Spirituality: Ritual of pious exercises rather than a passion for the Will of God?

Sr. Joan Chittister

Images That Disturb, Challenge and Discomfort

In my Benedictine soul, there are a number of Jesuit images — all of them powerful, all of them personally impacting.

My first image came in grade school. Sister never let us turn in a paper without first writing A.M.D.G., "all for the greater glory of God" (Ad majore Dei gloriam — the Jesuit motto) in the upper left hand corner of the page. Before everything else. Before our names, before the date, before the title of the paper itself. After that, all the things that I was told were important, essential, really central to life, paled somehow.

The second Jesuit image that marked me deeply came with the search for higher education. All of a sudden I discovered that the majority of Catholic colleges in the country were Jesuit colleges. Most Orders I knew had a few small colleges. These people had apparently devoted their entire community life to the development of the Christian mind. Why, I wondered?

The third Jesuit image that burrowed underneath in me and stayed in consciousness over time was the number of people I knew who were suddenly going off to make thirty-day retreats or traveling for miles to find Jesuit spiritual directors. Having just come out of a period of mechanical rigidity into a world of Vatican II license, I was comforted by the fact that there was someone, apparently, who knew what holiness was all about. The final and most profoundly impacting of the Jesuit images, the one that has burned its way into my mind and stretched open my soul and tore at my monastic heart is the sight of the Jesuit men who have pounded at the steel doors of a corporate military world with the cross in one hand and the gospel in another for the sake of the liberation of the poor and oppressed. They are images made in Central America and here, at the Pentagon and in the pueblos, outside churches and in the public squares. That image is Dan Berrigan talking to the judges who would sentence him to prison, making nonviolence a greater crime than nuclearism. That image, whether anybody wants me to remember that it was Jesuit spirituality that fueled him or not, is Bill Callahan with a smile on his face collecting money for Nicaragua or holding signs asserting the baptismal dignity of women. That image is Ignatio Ellacuria and his companions face down in their own blood in the school they ran in El Salvador. That image is the Jesuit provincial and his community brothers on their knees outside the Federal Building in New Orleans on behalf of Jesuit martyrs killed with U.S. support, shot with U.S. weapons, murdered with U.S. approval, sabotaged by U.S. money. I knew that my own life was out of sync unless I was in sync with the Jesus who could die resisting without fighting back.

I have come now to realize that those images are of the essence of Jesuit spirituality, that they are true to the primitive vision, that they are totally in tune with a smoldering drive to total pursuit of the will of God, to a lifelong engagement to imitate the Christ and to an unremitting commitment to do everything "for the greater honor and glory of God."

They are, of course, harsh and disturbing, challenging and discomfiting images for people who want spirituality to be a ritual of pious exercises rather than a passion for the Will of God. But not for me, whose misdirected piety they helped to cure and whose own monastic spirituality they have inflamed.