In Another “Winter of our Discontent,” Some Inspiration “Springs”!

I know everywhere we look there is something wearying. I’m not even going to mention any examples. You know what they are and where they are. In spring, summer, and fall, we can bury the discontent and weariness we feel in all the bursts of life and color and activity around us. In winter, we’re stuck with it; it permeates like piercing rain, like crusty frost, like snow that covers and blankets but holds no warmth. We’re stuck inside our houses and inside ourselves.

Am I bringing you down? Or were you already there?

Okay, let me go one step lower and then, mercifully, I’ll stop. Our Church leadership is pretty much as static and immovable as ever on women’s ordination, on the priesthood of all believers. There’s a blanket still over us, still smothering us and bringing no warmth.

If, like me, you need something to break through all of this winter gloom and bring some springtime cheer, I offer you:

Joan Chittister (Need I list her accomplishments?), one of the most influential religious leaders and spokespersons today, member of the Benedictine community, author of 40 books, winner of numerous awards, regular columnist for National Catholic Reporter, quotes an ancient philosopher, “Every age that is dying is a new age coming to life.”

In this new age of our own Church, she challenges us to be like Judith, Esther, Joseph, and Jesus, the outcast and invisible, who dared to rise up and overturn the oppressive system of their time. Theirs is our legacy and from them we receive our nurture as we work against injustice and oppression, refusing, like Judith, to abandon ourselves to “moral invisibility.”

We must continue, Joan Chittister says, to go “from passive consumers to dynamic communities” questioning (“If scripture says nothing negative about women’s ordination, why do they use Jesus to obstruct it?”) and challenging (Should we really return to the Latin Mass “where mystique is confused with mystery?”). 3% of the Church is clergy, 97% laity; 6 lay people are in training for ministry for every 1 priest and “65% of them are women!” What does that say to us? She relates the story of an elder Native American giving advice to a younger tribe member about to set off on a perilous journey, “Remember, when you see a great chasm, jump!”

…and…

Henry David Thoreau (Need I remind anyone of his prominence in American Letters?) seems to agree with Joan Chittister (no mean feat since he died over a century before she was born!). Speaking of – of all things – skunk-cabbages, which poke their heads persistently out of the dreariest, heaviest, most brutal winter layers, he wrote, “Is it the winter of their discontent?” Do they lie down? Despair and die? No! “Up and at ‘em,” “Excelsior,” “Pull it through,” – these are their cries… to themselves and the world. Going further, he asks us to see every “winter” walk (Read: protest, witness, prayer….) “as a sort of crusade”. He even challenges us to: “Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”

Of course, he means this literally – but also metaphorically – and, as such, can be inspiration for our getting through our long struggle for full inclusion in the church. We do need to keep taking those walks through stormy proclamations, icy barriers, and frosty indifference, those winters of our discontents, because, he reminds us, we all have an amazing source of strength. In each one of us is a “slumbering subterranean fire…which never goes out and which no cold can chill,” and that “inner hearth,” that “divine cheer” has “its altar” in each of our hearts.

Let’s warm ourselves with those thoughts until spring returns again.