THE MONASTIC WAY Joan Chittister MARCH 2017 Art by Ansgar Holmberg
D The Monastic Way is for people who lead a busy life, but long for greater spiritual depth. Each month in 2017, Joan Chittister invites you to explore words of Scripture that stretch the soul and help you to construct your world differently—to discover how God dwells among us in surprising forms.
The water I give will become in you a spring welling up... John 4:14
The Water I Give We are inclined to be such literal people where God is concerned; where life is concerned; where we ourselves are concerned. We use words—God’s words, in particular, it seems—as if the words of Scripture were only one-dimensional and either theological or cultural. We act as if “water” in this scripture, for instance, is either only water or the water we’re talking about is Baptism. Well, yessss, at one level, of course, but not only. The problem is that when we treat words at only face value, we can miss so much of the rest of their possible meaning. Too often, we miss the messages in them that are meant for our own culture. We dismiss the depth of many messages—like this one, in fact—because people don’t usually come up to us in a Western culture and offer us water. It can happen in desert countries, of course, because there, water really means something. It means life. It means survival. It means riches if you
happen to own an oasis. It means sustenance if you grow grapes or olives or palm trees. But, at least until now, water has always been a part of our environment. Something we never had to think about much. On the contrary, it was a gift to be taken for granted. And as a result, water, as a universal metaphor for grace or blessings of any kind, can escape us. But grace and blessing come in many forms in life. Some we never recognize until they are over: like the kinds of deaths that open entirely new lives for the spouse and children left behind. Or sometimes grace is illness or trauma we never expected but which release whole new skills or abilities in us. Or sometimes it is a blessing to be moved from one place to another where more love abounds or more opportunities exist. I’ve always been one of the people who thought life was all about finding what we like and putting down immovable roots there. Change was something I had to be pulled into—kicking and screaming —until I realized that only that change could possibly stretch my faith or provide such growth. The spiritual lesson is a simple one: Everything in life is some kind of “blessing” eventually. Ask those prisoners who would never have had a spiritual life if it would not have been for the local chaplain who brought them to it, broken and
bleeding of heart. Ask the woman who never had children of her own, but became a mother to many as a result. Or ask the businessman whose business collapsed and enabled him, finally, to discover what it meant to be a family man instead. God offers us life, often through the death of something we once held dear. One thing is doubtless: the offering will always materialize if we will only open our hearts and minds to the certainty of its coming.
D Wednesday, March 1: Expect the goodness of life and you will begin to see it more clearly. Thursday, March 2: It is the agitation within us that creates the agitation around us. It’s when we start to accept ourselves, when we learn to do what we can, while at the same time, trusting in the goodness of God, that life becomes a blessing rather than a burden. “Make peace with yourself,” Isaac of Nineveh writes, “and both heaven and earth will make peace with you.” Friday, March 3: The real fullness of life lies always in the smallest moments in life. They call us beyond themselves to embrace the essence of what it means to be truly alive. When we learn to smell grass and see the stars, we have arrived at the threshold of being fully human. Saturday, March 4: The stuff of the spiritual life begins in our dreams, to become the best person we can possibly be. It flows out of a commitment to others and a singleminded focus on the possibilities in ourselves. As Paulo Coelho writes: “We must never stop dreaming. Dreams provide nourishment for the soul, just as a meal does for the body.” Sunday, March 5: What we put into our mind and soul is what will come out of them when life is difficult, or challenging, or starved for meaning. Choose carefully the things you spend your time on. They will be what forms you and what forges you in the end. Monday, March 6: We spend time on our bodies and what we look like; we spend time on our jobs and how much we earn. But we too often starve our souls. Then we wonder why we collapse inside when the things we’ve collected and the wealth we’ve accumulated can’t solve what ails us. Tuesday, March 7: The spiritual life is what drives us outside ourselves to care for something other than ourselves. Only a spiritual life makes us bigger than we really are. Wednesday, March 8: The degree to which we care for others is the measure of the depth of our own souls. “If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else,” Maya Angelou writes, “you will have succeeded.” Then, in other words, we will have become full human beings. Thursday, March 9: It is not the body that wilts. It is the spirit that fails us when we starve it of the joy and breadth of heart, of the love and faith it needs to carry on. As Van Gogh wrote, “The best way to know God is to love many things.” Friday, March 10: The spiritual life is what really makes ordinary life an extraordinary experience. Anything else we allow to capture our souls is pure camouflage.
