Prophets Then, Prophets Now: An Interview with Joan Chittister and Richard Rohr

ROHR I’d like to build on that and point out a parallel within the church. The more the hierarchy reasserts its centralized dominance in everything, the more I am finding that many people in the Catholic Church today are passive dependent, and very often passive aggressive. I think that could be proven statistically. Let me give you an example: While doing a hermitage this Lent, I thought I would go to the local parish Mass. We were reminded about seven times during the homily what sinners we were, how unworthy we were. All these educated people in this upper-class parish, largely professionals or retired, just sat there, numbly taking this, largely poker faced. Right at the end, he reminded them, of course, that he would be hearing confessions and take care of their sinfulness. Consciously or unconsciously he built a dependency system on himself and taught them helplessness. He did not empower us as Christians. I wanted to walk out, but I didn’t. This is why it is good for priests to be out in the pews with some regularity. Now there’s a certain number of Catholics, as you know, who always walk out after communion. But in that particular church, I would say almost half the church walked directly from the communion rail out the back door of the church. So you see what you have. These people are just cooperating as little as they can, in case the whole thing is true, and then they disconnect. That’s the kind of passive aggressiveness I think we’re going to see more and more of in our Catholic Church if people are not respected as temples of the Holy Spirit.

CHITTISTER But, Richard, I think you have pointed to a part of the population you didn’t define. There are a lot of people in our churches now who are very sacramental people. They want the sacraments. They want the tradition at the center of their lives. They are really embedded in the Jesus story and they want their children to have some idea of communal and institutional worship, and they edit every single thing it does. They sit, they stare. They’re not even listening, and they didn’t stay for confession. There is a dimension of people in the churches today who are also thinking Catholics as well as non-thinking Catholics. The thinking Catholics, when they hear something like that, are often inclined to walk out, certainly right after communion. Or let’s put it this way: if not right after communion, definitely past the confessional box. Because they’ve got it. They can’t articulate it but they feel it.

ROHR That’s a more positive interpretation and I think it’s often true. I hope it is.

CHITTISTER Well,I’ll bet if we went over here and did a survey of these 1,300 people who are attending this conference, I’ll bet you’ll find out that two-thirds to three-fourths of them are in those very parishes, and they are sacramental people. But they are no longer easily intimidated or easily bounded. And that’s where the frustration is lying—between the institution and the people in the pews. They’re going to church but they, themselves, are in some sort of intellectual transition about what this church is teaching and how it affects them. It’s a fascinating question because I see just as many people as Richard does who do not question at all.

ROHR I think they shut down large parts of themselves to do that. They pay a big price for it. And they’re willing to do that—to shut down large parts of themselves.

CHITTISTER There is something psychological here as well as religious because we’re getting exactly the same attitude where the state is concerned. It’s exactly the same thing. It is, somehow or other, the kind of dependency that is looking for direction. Not leadership, but direction. “Tell me where to go because I don’t know.” Our constitution is being shredded a line at a time. Half of this country does not care, doesn’t even notice, will go so far as to say, “We have to do this in a time of war.” Now, I don’t know who you think declared this war. But I can tell you, as somebody who circles this globe regularly, there is a world out there that does not see us as its freedom fighters.

REFLECTIONS And by that time, it’s going to be way too late for both civil society and the church.

ROHR It almost feels like the great Catholic tradition that formed us is becoming parochial, that it’s not “catholic” at all. It’s so tiny and defensive and afraid, and not even very tied to honest historical scholarship. This great tradition of wisdom and love, started by Jesus, is simply invalidating people who do not say it our way. And yet, ironically, Jesus consistently exemplified and taught two things: forgiveness and inclusivity. There is hardly a gospel narrative that does not teach one or the other, or both. I mean, what kind of a universe is this, if we can just silence the opposition? Even scientists do not do that, they just do more research. The irony is, as we both know, we’re simply going to create more opposition, a much deeper, more angry, more alienated, and more irrational opposition. In fact, much of the irrational dismissal of the church that I find among the alienated is a dismissal and a pat- tern that they first learned from us! It comes back to haunt us.

REFLECTIONS Richard has written that prophets live in a “liminal space.” That is, they live inside an institution, but on the very edge of it. By being in that space, the prophet doesn’t critique or throw stones from the outside, but neither does he or she remain complacent or safe on the inside. I wonder if nowadays, in our therapeutic culture, that’s simply too stressful? Have we become too concerned with ourselves and our own personal health and well-being to take risks for the sake of the community?

CHITTISTER It’snotallthefaultoftheindividual.Why are people as self-centered as they are about those things? It’s because there are no safety nets being built into the system and the society anymore that they can count on. I mean, they’re telling the older generation, “Get over it. This is the last time you’ll see Social Security.” They’re telling young people, “You’re going to have to take care of yourself.” Once you take away peoples’ support system, they’re into that survival mode that I was talking about a few minutes ago. It doesn’t look like survival because these are all good-looking people, driving big cars and living on tree-lined streets in nice houses. But they’re scared, absolutely.

ROHR So you’re pointing out that people are fleeing to individualism because there are not that many institutions that can be trusted.

CHITTISTER They’re being forced into individualism. It’s everybody on her own now because this government is not going to help. It won’t help you when your children are sick. It won’t help you when you’re close to death. It’s not going to help you when you can’t earn any more.

REFLECTIONS So in order to do the kind of prophetic work that you both are writing about, one really has to have a sense of hope.

ROHR If you don’t come from a core of hope,I don’t think you can be a prophet. If you’re just oppositional and negative, you’re no prophet. The core of hope, the absolute centrality of the inner-God experience, is crucial to true prophesy. And you can tell in a person whether her inner core is positive, hopeful, and believing, or cynical, sarcastic, and dead. Some in the hierarchy write us off. They think we’re cynics. In fact, we’re radical believers, deep believers. That’s what gives any of us the true authority to speak.

