Biography
Sr. Joan Chittister is Executive Director of Benetvision in Erie, Pennsylvania, a national resource center for contemporary spirituality. Sr. Joan is a social psychologist, a renowned international speaker, and a widely published author. Her book, Heart of Flesh: A Feminist Spirituality for Women and Men, was named one of several "books of the year" by Sojourners magazine. Her most recent books are The Story of Ruth and The Illuminated Life. Sr. Joan is widely recognized for her work for justice, peace, and equality for women in the church and society. She is an engaging and dynamic speaker whose lectures are popular around the world. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

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          and 30 Good Minutes.

"Wisdom: A Gift or a Task?" 
Soon after the death of the greatest rabbi in the region, a traveler said to one of his disciples, “Your rabbi was renowned for his wisdom. What did he give greatest attention to in life?”

The disciple thought a minute and said: “To whatever he happened to be doing at the moment.”

Wisdom, in other words, is the gift of living the present to the utmost and learning from the now whatever we will need to respond with integrity to whatever our future brings. But, if that’s really true wisdom is going to give most of us nothing but trouble. In fact, the world is full of wisdom about wisdom: Bertolt Brecht wrote, “Mixing one’s wines may be a mistake, but old and new wisdom mix admirably.”

Jean Cocteau wrote: “The extreme limit of wisdom—that’s what the public calls madness.”
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Eric Hoffer wrote: “The wisdom of others remains dull till it is writ over with our own blood. We are essentially apart from the world; it bursts into our consciousness only when it sinks its teeth and nails into us.”

These great thinkers make three points that bear reflection today. They tell us, first, that wisdom comes only on condition of personal experience; they teach us, second, that whatever we have learned in the past never fails to enrich the present; and, they remind us, third, that wisdom comes only when we realize that the present is always and only a call to develop whatever vision has brought us to this point.

Put those insights from the intellectuals of the age next to the ageless scripture of Proverbs 8 and we have something really startling—but very important—to think about in each of our own lives. Wisdom, in other words, is not a passive virtue—wisdom is not just something we soak up if we live long enough not to be able to avoid it. We have to work at getting wisdom or we will live a very shallow life.

Wisdom is not life lived wrapped in marshmallow and indifferent to the reality within us, the Scriptures imply. Wisdom is not the fine art of serene oblivion. Wisdom is life peeled and cored, it is attention and consciousness lived to the hilt—“No crooked talk, no wily ways,” the Scripture says. No, wisdom is clearly not apathy masquerading as patience. On the contrary, with wisdom comes the obligation to deal with life head on, head up, with open eyes and honest heart and courageous conviction. Scripture says in so many words: that wisdom is about truth, duty, justice. “The truth my mouth recounts, wickedness my lips abhor ... on the way of duty I walk along the paths of justice” the book of Proverbs reads without compromise.

Clearly, wisdom is not a gift; wisdom is a task; wisdom costs. Wisdom calls us, the Scripture says, to know ourselves, to squeeze out of every moment in life whatever lessons it holds for us, whatever responses it demands at that time.

It is wisdom that calls each of us to be everything we have the capacity to be.

It is wisdom that is the internal force that drives us to become the fullness of ourselves.

It goes without saying then that wisdom is not life lived at its most docile. It is, instead, life lived at its most demanding.

Let those who seek wisdom, in others words, beware.

Scripture maintains that wisdom—which it defines in another place as “fear of the lord”—means holy astonishment, complete wonder and awe at what God does in my life and the life of everyone around me. Wisdom is the first thing God created, “The first of God’s acts long ago,” Scripture says. It is important beyond all telling, in other words. It is basic to life, fundamental to holiness, and full of unrelenting challenge.

Lovely, that thought, isn’t it? Until you give more reflective consideration to what the Scripture also says wisdom will then demand. To have wisdom, Scripture tells us, I must desire, seek, allow, “Knowledge and instruction,” I must speak truth and sincerity, I must open myself to experience and to counsel. I must be both strong and understanding. I must do justice and I must honor duty.

Wisdom, this scripture insists, is a first priority in life, an essential element of happiness, that without which nothing else—not success, not money, not long life—nothing at all, in fact, matters. To gain wisdom, then, it must be my daily intention to discover what is true for me in every situation, to pursue it, to learn from it, and so, eventually, to become it myself.

Wisdom, the Scripture requires us to understand, is the craft of taking all the learnings of our past and our present and be willing to be guided by them into the future. Wisdom is, very simply, very directly, a commitment to go on, always open, always learning what life is really about for me now, if everything I am and are meant to be is ever to be developed before I die.

The real point of the reading lies in the fact that wisdom, if we seek it, is that which simply does not let us alone. Wisdom doesn’t settle down nor does it allow us to settle down. Wisdom leads us from one point to another in life until we learn what we’re supposed to learn, until we do what we’re supposed to do, until we each become what we’re supposed to become with who and what we are Wisdom leads, prods, and will pursue us to our graves. Life—wisdom—is pursuing each of us, indeed sinking its teeth and nails into every one us, calling us to what the world calls madness, forcing us to mix the wines of our life.

If we respond to the voice of wisdom around us and in us, we will then need to change, grow, develop, deepen, and come to new meanings, new learnings, new moments, new ways of being alive. Because something in our past challenged us and something in our present changed us and something within us still prods us toward whatever our unknown futures are. We’ll hold on to the past, of course, but each of us—if we’re really faithful to whatever our present is—will always step beyond it.

We’ll honor the past that enables us to embrace a new present and know that the present itself will take everything we ever learned in the past to sustain it. Everyone of us knows the relentless pursuit of wisdom. We have, after all, over and over again as groups and as individuals, resisted it, flirted with it, and, if we were lucky, finally, finally succumbed to it.

