The Time Is Now: A Call to Uncommon Courage

by Joan D. Chittister

Somewhere between pre-war isolation and a postwar world that put its hope in the power of global institutions, life turned upside down. We became citizens of the world, cling as we might to small-town USA. The planet is now our neighborhood, a polyglot place where very different kinds of people need and want the same things.

We may all seem to be going in the same direction, but when we get to the crossroads of a world in flux the human parade splits: Some emphasize the need to preserve the values and structures that brought us to this point. Others warn that standing still while the world goes on will be our downfall. So we wander in a world of expectations we can neither see nor embrace. Breaking news: the world is a land mine of differences.

This moment is a daunting one. At every crossroad, every one of us has three possible options: The first choice is to quit a road that is going somewhere we do not want to go. We can move on in another direction.

The second alternative is to surrender to the forces of resistance that obstruct our every step toward wholeness. We can succumb to the fatigue of the journey that comes from years of being ignored, ridiculed, or dismissed for our ideas.

The third choice is to refuse to accept a moral deterioration of the present and insist on celebrating the coming of an unknown, but surely holier, future. The third choice is to go steadfastly on, even if we are not sure what we will find at the end of it. The third choice is to follow the path of the prophets of old. It is to echo those who came before us who spoke the voice and vision of God for the world. It is to risk, as the prophets did, not really being heard at all—at least not until long after the fact. The third choice is a choice that demands great courage.

The prophet is the person who says no to everything that is not of God. No to the abuse of women. No to the rejection of the stranger. No to crimes against immigrants. No to the rape of the trees. No to the pollution of the skies. No to the poisoning of the oceans. No to the despicable destruction of humankind for the sake of more wealth, more power, more control for a few. No to death.

As Daniel Berrigan, one of the prophets of our time who decried the Vietnam War and turned that into a life-long path to peace for many, said: “The prophet is one who speaks the truth to a culture of lies.” And while saying no, the prophet also says yes. Yes to equal rights for all. Yes to alleviating suffering. Yes to embracing the different. Yes to who God made you. Yes to life. This book is about prophetic spirituality. And what exactly is that? It is the spirituality of awareness, of choice, of risk, of transformation. It is about the embrace of life, the pursuit of wholeness, the acceptance of others, the call to co-creation.

In short, prophetic spirituality is about living out our faith on the streets of the world, rather than just talking about it. Faith is invalid unless you are living it. That is the basic message of the prophets and it is as true today as it was thousands of years ago.

The biblical prophets of Israel—every one of them—when they came to a crossroad between truth and untruth, when they had an opportunity to settle down, to quit the resistance to evil, to accept what was, chose instead to keep on going. Despite difficulties, they chose to live and proclaim Truth for themselves and for others.

It is that steadfast, unyielding, courageous commitment to the eternal Will of God for Creation—whatever the cost to themselves—that is the prophetic tradition. It sustains the eternal Word of God while the world spins around it, making God’s Word—Love—the center, the axle, the standard of everything the faithful do in the midst of the storm of change that engulfs us as we go.

The prophets care about secularism and they preach against the creeping abandonment of God’s will for the simple sake of being able to integrate more easily into different communities. They know what happens to a society—and to a church—that forfeits the breadth and impact of its spiritual perspective in its adherence to a single issue religion. They know what happens to the faith when it concentrates only on selected sins and allows sins like social injustice to suffocate, suppress, and silence the rest of the commandments.

The prophets understand why spiritual seekers cry out in despair for church leadership in the condemnation of nuclear weapons but get condemnations of condoms and contraception instead.

The prophetic tradition is clear: We are not here simply to succeed today. The prophet will persist for as long as it takes to make the present what God intends it to be as well as to prepare the future to maintain it. We are here to seed the present with godliness so that others may someday reap the best of what we sowed.

Nevertheless, in that brief period of guided meditation, I learned something that would serve me all the rest of my life: Contemplation, I came to understand through this focused attention on individual Gospel passages, was about the immersion of my life in the life of Jesus. The authenticity of my spiritual life, in other words, depended on my grasp of the life of Jesus. That it was to be a personal challenge to my life, as well, would only come later.

