Merry Christmas & Happy Hanukkah

I've spent a lovely day with my family and it is now a little after two in the morning. Boxing day has probably already begun in the online world. I've been passing the time looking at old Jon Stewart clips. Christmas this year has made me think of the friends and family who I miss and I've been less than cheerful through parts of today. To alleviate my woes I began by searching for Stewart's second appearance on the now deceased Crossfire. Freakin' hilarious and fuckin' brilliant. Classic Jon Stewart. After watching some clips from the Daily Show various links ended up leading me to an interview with Sister Joan Chittister on Bill Moyers. (The link is a 15 min audio file but it is well worth a listen. There's also a transcript.) Sister Joan might be accused of being a little less than pragmatic, of proposing unattainable ideals in a world of bitter compromises, but her message is clear and it is largely true. If ever you'd forgotten what Christianity is about, what spiritual contemplation, belief and practice were about, go listen to this interview, or go read some of her columns (eg. on the stupidity of recent brouhaha over the displacement of "Christmas" by "Holiday" in some public and government contexts). I'm serious. I cried (briefly) while listening to the Moyers interview. Beyond her touching messages about world peace, and her pleas for the poor, Sister Joan also has what I think to be an excellent understanding of Catholicism. Coming from a buddhist who was partly raised by an an ex-Catholic priest, one might take this endorsement with some skepticism, but I will support it with the following quotes. It's too late (I'm too lazy) to write about what disagreements I have with sections I'm about to quote, and they are beside the point. In particular, in addition to Sister Joan's perceptive views on Christian morality in contemporary America, I want to point to a little snippet of some of her theology: "Scripture is not a driving test. Scripture is a challenge to the heart and this moment. [...] we don't believe it's frozen in time."

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MOYERS: Dobson, Falwell, Robertson and a lot of secular pundits and columnists are saying that this election was decided by moral issues. Do you think moral issues were that decisive in this campaign?

CHITTISTER: Well, I don't believe… I'm not exactly sure that they were as decisive in the end. And I'm not sure that there's any way we can measure that. But even if I say, "Yes, they were," the fact of the matter is that they are some moral issues, they're not all moral issues.

The fact of the matter is that they're all in contention with something else which is also a moral value and also equally important unless you put it completely out of your mind or your heart. For instance, let's look at the abortion question. I'm opposed to abortion.

But I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking. If all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed and why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.

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MOYERS: Do you have anything in common with the Religious Right?

CHITTISTER: I have Jesus in common. That's enough for me provided that we're all allowed to talk about and to hold in our hearts that aspect of the Christ life that we really believe must be raised at this time.

MOYERS: And what are those? What are the moral issues that you would like to see us pursuing as a people, as a country right now?

CHITTISTER: Well, I believe we got the cue on the mountain. I think…

MOYERS: The sermon on the mount?

CHITTISTER: I do. I do. The Beatitudes, as far as I'm concerned are the most overlooked and underdeveloped aspect of Christian scripture.

MOYERS: Well, for all the people who are watching who don't know what the Beatitudes are, what are you talking about?

CHITTISTER: Well…

MOYERS: The sermon on the mount.

CHITTISTER: The sermon on the mount, Jesus gets up, faces a crowd who's saying to him, "What are we do now?"

And he said, "Remember the poor. Keep the poor as your criteria." We have 1 out of every 318 people on this planet this morning, Bill, are refugees. They're following garbage cans in the back of restaurants around the world. They're following the resources that we took from their countries that are now jobs in somebody else's country.

MOYERS: Blessed are the poor?

CHITTISTER: The poor, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice. We've got somehow or other to recognize that when we go into a country and pay a little kid 20 cents an hour for a 70 hour week to make our shoes and our jeans, we have to ask ourselves how is it that we can export our industry but we can't export our Fair Labor Standard Act.

MOYERS: So, blessed are those who seek justice?

CHITTISTER: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice. Blessed are those who mourn. Remember those who are in grief, those mothers with dry breasts in Africa right now are mothers. And we're pro-life? Where are we?

Where are we in Darfur? Why do we have an army in Iraq for killing other mothers when with the power of this country, if this is going to be a moral country. Blessed are the peacemakers, the peacemakers, not the war mongers who are simply planting seeds of war for the next generation. That's our criteria. The Beatitudes must be our criteria.

MOYERS: See, this is the issue. People read scripture and reach different conclusions.

CHITTISTER: That's what scripture's supposed to do. Scripture is not a driving test. Scripture is a challenge to the heart and this moment. Scripture is the whole scripture. But we don't believe it's frozen in time.

MOYERS: Why are you a Christian?

CHITTISTER: Well, because of the Jesus story is my story. There's nothing else that really touches my heart or my spirit the way Jesus does. There isn't any other answer for me. There's no question about that.

MOYERS: Why are you a Catholic? I mean, the Catholic Church is still a paternalistic hierarchy. You're never going to be a Bishop, because doctrine forbids it. Your own Pope says, "Never." So why do you remain a Catholic?

CHITTISTER: Well, we've said "never" to a lot of things. We're very good at never, and then we say 400 years later, "as we have always taught." I'm a Catholic because I believe that the church is a treasure house of the Christian tradition.

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Merry Christmas.

ps My admiration for Sister Joan, for the work she does, and for her type of Catholicism and Christianity more generally, should not be interpreted as implying some sort of new age equivocal approach to religious practice on my part. I am still a buddhist. I continue to be a buddhist because I think it is for me a more effective means of achieving what I want, namely an open and knowing mind, free from the discursive habbits of ego.