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"The Role of Religion in Today's Society"
There is no doubt about it, in a society of gross imbalances somebody has to ask, "What is the role of religion? Should it be a private refuge or a public presence and how will we ever know?"

The Vietnamese tell a folk tale that I think goes right to the point of the question. The Vietnamese say that there is only one difference between heaven and hell. In hell, they have chopsticks three feet long and the people can't eat. In heaven, they have chopsticks three feet long but the people feed each another.

The purpose of holiness is not to protect us from our world. The purpose of holiness is to change the way we live in the world, not for our own sake but for the sake of others. Jesus demands the same thing. For some reason or other, we often miss that point. We are more inclined to want a religion that comforts us than challenges us. Why? Where did we ever get that idea? Maybe it is because we have misunderstood, or at least forgotten, the meaning of Sabbath, the importance of mountain symbolism in religious literature and the effect of the very placement of gospel text.

Let's look at each for a minute. Sabbath, the rabbis teach us, doesn't exist because God needed rest. God doesn't need rest. That is heresy. The rabbis tell us that the Sabbath exists because God demanded rest. God wanted Sabbath to equalize the rich and the poor, so that the poor could be free for at least one day and the rich could no longer oppress them. God wanted Sabbath to give us time to evaluate our work as God evaluated God's work, to see if our work was equally good.

Finally, God gave us Sabbath to give us time to reflect on the meaning of life. Sabbath is one-seventh of every week. It is one-seventh of every life. Sabbath is fifty-two days a year, over 3,500 days in a lifetime of seventy years, or over ten years of the average life. Sabbath is thinking time designed to change us. Sabbath is important, then, to all of us in our worlds. Week after week after week, we have to ask the questions, "What changes are demanded of us now?" That answer, I think, depends on how we see the role of religion.

There is a scripture story about the Transfiguration of Christ that gives us an idea, perhaps, of the answer. In the story of the Transfiguration, remember, Jesus takes Peter, James and John up a high mountain. Mountains, you may well know, in Greek, Hebrew, Roman and Asian religious literature, were always places where the human could touch the divine. Sure enough, at the top of that mountain with Jesus, a wonderful thing happened. The apostles began to see Jesus a new way. The apostles got a brand-new insight into whom this Jesus really was -- dazzling, consuming, literally enlightening. They began to see Jesus differently.

What they see at the top of that mountain is, at least, unexpected and certainly disturbing. You see, at the top of that mountain before those apostles, Jesus does not appear with Aaron the priest, who was the interpreter of the law. Jesus doesn't appear there with David the King, the defender of the state. No, Jesus does not appear with symbols of royalty or ritualism. Jesus appears to those apostles with Moses, Elijah, the prophets. Moses, who led the people out of oppression; Elijah, whom King Ahab had called, "that trouble of Israel," because he condemned the people's compromise between true and false gods as the underlying cause of their problems.

In a gospel apparently about the mystical dimension of religion, there is a troubling, teeming undercurrent of turmoil, a struggle between piety and real Christianity, a struggle between religion for real and religion for show. The gospel shows us that Peter, in your name and mine, opted for piety. "Let's settle down here, Jesus, and build three booths."

I'm not really sure, but I think what he had in mind was a chancery, a seminary and a college. Peter, in other words, was opting for a religion of temples, institutions and shrines. Peter was opting for a religion that transcends the world, but the scripture reads that before he could even finish speaking, God interrupted and said, "Listen."

Then something happens that we too often forget. The gospel is completed by a portion that is usually unread, too little remembered, too much unfulfilled. At the very moment, when it would seem that Jesus is emphasizing the mystical and transcendent dimension of religion, Jesus himself takes the apostles away from visions, away from privatized religion, to meet the ones who needed them most in the town.

Jesus takes them to the man whose son was possessed by a demon. Jesus himself leads them down to the bottom of that mountain to the hurting people, unbelieving officials, the ineffective institutions and the demons below.

Real religion is not about building temples and keeping shrines. Real religion is about healing hurts, speaking for and being with the poor, the helpless, the voiceless and the forgotten who are at the silent bottom of every pinnacle, every hierarchy and every system in both state and church, church and state.

Real religion, the scripture insists, is not about transcending life; real religion is about our transforming life. The gospel of the transfiguration calls us to Sabbath; calls us to become enlightened; calls us to change our attitudes about the role of religion; calls us to understand the nature of religion itself; because the so-called rational has failed.

For instance, they say that militarism is rational. How else can we defend ourselves? Never before in history have we spent so much money on defense and never before in history, have been so vulnerable because of it. The people below, the people at the bottom of our mountains, wait to be healed of the diseases that spring from our spiritual darkness. The poor wait for jobs; the homeless wait for shelter; children are waiting for food; young people are waiting for education and job training; the elderly are waiting for care that we say that we can't afford in the richest nation in the world.

Every year we go on in peace time spending more money on instruments of destruction than on the development of peoples. We create the end of the world and store it in the corn fields of Kansas while the working poor, the people who suffer under part-time pay for part-time work or double-time work for part-time pay, get poorer and poorer in this country and around the globe.

Religion, you see, does not call us to the rational. Religion calls us to the Beatitudes, to the works of mercy, to the casting out of demons, to the doing of miracles for those in need, to the being and act of irrational love and burning justice of God. That is what the Transfiguration is about, that is what religion is really about, changing ourselves so we can change the world.