The separation was both unfortunate and unfounded. The fully Christian life is a blend of both. To opt for sacramental spirituality devoid of prophetic spirituality is to ignore half the Jesus message, half the Christian mandate, half the Christian life.

The temptation, of course, is to refuse the invitation to really “follow” Jesus—that is, to be in our time as he was in his, to really feed the hungry or contest with the practices of oppression or deny the piety of sexism, racism, and economic slavery. In fact, we often ignore, resist, reject the idea that, like Jesus, we have a role to play in righting a world whose axle is tilting in the wrong direction.

Our task is to be obedient all our lives to the Will of God for the world. And therein lies the difference between being good for nothing and good for something. Between religion for show and religion for real. Between personal spirituality that dedicates itself to achieving private sanctification and prophetic spirituality, the other half of the Christian dispensation.

Christianity requires, as well, that we each be so much a prophetic presence that our corner of the world becomes a better place because we have been there.

Instead, the call of Jesus is the call to prophesy, to speak a word of God to a world that prefers religious rituals and spiritual comfort to the demands of moral maturity. It is to be a prophet’s witness in a prophetless place. Prophetic spirituality calls us to walk in the wake of the biblical prophets of ancient Israel, to hear the word of God for the world and repeat it, shout it, model it until the world comes awake. It is to demand it until the hungry are fed and the sick are cared for and the violent are sent away empty of their power to destroy. Prophets then and prophets now are those who look at life as it is—hard of heart for many, unfair for most—and set out to expand it. Prophets simply refuse to accept a vision of tomorrow that is limited to the boundaries of yesterday and empty of God’s word for today.

The classical prophets of ancient Israel did not rebuild the past. They didn’t even really restore the present. But they did hold up a restless, unyielding vision of tomorrow.

But we must never forget, as well, that the prophets were people like you and me. They were discouraged by the chaos of the present. They were weary from trying. And they also toyed with the same three options that challenge us yet. They had to decide whether they would forgo the struggle entirely, surrender to the prevailing culture, or refuse to agree with the injustice of the time.

No, we are not all prophets—in the classic or original sense of the word—but we are all meant to be carriers of that same prophetic message to our own time.

The fact is that there is no one too busy, too old, too cloistered, too remote from the struggles of the world to have no way whatsoever to promote the Word of God in a world such as ours.

What this world needs most from us right now is commitment to a spirituality that is prophetic as well as private, that echoes the concerns of the prophets who have gone before us. Prophecy, in other words, is an essential dimension of Christian presence, a clear witness of the Spirit-directed life.

The call to discern the difference between what is holy and what is simply popular, between what is and what should be, is of the essence of the good life. The work of God is in our hands. To ignore that is to ignore the very fullness of life. Every prophet contemplated the price of the risk and went on regardless—calling to the world to become its best self—and so must we.

The church later canonized Romero. People call him a saint now. But at the acme of his prophetic posture in El Salvador, the church itself not only did little to protect or save him but also questioned his support of troublemakers as they defied a repressive government. Prophets can be so irritating. Dostoyevsky is clear about the way the world absorbs them. He wrote, “People reject their prophets and slay them but they love their martyrs.” Once the troublemaker is silenced, the public can afford to revere their now tamed selves.

Dorothy Day’s answer is itself prophetic: she did both. She refused to choose one over the other. She writes: “What we would like to do is change the world—make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, or the destitute—the right of the poor, in other words—we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world.”

Dorothy Day brooks no misunderstanding. She is out to change the world. She is also out to feed and clothe and shelter people—“the worthy and the unworthy poor.” And she will fight to get it done while she creates little oases of peace everywhere. Then, she says, one little space at a time, she will encircle the globe with this new way of being alive. That’s charity to the ultimate. It is also a world-changing prophetic statement about the Christian lifestyle.

Set in such stark terms, it is easy to see that both dimensions of ministry are strengthened by involvement in the other. What is the use of feeding the hungry without advocating for better social services? What is the use of demanding higher wages for physical labor while omitting the need for childcare for working mothers? Or, on the other hand, what is the use of prophetic vision while the living poor go hungry? As the world waits for the legislative insight it will take to restructure social services or raise wage levels, a family can starve. Intellectual concern is no substitute for the food a family cannot afford despite the fact that they work two jobs. The ...

