Risking the Questions invites you into conversations most of us have only in our minds. Sr. Joan Chittister — whose courageous spiritual insights come from 70 y...
Being a woman in the Catholic Church, a nun who insists on asking difficult questions and holding those in power to account for what they say and do can make for a sometimes lonely and difficult life.
So, she has been asked more than a few times, “Why do you stay?”
There are a lot of components to that answer and they were gathered years ago into an essay for the magazine, Lutheran Women Today.
In the essay, one of the most requested pieces of her writing for years after it was published in 1996, she asks “how it is possible, necessary even, for me as a Roman Catholic to stay in a church that is riddled with inconsistencies, closed to discussions about the implications of them and sympathetic only to invisible women.”
She answers in ways that are available only to someone committed to the institution in a creative way, tolerant of the church as a process that’s never fully finished, and willing to hold both the institution and herself to account. It also is an answer available to someone who doesn’t shy away from the conflicts that seem inevitable but also necessary if the process is to move toward a greater acceptance of women.
In this conversation, she expands on certain ideas in the essay – that “the sexist church that I love needs women for its own salvation” and that “the church and women are sanctifying one another.”
She has stayed for a long time – this year marked her 70 th in the community of the Erie Benedictines – and she has no intention of leaving any time soon.
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Episode 9 - Engaging the World and Traditions Beyond the Monastery
As a woman religious and spiritual leader of global significance, Sr. Joan Chittister came into contact with members of other faith traditions around the world. One of the results was the book, Welcome to the Wisdom of the World (Eerdmans, 2010), which understands those traditions in contemporary circumstances.
In this episode Joan describes how she came to understand the significance of other traditions. “These are the deepest, most ancient religious and spiritual traditions that the world has to offer. And in every one of them, you have to ask yourself: ‘Do you believe in God?’
If you believe in God, so do they, and how, if you believe in the One God, how can you not imagine, then, that that God is speaking to every one of us in another tongue, in other symbols, at other moments of both asceticism and celebration.”
Those convictions carry with them practical implications. In Joan’s case, one of the most visible is the Global Peace Initiative of Women, involving women religious leaders from a range of faith traditions.
The organization has been responsible over decades for meeting with women of different cultures and faith, including those in conflict with one another. Joan’s understanding of the wisdom of the world carries practical implications for each of us.
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Episode 8 - Women
As a young sister teaching school, Joan Chittister one evening came across the small book, Women and the Church, by Sr. A.M. McGrath, a Dominican sister and a PhD historian and chair at the time of the history department at Rosary College.
The book, published in 1976, is a piercing march through the church’s historical attitudes about women, a mixture of deep history and polemic. Chittister read it in one sitting, and the book lined out a part of the path she took in advocating for women.
“It marked me,” Joan says of the book during this episode. “It marked me inside myself. Actually, I never forget the woman. I still have the book. I consider it a moment of grace for me.”
Her commitment to women and their place in the church and the wider world led her to such moments as the 1995 UN Conference on Women in Beijing.
She still feels the negative effects of being a woman in the Catholic Church but she also thinks on many levels and in society, things have changed for the better from the time she came across the McGrath volume.
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Episode 7 - The Earliest Struggles: Childhood Trauma
It wasn’t until 2011, during interviews that would ultimately become a foundation for the biography Joan Chittister: Her Journey from Certainty to Faith (Orbis 2015) that Joan spoke openly to anyone about a childhood that had been marked by fear of the violence her mother faced constantly at the hands of an alcoholic stepfather. She would carry the memories and effects of that trauma for the rest of her life. It was a childhood that involved a temporary escape with her mother, as well as instructions from her mother should “the worst” occur.
If it was at the time disorienting and frightening for an only child, it would also eventually become a source of insight and resolve.
Childhood memories became a significant force behind her relentless advocacy for women in all circumstances, in the church, in society, across cultures. It also provided her insight into the fragility of others and compassion for those on the margins and in precarious circumstances.
“So somehow or other, sitting here today,” she says in this episode, “I know where my life came from. It came from what I had to escape, what I had to find myself, and what I had to be able to name myself.”
She knows, too, where her courage comes from. Her mother would be with her in spirit when she had to stand up to the men who wanted to keep her from speaking, who wanted to silence her questions.
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Episode 6 - Struggle as the Pathway to Hope
At the heart of the work, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope (Eerdmans, 2005) is a searing personal tale of a young Sr. Joan Chittister. Having been accepted to one of the country’s most prestigious writing programs, the permission to attend was inexplicably and, without warning, withdrawn by her superior at the last moment.
It was a cruel act without explanation and sent Chittister into a deep consideration of her vocation, of what it means to deal with this kind of unexpected, life-altering disappointment, and what it means, ultimately, to find hope.
In this conversation, she recounts that incident and the lifelong insights that emerged. Change, she says, is a condition of life in the 21 st Century and “real change is that place where struggle starts. … There’s nothing fixed here now. Our theology isn’t fixed, the culture isn’t fixed. The institutions are changing. Our relationships shift all the time, even the family. But if we are raised on absolutes then, then what happens? Is God responsible for these negative absolutes in my life?”
Her answers might surprise. They are drawn from years of dealing with her own and others’ struggles, and from realizing where, in those struggles, are our sources of hope.
Risking the Questions invites you into conversations most of us have only in our minds. Sr. Joan Chittister — whose courageous spiritual insights come from 70 years as a Benedictine sister — and her friend and biographer, former National Catholic Reporter editor Tom Roberts, discuss deep and universal topics. Listen as they explore questions like the nature of God, our purpose in life, how to respond to changing times, and more. See what questions and answers arise in you.
This podcast, a joint project of Benetvision and NCR, is made possible in part by Bill and Jeanne Buchanan.
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