Once upon a time a group of disciples asked an elder, "Does your God work miracles?"

The elder said, "Well, it all depends on what you mean by a miracle. Some people say it's a miracle that God does the will of the people. We say, it's a miracle when people do the will of God."

What is the role of religion in society, private refuge or public presence? Transfiguration means that the role of religion demands enlightenment. The role of religion is to bring us to an awareness of life. The role of religion is to transform the world, to come to see the world as God sees the world and to bring it as close to the vision of God as we possibly can. Why? Scripture is very clear. What God changes, God changes through us.

Interview with Joan Chittister
Interviewed by David Hardin

David Hardin: Joan, you were talking about Jesus wanting us to be peacemakers -- and you are one. Don't you think the world is doing a little better these days?

Joan Chittister: There is no doubt about that, Dave, and I applaud that. That is the foundation of peace making, to see good where good is. It is very easy to be against everything on general principle. The fact of the matter is we move nobody nowhere unless we recognize the good that is happening.

At the same time, we can't be complacent. We can't be lulled. To step down the alert segment of the weaponry, taking the globe back from the brink of suicide and destruction, is fine. But, the question is, when are we going to release the funds that we need for people? Star Wars, as I understand it, is still going strong, three trillion dollars worth. It has got a life of its own while the homeless on this continent, in this country, have no life at all. We have to keep pressing for that or we have made false peace with peace.

Hardin: You are saying that we need to make sure that some of these enormous expenditures for defense get diverted into social and meaningful causes.

Chittister: Absolutely. We have an infrastructure in the United States that has been untended for a decade. We've built up an arsenal and now say we were probably incorrectly appraised of its needs.

Hardin: Many people say that the role of the church is to stay out of social issues and talk about building faith and scriptural understanding. You clearly would disagree with that. Talk a little bit about how the church should be in the social game.

Chittister: Sure. There are always three arguments, well meaning, sincere and some long-founded, used to smother the voice of the church in the public domain.

The first, of course, is the separation of church and state. But, that is a terrible misuse of history designed apparently as a gag-order on the human soul which chloroforms into compliance with the unthinkable. Why? Because the founders of this country were trying to protect us from the imposition of a single-state religion. They were not trying to suppress religion. They wanted truth to be able to arise from every and any single quarter.

Hardin: They wanted to insure religious freedom.

Chittister: They wanted religious debate. They didn't want religious monism of any kind whatsoever. We are misusing our own history.

Secondly, we say that the Pope doesn't want the church in politics. There is a big difference between being in the political arena and being in the political debate. The church has the obligation to raise questions of conscience, questions of creation, about issues that are destroying us.

Thirdly, people say, "Ah, Sr. Joan, Jesus didn't want it. Jesus said, 'Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's'" That is exactly what Jesus said, David. He said, "Render no more."

Hardin: I always thought He meant income tax.

Chittister: Maybe that is all He meant!

Hardin: You also have been very articulate and somewhat controversial in your thinking about the role of women in the future of the church. What do you think that should be? How calls us to commit ourselves to the irrational love of God for others should that change or might that possibly change?

Chittister: Oh, it must change. The fullness of baptism has to come for women, too. Otherwise what we are arguing is that women can get some graces but not all graces, that God made a world full of pink and blue souls and the pink ones leak. Either women achieve the full grace of baptism or they don't. Either God equally valued women or women are useless in the church under any circumstances. We are losing the gifts of grace in half the population of the world in both state and church.

Hardin: I think it also overloads the dice towards the masculine values which may be a little dangerous at times. There is a little too much violence involved. Women, I guess, are so much less war-like and more interested in children and in the future of the planet. What you are saying is that their voice needs to be heard more clearly than has been allowed in the past.

Chittister: It absolutely must. Those attitudes, perspectives and priorities must be brought to our decision-making arenas everywhere. We see where we stand as a people as a result of a one-sided view of the world.

Hardin: I think you do a wonderful job.

Commentary: James Wall, "Joy"

Jim Wall is editor of The Christian Century and a regular commentator on the Chicago Sunday Evening Club.

I dimly recall as a preschool child being taught to always color within the lines. That orderly training is one of the ways we, unwittingly, shape children to believe that the only reality that matters is that which can be measured, laid out logically. Now I realize that on occasion there is merit in coloring within the lines. But when our education is exclusively of that order, we develop a view of reality that makes it difficult for us to receive God's strange, undeserved and unexpected gift of grace, that joyful moment when we know we belong to God.

Describing a period in his career when his health was bad and his spirits low, film-maker Ingmar Bergman confessed to a friend, "I'm about to lose my joy. I can feel it physically. It's running out. I'm just drying up, inside."

In talking with his friend, Bergman recalls how Johann Sebastian Bach found that his wife and two of their children had died while he was away on a trip. In his diary that day, Bach had written, "Dear Lord, may my joy not leave me."

In his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, Bergman writes, "All through my conscious life, I...lived with what Bach calls his joy. It...carried me through crisis and misery and functioned as faithfully as my heart, sometimes overwhelming and difficult to handle, but never antagonistic or destructive. Bach called this state his joy, a joy in God." (p. 43).

Both Bach and Bergman testify that holding on to their joy is no easy assignment. But without that joy, the ability to connect with the ultimate, we are left with only the hollow certainty of measured reality. Until, that is, we are lifted into the ecstasy of knowing that when we let go and trust God -- when we color outside the lines -- we are ready to receive the unexpected gift of God's grace.

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