Where the hallmark of charity is its uncommon generosity, the ring of real prophecy lies in its uncommon courage.

The great prophets both comfort the wounded and work at changing the structures that embed the wounding to the point that we all come to take it for granted. When that happens, there’s little hope of change.

All of life is a sacred adventure in the coming of the Reign of God, a journey to fullness of life rather than its denunciation. Yet many still follow the privatization of the spiritual life that blossomed in the nineteenth century.

If there is anything about the prophetic dimension of life that is clear, it is surely this: more people decline to accept the appointment than to embrace it.

To be spiritually mature, we must each be about something greater than ourselves.

To own the implications of prophetic spirituality in the Christian life, we must think beyond our own small world to the effects other issues are having on the local area and make a response to them—with others or alone.

Today’s prophets take it as their responsibility to explore what it means to run a hedge fund; to bundle debt; to argue for the right to discriminate against those who are gay, for instance, on religious grounds. Most of all, they set out to help others understand what’s going on so we can all do something about it together.

Prophetic spirituality requires us to stop hiding behind a life of prayer as an excuse to do nothing about anything. On the contrary, it is the cry of the prophets crying through us that is the measure of our commitment to the prophetic dimension of the spiritual life.

Prophetic spirituality is an attitude of soul. It is not a set of spiritual “practices,” a collection of dogmas, however time honored. The person with the soul of a prophet sees what the rest of the world either cannot see or does not want to see, and uses that vision as a compass through life. The prophetic spirit comes to see the world as God sees the world—and responds to it accordingly.

At some point human compassion becomes more important than commercial competition and racial or religious criteria. Then, as Jesus wept over Jerusalem, so do the prophets of today weep for those caught in the web between profit and prophecy.

These carriers of prophetic spirituality now go on trying to change the ungodly opinions of an unseeing world. So, to the rank and file of humanity, prophets look mad. They look wild. They look out of sync with the rest of humankind. They look mesmerized by the view of another world. And it’s true. Prophetic spirituality is grounded by the vision of an unseen world where all things are in harmony and where the Will of God for creation is the energy that drives it.

The present-day prophets who follow such a One as this know that being unreasonable is the only reasonable way to the Gospel.

Today’s prophets of a prophetic gospel know that doing what the world calls “good” rather than what God calls good will do you little good at all.

The temptation, of course, is to quiet down such a rowdy set of messengers. The temptation is to be “reasonable.” “Rational”—as our governments are rational. As if wanton death and deprivation are reasonable. After all, they argue in response, what good does it do to make a stir in the city square or on the steps of the church, right? It will only annoy the rest of the people even more. The pressure to be quiet, to let other people—the politicians, the neighbors, the “experts”—say how we feel about things is very effective.

But if everything is so right already, so just, so ‘‘good as it gets” now, what possible harm can some good universal conversations about it possibly be?

Better yet, prophetic spirituality asks, Who will require that we raise to the level of public discussion the most revealing questions of them all: For whom are things really good? And why? And how did it get that way? And who is being most advantaged by it? Most of all, what is to be done about those for whom the present state of well-being is slipping closer and closer to the murky bottom of life?

So, too, is the prophetic spirit empty of everything but the Word of God, of everything but what it means to be true to the coming of the Will of God for creation. This is the person who is intent on the giving of the self to something greater than the self. There is, in fact, no self here, no personal or self-serving agenda, no egoism. This is the person whose life is compelled by a vision others either do not see or who have yet to commit themselves to something beyond their own agendas.

Prophetic witness is not about the aggrandizement of the self or winning awards or being accepted socially. The prophets of our time are singularly and exclusively about being fearlessly true to the Word within.

First and foremost, a real follower of Jesus the Prophet is faithful, forever endures. And endure a prophet must. No new idea, however right, however much the essence of goodness, overgrows old ideas easily or quickly.

Second, the prophet does more than denounce evil. Instead, prophetic spirituality envisions a world in which justice and equality, peace and community, are the norm rather than the struggle. It is the prophet of our time who leads the way to the development of an alternative vision of life by imagining a new normal.

Third, basic to everything is the fact that prophetic spirituality trusts in the grace of holy audacity, the prophetic movement of the Spirit within us, the obligation to tell the truth. To see the truth requires that we must say what must be said, whoever it is that denies it.