We’ve taken new steps, reverenced the old ones that brought us to them; taken up darkness and found that, in the end, it was light for us. No doubt about it: wisdom is a very dangerous thing. Pray for it with caution. But pray for it we must if each of us, too, wants to live all the life we’re meant to live.

“So now, O people, listen to me,” the Scripture pleads, “instruction and wisdom do not reject ... for the one who finds me finds life...”

As time goes by two things become more and more apparent: first, that life is a process, not a place. And secondly, that it is wisdom that leads us there.

“Holy One, what is the difference between knowledge and wisdom?” the disciple asked. And the Holy One answered: “When you have knowledge, you use a torch to show the way. When you are wise, you become the torch.”

Those who follow God down circuitous paths wherever life steers become a torch for others. It is that kind of wisdom each of us celebrates and each of us prays for in our own lives. The book of Proverbs reminds all of us again that life is a series of unending changes bred by the demands of our personal present and nourished by a faithful past for the sake of a faithful future. All of us who find the wisdom to follow God wherever God leads by paying attention to what we are learning at the present moment will somehow, somewhere finally find whatever it is that for us is fullness of life. Because, though mixing one’s wines may be a mistake, old and new wisdom mix admirably.

Interview with Joan Chittister
Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot: Joan, you say in your message that wisdom—to put it simply—is the commitment to go on. How was that concept first revealed to you personally?

Joan Chittister: Well, I think it came, Lydia, out of an attempt to understand in my own life— how it is that life doesn’t seem to get less and less unclear as you go on. You say to yourself: “Well, but I solved “A.” Where did “B” come from? Why this when I just got over that? What is this about?” You get into the middle of a series of losses in life and if you’re a spiritual person, someplace a long the line you have to say, “But why? What is it about?” And some place in my own life I began to realize that those places and patches in life that were unclear to me were calling me to some new kind of life in myself. Even loss became life.

Talbot: You say a series of losses in your life. What were they?

Chittister: I’ve had plenty. My father was killed in an automobile accident on Christmas Day coming home to have supper with me. My mother was an Alzheimer’s patient was twenty-eight straight years. My mother died, for all practical purposes, twenty-eight years ago, but lived on. And when you see one death that was instant and totally out of time and another death that never happened but did happen, you have to—if you hold the Scriptures in your hands and the spiritual life in your heart—ask, “Is God in this and how and why? What is this about in my own life?” It is about learning wisdom. My father’s death had something to do with enabling me to deal with my mother’s life.
Talbot: You say and you told me just before the program: “I don’t survive, I thrive.” There is something about you, Joan. Your lectures, your books, your publications are legion. You told me that you’ve just completed a series of seven...well, you fill in the blank.

Chittister: I just did new presentations—I hardly called them presentations, for me they are reflections—called “The Seven Mountains of Contemporary Spirituality” in which I’m asking what mountains did Yahweh lead Israel to climb and what was to be learned on each.

Talbot: And in Australia last year you did forty-five lectures in twenty-eight days...

Chittister: Not last year, last month!

Talbot: Last month! My point is: you don’t stop. You do live out what you’ve been telling us about—the commitment to go on. But is that something learned or is it something you have absorbed through your faith?

Chittister: I think it comes out of my monasticism. I think it comes out of praying the Psalms and reading the Scriptures three times a day, everyday of my life in community. When you are so totally immersed in the spiritual life that you begin to realize that the old dichotomy they taught us between the spiritual life and the daily life is a lie. It’s all one or it is no life at all. So you see, it’s the old, “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.” This is not a problem. It’s not something that I have to gear up to, it is just simply life. My life.

Talbot: Peace making and the human spirit are central to the themes that you focus on. The peace making and human spirit themes come out of this understanding of monastic ways and the Benedictine rule. What is that rule?

Chittister: It’s a rule of moderation. It is, as I’ve said in several books, wisdom distilled from the daily. It is the ordinary life lived extraordinarily well. It is not negative asceticism enshrined and it is not non-asceticism. It is finding God where God is now in this moment—at this moment, at this time—for the sake of my growth tomorrow.

Talbot: When you were majoring in speech and communications at Penn State, and before that at Notre Dame doing your masters work, did you know you were going to become a nun?

Chittister: I knew that at the age of three! I entered the order at sixteen. I didn’t enter after I finished my education.

Talbot: Was there some one revelatory moment?

Chittister: Yes.

Talbot: What was that?

Chittister: My biological father died when I was three and my mother took me to the funeral home. She held me up by the casket so that I would understand that daddy couldn’t come home and play again. And at the foot of the casket were two Sisters of Mercy in the traditional habit. I said to my mother, “Mother, what are those?”—not “who,” I didn’t think they were people!— “What are those?” And my mother said, “Darling, those are special friends of daddy’s and when the angels come for daddy tonight, they will stay here and they will say, “This is Joan’s daddy. He was a very good man. You should take him straight to God.” Well, I couldn’t think of a better way in the world to spend my life than to give little girls’ daddies to God. At that moment I said to myself, “I want to be one of those.”

Talbot: Benetvision is unique in the media ministry that you do. Walk us through a typical day at Benetvision.

Chittister: It easy. It’s a matter of asking what people need, what they are looking for, gathering the staff, laying out the time-line, taking the telephone calls from people who really want this kind of discussion on the spot.

Talbot: Your recent book, Heart of Flesh, was the book you were working on last year at this time. What’s the next one?

Chittister: It’s going to be A Woman’s Creed. I start it in January. I want to look at the Apostles’ Creed and ask to what extent does the modern Christian deal with those concepts and how and why.

Talbot: That’s powerful. We look forward to having you tell us about that next year. Thank you so much, Joan Chittister.