"The Prophetic Voice: Listen"
Sr. Joan Mitchell
Sunday, December 5th 2004

At a baptism two weeks ago, my cousin’s grandson had a question. “Go ahead, ask her,” his grandpa urged. The little boy’s question was-“What’s a nun?” Earlier this curious little kindergartner had explained he was the only one in his class who knew the word for what bees do for flowers-pollinate them. Such a learner needed a worthy answer.

How do I explain my life to a five year old? So I think, “We teach people about God,” but we are more than our roles. I never identified with bride of Christ theology. Theologian Elizabeth Johnson off the shelf and thought I will say, “I’m a friend of God and prophet.” Friend of God felt comfortable but prophet seemed presumptuous. In the end I settled for-“Someone who does work for God.”

The child kept swinging from his grandpa’s hand, unimpressed. I should have said sisters are an evolving communal life form and appealed to his scientific bent. I’m still listening to his question and listening to my life for an answer. The question came from the future, from a child two generations younger. I’m hearing the question at a time in my life and the life of the church when old answers no longer suffice. My answer emphasized work, my bias as a Sister of St. Joseph-to divide the city, listen to the needs of the dear neighbor, and roll up our sleeves to do what needs to be done.

I hear and hold the question of who am I in our hurting church, where shame and scandal have found many leaders wanting. Adults usually ask me a different question-how can you stay in the Church? I admit to feeling like John the Baptist, who has his tools of judgment out in today’s gospel. He’s ready to take an axe to the family tree of Israel and clear out the dead wood that bares no fruit. He threatens the messiah will have a winnowing fan to separate the wheat from the chaff. Being a child of Abraham and Sarah does not substitute for living faith.

Parker Palmer testifies in his book Let Your Life Speak that it is entirely possible to lead a life other than one’s own-to do only what parents or society expect, to pursue success or satisfy ambition. Before the Second Vatican Council living a life other than one’s own is what nuns did. We obeyed our rule, the Church’s prescription to make us saints. Actually, before Vatican II, living the faith we received is what most Catholic did-we learned our prayers and catechism, went to Mass on Sundays, ate fish on Fridays. We’re done.

The Council opened the window for the Spirit, inviting us, the people of God, to listen and respond to the gospels, to listen and respond to the joys and sorrows of the afflicted in this world as our own, to listen and respond to the Spirit stirring in our own experience. The Council recognized that it is baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus that calls every Christian to holiness.

Since then our vocations as Christians depend on listening rather than conforming to prescribe rules and requirements. This is how sisters understand the vow of obedience today-as listening to the needs of the times. As Palmer puts it, we must listen to our lives telling us who we are. We must recognize the gifts we irrepressibly embody and share.

“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live-but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.”

Such listening involves going inward and sometimes downward to listen to one’s own life, including its shadow side. What can I not help but live if I am living my own life? I left the classroom 34 years ago but have never stopped teaching. How about you? What can you not help but live?

What do we hear when we listen to our lives as Christians and church? I think many of us have found that we cannot not believe and be church together, even in the face of failed leadership. “Keep the faith, change the church,” says Voice of the Faithful. Instead of a mass exodus, these sex abuse scandal have forced us to listen to lives anew and to our own firsthand experience of God. The faith I live is not the tradition I receive in the catechism but the faith commitment others lived before me that I cannot not live now that it is my time to keep walking without clear vision of the way.

Isaiah in Sunday’s first reading imagines leaders blessed with understanding and wisdom, courage and awe, counsel and knowledge, who judge the poor with justice and build a time of peace when the lion and the lamb live together in peace. Some of us cannot not be on the Lake Street Bridge on Wednesdays. Some of us cannot not be compassionate, cannot not work to treat people with HIV/AIDS. Some of us cannot not keep trying to bring the lion and lamb together.

The answer to who am I as a sister has everything to do with the answer to who we all are. We are empowered laity whose lives and commitment sustain the church. The women and men who belong to our community as sisters and consociates partner with you. You partner with us. We sisters no longer take our identity from being separate and holier but from our relationships, our widening circles of friends and neighbors. We understand ourselves in a communion of life with all that is. We intentionally stand with the poor and with the people of God. Like Gloria Steinem’s answer to someone who said she didn’t look 60. “This is what 60 looks like.” “I am what a sister looks like and is.”

I hear and hold the question of who I am in these darkening days of Advent, when wind and chill have already stripped away last year’s leaves and blossoms, littered Earth with seeds, and made the stars visible again overhead.

The Advent time of year surrounds us with a landscape that asks what is essential? What like the trunks of trees holds us? Wherein lies our strength and resilience for weathering storms? What unseen seeds will some spring day sprout? The dark puts to bed the familiar world we see daily in lush light and surrounds us in the unformed world of dreams and far-off stars. We light Advent candles to gather our families and communities around small circles of hope so we can see each other and share our commitments, as we anticipate the world’s turning.

This is a dark womb time of year when we anticipate and reflect on the birth of the child Emmanuel, the child who is God-with-us. Although literally born in the past, liturgically the newborn child of Christmas comes yearly into our future and asks like the curious kindergartner who and what and why we are. I should have said I’m a listener to the Spirit in me and in us. We are what faith and hope look like. We are what prophets look like. PS: A woman suggested on the way to communion that I should have told the little boy that sisters are pollinators.

From Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer

Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about-quite apart from what I would like it to be about-or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.

That insight is hidden in the word vocation itself, which is rooted in the Latin for “voice.” Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live-but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.

The power for authentic leadership is found in the human heart. Material reality is not the fundamental factor in the movement of human history. Consciousness is. Awareness is. Thought is. Spirit is.

Be the hope
Grow, not make a life.

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, says Palmer, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent. (3) Daily Jews pray the Shema. Its first word Shema gives this prayer its common name. The word means hear or listen; it implies take heed, obey. “Shema Israel Adonai elohim akad.” “Hear O Israel the Lord your God is one.”

This meaning touches on our contemporary understanding as Sisters of St. Joseph on the vow of obedience. We understand this as listening to the signs of the times. We aim to divide the city and to discover people’s needs. Listening in this sense implies acting on, responding to the needs.