No wonder we grew up looking so different from the Jesus who prayed, "That they all may be one." No wonder we grew up thinking so differently from the Jesus who concentrated His life on the margins of society where the poor and the outcast were waiting for life before death.

Jesus, you see, was not raised on catechisms and creeds. Jesus was raised praying the Psalms. Sung for centuries, the Psalms have captured the spiritual wisdom and insights of one generation after another. They sing all the human emotions to God. They talk to God. They ring across time with the human memory of the fidelity of God and the soul searching of humanity. They sing of a theology of human life that transcends national boundaries and selfish privatism. They sing of the whole human race united in the God who is life. Psalm prayers, in other words, are a crash course in justice, not a compendium of laws.

The Psalms called Jesus beyond Judaism and they stretch us still beyond ourselves. It is impossible to pray the Psalms and settle for parochialism. It is inconceivable to pray the Psalms and foster national chauvinism. It is unthinkable to pray the Psalms and wallow in a theology of domination that gives some of us the right to misuse the rest of us in the name of sexism or racism or capitalism.

What did Jesus learn in the Psalms? First Jesus learned that the poor are heard. "You, O God, listen to the needy and the oppressed," Psalm 69 declares. "When the poor cry to me I will hear them," Psalm 34 insists. For those with ears to hear that is a dire warning. The Psalms do not say that the poor will be miraculously saved. The Psalms simply promise that the poor will be heard. The Psalms imply quite clearly that though you and I may not hear the poor, God will, and you and I who do not hear them and stoop down to them, and reach out to them, and stand up for them, will ourselves go unheard on the side of God's deaf ear.

And so Jesus, formed in the Psalms, heard the poor on the sabbath and in the temple and at the tables of the rich. The question for our time is whether or not we, too, speak for the poor of this world -- for minorities deprived of a decent wage, for women who are being told that Jesus' message to them is "Don't follow me," and for the poor in all the ghettoes of the world who do not count when the decisions are made.

Jesus also learned in the Psalms that the world is a cosmic reality, not the local preserve of the chosen few. God's blessing, God's love, rains on all, the Psalms insist. "God touches all in the heavens and on earth," Jesus was constantly reminded. "Everything is full of sacred presence," He heard in Psalm 103.

Jesus learned, in other words, that the planet is not ours for the exploiting. The universe is not ours for the controlling. The people are not ours for the enslaving. God gives good and God wants good for everyone. And Jesus, it is clear, blessed Jew and non-Jew alike, the Centurion and the Samaritan; the little as well as the great. "All creatures look to you with hope," Jesus learned to pray in Psalm 145, "And you sustain them in their need. You are generous to all creation."

And so Jesus taught Samaritans and cured pagans and talked to Romans and taught women what women were not supposed to learn. It was to women, in fact, that Jesus first taught the fact that He was the Messiah and that He was risen from the dead. Discrimination in the name of religion, then, is a base and ungodly thing. No, Jesus saw his Roman/Samaritan world through the filter of the Psalms and embraced it all.

Clearly, then, nuclear disintegration of the planet is simply unthinkable to a psalmic people. The exploitation of the globe is lunatic to a psalmic people. The feminization of poverty is unimaginable to a psalmic people. The denigration and disenfranchisement and theological erasure of women is simply unacceptable to a people who pray the Psalms and grow in the spirituality of the Psalms.

In the Psalms, then, Jesus learned to hear the poor, and to care about the world beyond his world. But Jesus also learned to trust in the faithfulness of God. "Uphold my cause, O God, for I walk in integrity. I trust in you. I shall stand firm," Jesus prayed in Psalm 26. And trust became the cornerstone of a Jesus who was not received by those to whom he was sent and was rejected by those whom He had healed and was misunderstood by those to whom He had explained himself.

It is trust that we too must learn if our own lives are to have purpose and constancy despite the weight of fatigue, in the midst of the great struggles of life for justice and equality and peace. But trust is not a virtue until there is reason to despair. This psalmic people who knew slavery and exile and siege and destruction taught the world to trust by praying prayers of trust. Clearly, the Psalms not only teach us to be faithful to God. The Psalms teach us that God is faithful to us.

Finally, Jesus learned in the Psalms what we must learn. Jesus learned that consciousness commits. "Let not those who seek you be dismayed through me, God of Israel," Jesus prayed in Psalm 69. People, in other words, should be able to see in us what our God is like. Advocacy, creationism, universalism, justice trust and witness is what Jesus learned in the Psalms. And that is what He was living when He cured on the Sabbath and touched the doubly polluted corpses of women and listened to the poor and disputed with lawmakers. It is, to this day, the legacy of the Psalms.

Prayer is not meant to be a magic act that cajoles and coaxes God to turn life into a Disneyland of religion. Prayer is meant to change us so that we will then change the world. Jesus, clearly, had learned to pray. The question for our time is have we?

