Biography
Sr. Joan Chittister is a member of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pennsylvania, and is Executive Director of BenetVision, a resource center for contemporary spirituality. Sr. Joan is Co-Chair of the Global Peace Initiative of Women, a U.N. partnership organization. She’s an internationally renowned speaker, a regular contributor to the National Catholic Reporter and Belief Net, and the author of many books, including her best selling memoir, Called to Question. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Seeking the Interior Life" 
Today I would like to talk, not about the external prayer forms, but rather about the internal prayerfulness that comes from them.

“Living without speaking,” Abba Isidore, the great spiritual master, said, “is better than speaking without living...if, however, words and life go hand in hand, ah, no that is the perfection of life.” Those words still ring true. It is a hurried and a noisy world in which we live. We do not live
in an Egyptian desert of the third century. We don’t even live in a hermitage on top of a mountaintop now. We are surrounded, most of us, at all times by the schedules and the deadlines and the crowds and the distractions of a dense and a demanding society.

We are an increasingly extroverted society, called away from our private selves on every level of life. Institutions plan family events for us and organize civic celebrations for us and design financial plans for us. We spend the greater part of our lives meeting and satisfying the social requirements of the institutions which, ironically, are supposedly designed to make personal expression possible.

Even the spiritual responses people make to the God who created us are determined in large part by religious bodies who carry within themselves the traditions of the denominations from which they spring. But the contemplative person knows that ritual and rite are not enough to nourish the divine life within. They are, at best, the accessories of religion. Spirituality is not the system we follow; it is the personal search for the Divine within us all.

The making of interior space, or interority, for the cultivation of the God-life, is of the essence of contemplation. Interiority is the entering into the self to be with God. The interior life is a walk through darkness with the God within us who leads us beyond and out of ourselves to become a living vessel of divine life let loose upon the world.

Going into the self, finding the motives that drive us, the feelings that block us, the desires that divert us, and the poisons that infect our souls brings us face to face with the God who wants more than those for us. We find the layers of the self—the fear, the self-centeredness, the ambitions, the addictions—that stand between us and the awareness of the presence of God in life. We face the parts of the self that are too tired, too disinterested, too distracted, to make the effort to nurture the spiritual life.

The contemplative examines the self as well as God so that God can invade every part of the self and every part of life. The contemplative refuses to allow the noise that engulfs us to deafen us to either our own smallness or to blind us to our own glory. Interiority is the practice of dialogue with the God who inhabits our hearts. It is also the practice of quiet waiting for the fullness of God to fill up our emptiness. God lies in wait for us to seek the life that gives meaning to all the little deaths that consume us day by day. And interiority, then, brings us to the awareness of the life that sustains our life. It is the cultivation of the interior life that makes religion real.

Contemplation is not about going to church, though going to church ought certainly to nourish
the contemplative life. No, contemplation is about finding the God within, about making sacred space in a heart saturated with advertisements and promotions and jealousies and ambitions, so that the God whose spirit we breathe can come fully to life within us. To be a contemplative it is necessary then to spend time every day stilling the raging inner voice that is drowning out the voice of God that is already within us. The fact is that God is not beyond us. God is within us and we must go inside ourselves to find the spirit that sustains our spirits but silence is the lost art in a society made of noise.

Radios wake us up and timers on TV’s finally turn off the day-full of programs long after we have gone to sleep at night. We have music in cars and elevators and office waiting rooms. We have surround-sound that follows us from the living room to the kitchen to the upstairs bath. We have public address hookups in every office building and large, loud, screaming sound systems mounted on every street corner. We exercise with earphones on and tape recorders strapped to our belts. We lie on beaches with our ears next to portable CD’s. We surround ourselves and immerse ourselves in clatter. Racket and jingle, masking as music and news and sitcoms, have become the sound barrier of the soul in this society. It protects us from listening to ourselves.