Saturday, March 11: The spiritual life is what awakens us to the beauty and essence of the rest of it. “To awaken,” the Buddhist saying teaches, “sit calmly, letting each breath clear your mind and open your heart.” Sunday, March 12: We spend most of life enclosed in a plethora of goals and responsibilities, of actions and frustrations. Those are precisely the times it is important to turn away from the whirl of it all. Stop. Be silent for a moment. Start over. Let the spirit flow through you before you begin again. Monday, March 13: When our worlds go to chaos around us, it is a call to transcend the temporary. This is precisely the moment to go inside ourselves and reclaim the silence of the Spirit it takes to carry us through it. “It is foolish to think,” Teresa of Avila writes, “that we will enter heaven without entering into ourselves.” Tuesday, March 14: The spiritual life is not complex. On the contrary, the truly spiritual person is the simplest of them all. These are they who know that God is not in the whirlwind. God is within each of us waiting for us to appear there, too. Wednesday, March 15: We race through life as if it were a ski slope to be conquered quickly rather than a snowflake to be studied one at a time. “The moment one gives close attention to anything,” Henry Miller writes, “even a blade of grass, it becomes a magnificent world in itself.” Thursday, March 16: The more we examine our own lives, one experience at a time—seeing God in each, watching ourselves grow through every one of them—the more spiritual we become. Friday, March 17: Life is not meant to be a gallery of the good things we’ve done. Life is the recognition that everything we’ve done—however risky, however unwise—has taught us something about what it means to become fully human. “To regret one’s own experiences,” Oscar Wilde wrote, “is to arrest one’s own development.” Saturday, March 18: The spiritual life is a compendium of what we learned and then learned we had to unlearn if we ever wanted to be truly wise. Sunday, March 19: The spiritual life is not the same as physical growth. It does not happen in chronological order. It must be earned every step of the way by being willing to try and fail, to fail and fall, to fall and rise again. Only then can we see the presence of God in every step. Monday, March 20: The spiritual life is not about perfection. It emerges in the overwhelming awareness that the spiritual life is never about not falling at all. It is always about simply getting up and going on again in search of God who is searching for us. “By daily dying,” Theodore Roethke writes, “I have come to be.” Tuesday, March 21: Life is a battering ram that reshapes us again and again until we finally become who we are meant to be. “I have been bent and broken,” Charles Dickens wrote, “but—I hope—into a better shape.” Wednesday, March 22: The spiritual life is not a straight line. It curves back and forth and back again until we finally know who and what we want to be. Then, we are finally able to begin. Or as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Growing up…is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.” And oh, so many times we do.
Thursday, March 23: Though God is within us we grope awkwardly outward in our search for the spiritual life. We lurch from one god to another until we realize that it is filling our life with the awareness of God, not simply filling it with rounds of rituals, that fill our souls with Light. Friday, March 24: God is as much in darkness as God is in light. In fact, it is in the darkness that we often see God best. “What makes night within us,” Victor Hugo writes, “may leave stars.” Saturday, March 25: How do I know how to find God? Easy. What are you doing now? Do it joyfully, lovingly, and fully. “Whatever is happening,” Pema Chödrön says, “is the path to enlightenment.” Sunday, March 26: The more we come to understand the pain of others, the more we try to alleviate that pain, the closer we are to becoming children of the God who made us to continue the creation of the world. Monday, March 27: Spiritual adulthood is the stage of the spiritual life when the needs of others are as rankling to us as are our own.
— FOR A LISTENING HEART — The water I give will become in you a spring welling up... John 4:14 Spend a few minutes with this quote and then ask yourself: • What do these words say to me? What feelings or memories do the words evoke in me? • What do these words say about my spiritual journey? • My journal response to this quote is:
Tuesday, March 28: No one can teach us to be spiritual. Teachers can only school us in consciousness of God. But coming to recognize God in the vagaries of life is our own responsibility. Wednesday, March 29: The spiritual life begins and ends in eternal consciousness of God both within us and around us. “The soul is in God and God in the soul,” Catherine of Siena said, “just as the fish is in the sea and the sea in the fish.” Thursday, March 30: The test of the spiritual life is whether or not it gives direction, meaning and strength to the soul. As Viktor Frankl wrote, “This is the core of the human spirit…If we can find something to live for—if we can find some meaning to put at the center.” Friday, March 31: What we live on is what we become. To develop the spiritual life we must develop the spirit of God within us. By whatever means works for us—by contemplation, by music, by nature, by the arts, by filling the mind with the insights of the ages. “The soul,” Josiah Gilbert Holland writes, “lives by what it feeds on.” JOAN CHITTISTER is an internationally known author and lecturer and a clear visionary voice across all religions. She has written more than forty books and received numerous awards for her writings and work on behalf of peace and women in church and in society. www.joanchittiser.org ANSGAR HOLMBERG, a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet, is an inclusive artist whose paintings and illustrations appear in numerous periodicals and publications. They can be found in parish communities, retreat centers, schools, and homes across the US, Canada, in Europe and Australia.
—The Monastic Way— Order print subscriptions at store.benetvision.org Order online subscriptions at monasticway.org Vol. 26 No. 3 Please note: No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior permission from the publisher. ©2016
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