We know how to beg in prayer, we know how to make prayer an escape. But we will not be praying until we have become immersed in the mind and presence of God as Jesus did; until we, too, have come to see God everywhere, in everyone. Until we have come to listen to the poor; until we have come to work as God would work in this world; until we have come to trust and trust and trust that somehow, someday what must happen will happen because we have added our part to it.

We see how the Psalms have formed Jesus. The question is, then, what is forming us? When the papers point out that we are deporting the poor from the richest nation in the world, we must ask what is forming us?

When we maximize our profits at the expense of workers here as well as the workers of other nations, we must ask, what is forming us?

When we name some peoples expendable or invisible, we must ask what is forming us?

When we forget that there is injustice in the world, because the righteous do nothing about it, we must ask what is forming us? And what are its effects on the world around us.

Jesus pronounced the purpose of his life quite directly. "I have come that they may have life and have it more abundantly," He said. "The great spiritual question," a holy elder taught, is not whether or not there is life after death. The greatest spiritual question of them all is whether or not there is life before death." Those are the fruits of real spiritual formation. Those are the understandings that come from praying the Psalms.

Francis Bacon wrote once: "Our humanity were a poor thing were it not for the divinity which stirs within." Praying the Psalms stirs up in us the mind of Christ to gain life and give life where it is needed most. What else can prayer possibly be about?

Lydia Talbot: Sister Joan, you are one of the most magnetic, dynamic and energetic women of faith I think I have ever heard. I know that it all stems from some very special gifts that you experienced as a child, gifts that your mother and your father may have conveyed. Can you share some of that?

Joan Chittister: What a wonderful opportunity. I don't think anybody has ever asked me so sensitive a question. My mother was Irish-Roman Catholic; my father was Presbyterian. I love to say in mixed groups that my family was ecumenical before it was a word, let alone a virtue, but it is an important part of my own development. From my Presbyterian father, I learned some values and a way of relating to God and a way of being present in the world that was quite different and totally complementary to what I learned from a very wonderful sacramental life in Roman Catholicism. I believe that I am more whole because of his honesty and her phenomenal sense of the mystical presence of God in the present.

Talbot: Wholeness, honesty, mystical sense. You talk in your book on women's ministry in the church. As an educator, as a Benedictine, as a woman, the thing that you fear is this generation's sin of silence.

Chittister: Absolutely.

Talbot: What is that about and what does it take to live a life of integrity at this moment in history?

Chittister: Well, Lydia, I am convinced that there is a myth abroad in the land that the women's movement is a fad of thoughtless, careless, unemployed, middle-class, white, western women. The United Nations Decade on Women would not say that. We see women around this globe struggling. Do I believe that American women have a special place in this? You bet I do. We have the resources, the education, the arena, often the financial resources, to be a positive factor in another woman's life, in the lives of the women of the next generation. If we do not speak for those women, who will speak? For a white American woman to say, "I'm not oppressed. I don't know what they are talking about," this is all nonsense. Let me take you to Haiti, the Philippines, Africa, India and China. Go with me. See what it is that women wait for in other women. The sin of silence will fall on women as heavily as it falls on the male structures that are content to keep things the way they are as long as we say, "That's fine."

Talbot: You talk about the feminization of poverty.

Chittister: I do.

Talbot: You also say in your book that, whether we like it or not, there is a revolution. You wrote that in the 80's. What is that revolution today? How far have we come? Is there change?

Chittister: Not nearly far enough and yes, there is change. I mean there is enough of an inch given to make you know what a mile would feel. We have women almost to the point of believing they are human beings and even acting that way. The problem is that we have to be careful. We have respect as well as love, recognition as well as toleration. We have got to begin to take equality rather than tokenism for granted. Where women are not, the word is half-spoken. Where women are not, the perspective is unfinished. We have a world that is walking on one leg, seeing with one eye, and thinking with one-half of its mind, and it shows.

Talbot: You are a living, breathing witness to inclusiveness as an expression of your religious faith. Yet, you have said that the ordination of women to the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church has never been central to you.

Chittister: Oh, no, no. I have no call to the priesthood whatsoever.

Talbot: Talk about that.

Chittister: Well, I just don't. I am not a priest. I know I'm not. If they ordained tomorrow, Joan Chittister wouldn't be there. That is why what I say might have the ring of authenticity to it, because I am not speaking for myself. God help the priesthood if I were in it, but I know women who are marvelous priests. They have ministered to me, and they have been a sacramental presence, and they are channels of the grace of God. I want that grace released.

Talbot: Joan, you are also a filmmaker, a writer, a producer, a director of documentary material. One of the things you are working on is women mystics. Can you talk about that?

Chittister: I am in the process of doing a four-package series, a kind of a reflection piece, for meditation days for women or simply a discussion mode, so that women can be in touch with the phenomenal spiritual history that is already among us. You know, it isn't that we are discovering it. It is that we have it, and we have a right to claim it. We have the mystics, Julian and Hildegard and the great Gertrudes. We need to look again at their perspectives on life because this time around it might save the globe.

Talbot: You are a joy to have in our presence.

Chittister: So are you, Lydia.

Talbot: You are filled with energy and authenticity and for that we thank you.