Joan Chittister's blog

From Where I Stand by Joan Chittister, OSB	December 15, 2008
	Vol. 6, No. 13

Maryknoll priest Roy Bourgeois is under threat of excommunication for giving a homily at the unauthorized priestly ordination of a woman sponsored by the group Roman Catholic Womenpriests. The question, especially for those who know this priest to be a justice-loving, selfless prophet of peace, is how Fr. Roy’s “case” will be handled by the Vatican. No doubt about it: The situation is an important one -- both for him and for the church who will judge him.

It is important for Fr. Bourgeois because it involves the possible fracturing of the commitment of a lifetime.

A man who has given his life for the Gospel, been one of the church’s most public witnesses for human rights, stood for the best in the human condition and modeled the highest standards of the priesthood should certainly not end his life a victim of the conscience that has stirred the conscience of a nation.

But the way this situation is handled is at least as important to the church as it ever will be to Roy Bourgeois.

From Where I Stand by Joan Chittister, OSB	November 26, 2008
	Vol. 6, No. 12

The looks on their faces as they went round and round me were something I had never seen before in my religious life. I realized as they all went by that something very different had just happened in this assembly. The Sufi drum beat an even pace while the group sang “La-a-illa-ha” over and over again, then, alternatively, “al-le-lu-i-a,” and then “Amazing Grace.” All of them sung rhythmically, softly, persistently -- full heartedly. Which a person could surely expect of Sufis.

From Where I Stand by Joan Chittister, OSB	November 3, 2008
	Vol. 6, No. 11

The election that the numbers said ended almost a month ago -- whether anyone really noticed or not -- is just hours from being over. And not a day too soon for a country whose mental health has been taxed over and over again for the last four years. It's time for someone to start cleaning up the mess rather than simply go on creating it. We hope.

From Where I Stand by Joan Chittister, OSB	October 20, 2008
	Vol. 6, No. 10

Sometimes it isn't just one thing, sometimes it takes a confluence of things to make the invisible visible and the dark light. Things like butterflies and somebody else's mortgage and Irish bookies and attitudes all coming together, at once, and apparently independent of one another. But, underneath, not really isolated or unconnected at all. In fact, together, they say something very important to us all.

From Where I Stand by Joan Chittister, OSB	October 7, 2008
	Vol. 6, No. 9

This is, they tell us over and over again, "The most important presidential election in our lifetime." And they may well be right. After all, we are fighting two wars and facing the biggest economic meltdown since the Great Depression of 1929. If that weren't enough, we have major social issues -- health, education, job creation, energy -- to deal with on the side. Not to mention an obligation to be a good citizen of the planet, as well.

From Where I Stand by Joan Chittister, OSB	September 8, 2008
	Vol. 6, No. 8

With the political conventions over for this electoral season, I found myself haunted by the memory of an old child’s game called “Pickup Sticks.” In the game of “Pickup Sticks” somebody throws a bundle of long, thin pieces of balsa wood into the air. What had been an orderly assortment of wire-thin skewers is now a higgledy-piggledy mound of wood with each stick of different value.

Task: Pick up each one of them without moving any of the other sticks, accrue as many points as you can and then start again, like darts, toward an established series score. I never really liked the game.

I woke up the morning after the Republican National Convention feeling like I’d just found myself sitting in a pile of pickup sticks. Whatever had defined the two parties before their national conventions suddenly seemed to have blurred a bit. In fact, it’s getting more difficult by the day to tell who’s who anymore.

In the interest of full disclosure, as they say, I will admit my collusion with showmanship at the very beginning of this article: The fact is that I watched the opening night of the Democratic Convention from 6:00 p.m. to midnight. But I'm not sure what I saw. Was this a solemn civic event or a political variation of "Entertainment Tonight?"

It was a touching, powerful and embarrassing piece of media. In fact, it was enough to make the average, newspaper-reading U.S. citizen blush. There stood the president of the United States speaking passionate words into a Rose Garden microphone. He was excoriating Russia's "dramatic and brutal escalation" of violence toward Georgia, "a sovereign neighboring state," in retaliation for Georgia's suppression of Ossetia, its breakaway province. The action, George Bush said with properly restrained indignation, has "substantially damaged Russia's standing in the world."

The church world got a really good piece of advice this week. The pope, we're told, warned the Anglicans not to split over their internal controversies about homosexuality and the ordination of women bishops. He warned, quite wisely, about the dangers and the destructiveness of schism. (See Pope rides to Rowan's rescue) As easy as it sounds to simply go away and play in your own ecclesiastical sandbox, the fact is that divisions are never neat -- if for no other reason than that they not only fail to resolve the present problem but they model how not to resolve the next problem, too. After all, if we can fix one issue by simply leaving it, we can do the same with the next one -- and there will be a next one -- until what was intended to be a nice, clean division becomes one fracture after another, more a splintering and a slivering, than a surgically healing separation of unlike tissues.