This girl is on fi-ya!

Sister Joan Chittister, OSB, is every bit as amazing as you know her to be in her books. She’s got a razor sharp Irish wit, so there’s the soul of brevity in most everything she says. She’s got a point to make and she makes it with the clarity and passion and forcefulness of the nuns I knew in my youth in Catholic school.

 

For her, it’s all about Jesus. She believes in and lives out the Jesus story.

 

Now, if you unpack that, you’ll find more – much, much more – than an 85-year old Roman Catholic nun who might say the same thing and mean that and be obedient to every paragraph, sentence, word and punctuation mark to come out of Rome.

 

That is decidedly not Sr. Joan.

 

This girl is on fi-ya with love for the gospel and the person of Jesus Christ.

 

We had two sessions today with Sr. Joan. She talked about the Pharaohs and the examples they give us of religious leadership and the way they understood the gods. And then, she closed her laptop with a definitive snap and reminded us that, during some of this same time in Egyptian history, a man name Moses – one who had lived among them as one of their own – stood up and said, “There is only one God.”

 

Well, you would have to understand the pantheon of Egyptian Gods to fully grasp just how radical a statement this was.

 

But, you’d also have to understand why they built the Temples and the Pyramids to understand that the ideas of Virgin Birth and the Incarnation and Resurrection all came from the Delta – the cradle of civilization and deep religious thought – long before, centuries before Jesus was born.

 

Then, along came Joseph who pretty much said the same thing about there being one God and saved the very family who had sold him off to slavery from famine and death.

 

When Constantine declared Christianity the state religion, thousands of people fled to the deserts of Egypt and Syria to live the gospel as they heard it in their hearts and provided hospitality and spiritual to direction to thousands and thousands more people who were starving spiritually and desperate to know how to live the life they heard Jesus calling them to live.

Sr. Joan shared with us some of her favorite stories from the desert mothers and fathers and then asked us to reflect on them from our own lives. She asked questions like, “What is this tory really all about? Why is this story so important? Why do you think it has survived? What does it touch in your life? What does it disturb in you? What good came out of this story for you?”

 

I don’t have her book with me – her assistant collected all our books for her to sign tonight and/or tomorrow – but the story that was my favorite goes something like this:

 

The Abbott said, “The time is coming when people will be insane, and when they see someone who is not insane, they will attack that person saying, ‘You are insane because you are not like us.”

 

She then asked us to be in small groups and have honest conversations about the questions she had posed. Now, you know what? I have been in more small groups in more places in my almost 35 years of ordained ministry and I don’t think I’ve ever had more honest, more intimate, more passionate conversations as we did in my small group.

 

Do you know what I think made the difference?

 

I think you know what I’m going to say. Yes, it was Sister Joan and the example of servant leadership she set for the group.

 

We can’t all be Sister Joan but we can all do our best to be honest about our faith.

 

We can’t all be Sister Joan but we can all do our best to be passionate about our walk with Jesus and strive to follow his teaching.

 

We can’t all be Sister Joan because no one else is like Sister Joan and no one else in all the whole world is like you or me but if we strive to be authentic and if we live a life of integrity about what it is we say we believe, we, too, will be on fire with love for God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

 

Tomorrow, I am deeply honored to have been invited to preside at The Liturgy of the Word at the ancient altar of St. Catherine’s Monastery, South Sinai, Egypt.  The monastery was founded in 527 by the Byzantine emperor Justinian. The church is part of the autonomous Church of Sinai, but is part of the wider Greek Orthodox Church, and is considered Eastern Orthodox.

 

Sr. Joan has asked me to lead the group in her Benedictine form of reflection on the gospel for tomorrow (Mark 10:17-31) about the young man who run up to Jesus to ask, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Seems to have been a burning question of the day in many different countries.

 

I’m to chose one of the stories from the desert mothers and fathers and have the group reflect on it and the gospel story.

 

I can’t imagine anything more orthodox than that.

 

Thank you, Sister Joan, for your passion and your wit and your trust.

 

Even so, please hold me in prayer. This is a huge responsibility and I want to do my best.

I'll let you know how it all turned out.