A Life Sized Question
“If you expect to see the final results of your work,” an Arab proverb teaches, “you have simply not asked a big enough question.” To sustain a stay in a dry and barren desert, it is necessary to be about something great enough to be worth a lifetime of unrewarded effort. The great questions of life are questions that do not admit to cheap and easy answers. They are rooted in the bedrock of the culture and demand the emptying out of souls before they can really be answered. The women’s issue is an obvious one, for instance, but it is not an easy one. That women must soon be seen as equals in the church, adults in the world, artists and thinkers in society is clear. The amount of education and analysis and protest and courage that it will take, on the other hand, to reshape centuries of warped and distorted and heretical thought patterns that have been theologized and institutionalized in the name of God staggers the mind.
No single capital campaign will do the trick. No one speech will change the climate. No single law will undo eons of damage. It will take a million lives heaped on top of one another in the rotundas of congress and on the marble stairways of the Vatican to burst the bonds of arrogance and superiority that make God male and males more favored by God. For women and men everywhere who realize that they are about the fulfillment of Genesis, no amount of time, no expenditure of life will be too much to ask for the lives of women and men yet to come.
We have, Genesis teaches us, been put into the Garden “to till and to keep it.” Co-creation is a human responsibility that carries with it grave implications. There are simply some divine cravings in life—the liberation of the poor, the equality of women, the humanity of the entire human race—that are worth striving for, dying for, finished or unfinished, for as long as it takes to achieve them.
—From Joan Chittister: Essential Writings selected by Mary Lou Kownacki and Mary Hembrow Snyder, Modern Spiritual Masters Series (Orbis)
