Sr. Joan Chittister: At the Crossroads

God created the world, but God didn't complete it. That's the task he left to us." --Sister Joan Chittister

Listen to the whole 10 minute interview on Here and Now here: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/04/15/joan-chittister-time-is-now

Book Excerpt: 'The Time Is Now'

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. We can distance ourselves from the difficulties of it all. We can leave the mission unfinished.

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. We can go quietly into oblivion, taking on the values of the day or going silent in the face of them. This choice, in other words, is to crawl into a comfortable cave with nice people and become a church, a culture, a society within a society. We can just hunker down together and wait for the storm to calm down, go by, and become again the nice warm womb of our beginnings.

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. But courage, however apparently fruitless, is not without its own reward. Anaïs Nin wrote once: “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” And courage is a prophet’s road.

The prophets had a choice.

So do we.