed or quenched. On the contrary. Though Marty reminds the reader that she is Catholic with a capital C, "of the Roman obedience," it is not a stupefying submission but, more often than not, a "holy disobedience" that marks her words and work. Why? Because so much of what calls itself Christian is "more fancy than fact" strayed so far from the life and message of Jesus as to be unrecognizable.
Rather than standing as beacons to a different way, churches are joining the corporate pack, taking up the language and ethos of the marketplace where the highest values are efficiency and profitability, where everything is commodified, and, in the process, destroyed, violated, disposed.
She rebukes us for our collusion in work that enslaves others in sweatshops and kitchens and ourselves in assembly lines and office cubicles; for a definition of success that is measured only in upward mobility, salary scales and stuff. She laments the resultant loss of Sabbath, the very concept of Sabbath and its economy of just enough.
Chittister writes elsewhere that if spirituality is not feminist, it cannot claim to be Christian. This collection of essays continues that theme in the areas of language, whether referring to humankind or the Godhead, economics and work, office and authority. "If God is male, then males are, indeed, closer to God. Femaleness then becomes the undivine other, the leftover, the unknown, the unholy, the addenda. And, of course, the subordinate." God as male, she argues, is bad biology, worse theology; maleness is idolatry.
"Every act of power," she writes, "is either exploitative, competitive, manipulative, integrative or nurturing." She decries power used to destroy another, to defeat and control, to suppress dissent, power used to protect the church from feminine pronouns and feminine voices. "System is simply no substitute for the gospel," she writes against a spirituality of power whose God is system, where the criteria for fidelity are about obedience over truth and a unity based on silence rather than values held in common. She realizes she is speaking not only for Roman Catholic women, but for women in other denominations who, despite admission into ordination and higher office, experience themselves as tokens.
Hope, Chittister tells us, is found in small places and in the scattered turbulences of the questioning, the agitated, the oppressed and the dissatisfied invisible. Hope for her is like an oyster that defends itself by excreting a protective substance that turns eventually into the beauty of a pearl. In the process, the oyster becomes more valuable. This, she calls the ministry of irritation. Irritate away; Jesus modelled it; God demands it; the world needs it. Following Jesus, she writes, "is to follow the one who turns the world upside down, even (perhaps especially) the religious world."