What the contemplative knows that modern society has forgotten, it seems, is that the real material of spiritual development is not in books. It is in the subject matter of the self.
It is in the things we think about, in the messages we give ourselves constantly, in the civil war of the human soul that we wage daily. But until we are quiet and listen, we can never, ever know what is really going one—even in ourselves. Especially in ourselves.

Silence frightens us because it is silence that brings us face to face with ourselves. Silence is a very perilous part of life. It tells us what we’re obsessing about. Silence reminds us of what we have not resolved within ourselves. Silence shows to us the underside of ourselves, from which there is no escape, which no amount of cosmetics can hide, that no amount of money or titles or power can possibly cure. Silence leaves us with only ourselves for company. Silence is, in other words, life’s greatest teacher. It shows us what we have yet to become, and how much we still lack to become it.

“Wherever I am,” the poet Mark Strand wrote, “I am what’s missing.”

Silence, the contemplative knows, is that place just before the voice of God. It is the void in which God and I meet in the center of my soul. It is the cave through which the soul must travel, clearing out the dissonance of life as we go, so that the God who is waiting there for us to notice,
can fill us. A day without silence is a day without the presence of the self.

The pressure and pull of a noisy day denies us the comfort of God. It is a day in which we are buffeted by the world around us and left at the mercy of the clatter and jangle of our own hearts. To be a contemplative we must put down the cacophony of the world around us and go inside ourselves to wait for the God who is a whisper not a storm.

Silence not only gives us the God who is stillness but, just as importantly, it teaches the public self of us what to speak. Then we finally understand what Abba Isidore meant when he said: “Living without speaking, is better than speaking without living...if, however, words and life go hand in hand, ah, that is the perfection of life.”

Interview with Joan Chittister
Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot: Joan, your compelling message on prayer as an interior experience, a practice of dialogue with God who resides in our own hearts. But what do you say to people who call that a preoccupation with self?

Joan Chittister: Well, in a sense they are not completely wrong. But you have to be very careful that you don’t assume that the spirituality of the self is a neurotic enterprise. If I don’t know myself, if I refuse to face myself, then I get caught. Then I’m really caught in the mystique of the self. I’m refusing to accept either the gifts or the challenges in my life. I just brush them off. We have a word for it. We call it superficial and it is superficial. If I have nothing that I have wrestled with interiorly, what do I have to bring to a conversation with someone else who is wrestling?

Talbot:  We all know Joan Chittister leads the life of prophetic action in ministry. What is the connection between the contemplative life and prophetic action in service for others in solidarity with those who suffer?

Chittister: Absolutely the right question! I’ve lived in a Benedictine monastery for fifty years where we are praying the Psalms and the Scriptures together a minimum of three times a day, reading them for another hour in private and personal reflection. What is the connection? The connection is the fuel, the energy, the direction. It’s not discipline, it is the search. Once I hear the cry of the poor in the Psalms and I see the cry of the poor on the block in which I live, there is no way that praying those Psalms can be real for me if I don’t make them real on the block on which I live.

Talbot:  Joan, how has your writing changed—I notice the word wounded appears recently in your writing and lectures—since Iraq.

Chittister: Lydia, I have been involved in this for over thirty, thirty-five years. I find myself now in those places of suffering. I’m looking into the face of the wounded and the dying who are pawns now, just victims and pawns of systems who aren’t even bothering to count them. They don’t even tell us how many of them have died or will live without arms and legs because some people, somewhere decided that other people shall fight their wars for them. I think I’m living immersed in the notion of woundedness, but not of despair. I know that we can take that woundedness and can see that woundedness as the call to change our own lives here for their sake.

Talbot:  Called to Question is your latest book. Say a word.

Chittister: Well, it’s not a personal memoir. It’s a memoir of the way I, myself, have worked through these questions that you’re asking in my own spiritual journey.

Talbot:  Thank for sharing those with us, Sr. Joan Chittister. You’re the best.