REFLECTIONS And that is completely grounded in our biblical tradition. I hear many Christians say, “I don’t read the Hebrew Bible. That God is so angry. I can’t deal with that God.” And I always respond, “No, that’s the God who’s profoundly wounded. That’s not an angry God. That’s a God we can relate to in ways that we cannot relate to the God of the Christian Scriptures.”

CHITTISTER The God of despair, the God of frustration, the God of great vision. That God is the God that leads to Jesus. It’s also the story of a people who are in exactly the same situation we’re in right now, and learning new things about God and life, little by little.

REFLECTIONS So there over 1,300 people waiting to hear you speak about the prophetic voice, and they are not looking simply for a spiritual high. How can these people living in individual communities inspire prophetic ways of being in the church and in society?

ROHR What I always encourage people to do,because they don’t feel they have power over the big system, is find one area where they’re gifted, one concrete, particular—the “scandal of the particular,” as Walter Brueggemann says, and begin there.

CHITTISTER We must train people to ask one question: About what are you most concerned? About which of these great global questions are you most concerned? And then join a group who shares your concern and move the globe with them. Is it global warming? Is it the ozone layer? Is it the women’s issue? Is it war? Where does your heart bleed? Over what does your soul weep? Identify that. Find the group, because they’re out there. Find the group that has committed their lives to burrowing through that issue and join them.

ROHR That’s where your gift is.

CHITTISTER Find what your gift is and link it with other people, because that is the answer to the despair of individualism.

ROHR The largest percentage of the prophets served as prophets for one event or one era or one king. It wasn’t like they wore the shingle “Prophet” from birth until death. They were called to operate as a truth speaker in a particular situation. Most of them were short-term prophets—for an event, for a period—which, I think, gives people a lot of hope that we can be prophets, too. As Moses says in the Book of Numbers, “Would that all the people of God were prophets!” (11:28). There is always one area where we are gifted to see and speak clearly.

REFLECTIONS Would you say that the particular situation that Jesus addressed was the frequently oppressive and corrupt nature of religious authority operating during his time?

ROHR Absolutely. That is so obviously the case. I offered a talk at a conference a few years back where I took Matthew’s gospel and pointed out how, just in that one gospel, there are so many scenes of hostility between Jesus and the religious authorities. It takes up nearly the entire gospel. I wonder how we made out of these Jesus narratives a religion that is not self-critical? It’s phenomenal to me.

REFLECTIONS It seems to me that Jesus was arguing with the rigidly conservative and judgmental Catholics and Protestants of the time. And yet, today, conservative believers use Jesus to defend themselves.

ROHR When we imitate Jesus that way, we’re called rebellious, disloyal, disobedient, unorthodox. I think Joan and I have paid our dues to orthodoxy. I can defend the orthodox tradition because it is the only thing that gives me the courage to talk this way. I was educated in the tradition and I know the tradition. The prophets were radical traditionalists. When many people speak about tradition today, they talk about something out of the 1950s.

CHITTISTER That’s maintaining the past, not the tradition. The tradition is alive and dynamic. Someone wrote once, “The only difference between an optimist and a conservative is that there are those who believe that foolishness frozen in time is better than foolishness fresh off the vine.” I do think that it’s probably part of the reason that people who are not asking the questions, finding their gifts, and bonding with others feel so overwhelmed that they prefer to disappear behind it. I have a friend who told me that, among her circle of women, one of them—a very privileged and wealthy woman—said that she could not talk about the women’s issue any longer because, if she did, something in her life would have to change. So the only way out of it is to close the door in your mind.

REFLECTIONS So in order to have prophetic vision, one must first go through some form of metanoia, a radical change of heart and vision?

CHITTISTER Absolutely. Once you see, you cannot not see.

ROHR The notion of transformation was part of the breakthrough that led me into working with men’s spirituality. It is in the male psyche to be heroic, to operate on some level of what he thinks is greatness. It’s usually associated with power, money, control, and dominance. And yet what you find across religious boundaries—not just Christianity alone, but explicitly in Jesus’ teaching—is that in every initiation rite there is a “language of descent.” The Christian phrase was “the way of the cross.” Males have to be carefully taught a wisdom path, and much of that centers on their learning how to critique their own power. Males believe that they are physically more powerful than women. Yet Jesus taught us that those positioned at the top are, in fact, the most trapped. Grief work was a part of every initiation rite because by becoming capable of empathy for suffering a young boy was able to shatter his narcissism. In Kenya, a group of male African lawyers took me on a tour of what they called “The Caves of Grief.” These were stalwart guys. They were dressed in their traditional robes. And they said, “Here, we had to learn to cry.” There is a brilliant recognition that males are often trapped at the top. Tears do not come easily to the typical male because such a large part of him has been closed down by always “ascending” into illusion.

CHITTISTER I really take that as one of the signs of hope in our society. In my lifetime, I have watched men be able to cry. You have no idea how that touches me. That says to me that a man has two choices. He can choose to tell the truth and be a human being or he can choose to lie about his invulnerability and become an animal.

REFLECTIONS So vulnerability, that openness to be wounded, is also essential to being a prophet?

CHITTISTER You can’t understand oppression until you have identified your own. How do you know what it feels like to be abandoned, to be poor and not be able to take care of your children, until you have stopped bullying your way through every institution on earth? Who stands in line if they have money and power? So many women religious give up the habit because we knew it was absolutely essential to our ability to identify with the very society we said we wanted to serve. Too much privilege came with the habit: every door opened and every restaurant had a table.