Darton, Longman & Todd (London 2022). Pbk. 80 pages. £8.99.
As its title promises, this is the account of one person’s religious journey and understanding. The author is an American Benedictine nun and life-long Roman Catholic. Her religious formation in the 1950s was dominated by The Baltimore Catechism, a system of rote-learning that, as she puts it, ‘has all the answers before anyone asks the question’. That stood in stark contrast to the emerging landscape of computers, which ‘has few, if any, universally held answers at all in a world where change is commonplace… and tomorrow is a work in progress’. A second even more significant contrast in her early life was between two concepts of God. One, the frankly unbelievable God presented in the catechism, a mix of ‘magician, puppeteer, vending machine, warrior, judge and tease’; the other, the God whose warmth and guiding light overwhelmed her while alone before the blessed sacrament. ‘I was only 13, but that night changed my whole notion of the presence of God in our lives.’ Joan Chittister’s life has seen her champion of the second of each of these opposites, against the first. Yet while she rebels against her catechetical inheritance, she acknowledges its continuing influence. Three of its set questions even provide her chapter titles: Who is God? What must I do to gain heaven? Why did God make me?
The God-question has layers of answers. From her spiritual experience: ‘God is the internal voice calling me to give myself to the fullness of life.’ Science (‘my spiritual director’, she calls it) ‘brought me to realise that the Cosmic Presence, the beginning and end of everything, has been consumed, dwarfed, shrunk, and reduced’ to the God of Christian tradition. And without this inner light and cosmic presence, her own human dignity would be endangered: ‘No God, no meaning. No God, no purpose. No God, no cosmic quality about us at all. But I cannot go there.’ She cannot go there, it seems, because human creativity — art, music, poetry — and the glories of the universe demand a Creator. So at the end of it all we are back with Job 42 and Psalm 104. Nothing wrong with that! But members of the Sea of Faith will want to ask Chittister: What distinguishes your God from a simple label for the sum of human creativity and humanly discerned meaning and purpose?
The author’s second question, about gaining heaven, she interprets as, ‘How shall I know how to live in a world at the crossroad?’ Her answer is that we need to combine ‘a sense of personal responsibility’ with ‘a purpose greater than the self’; which being interpreted means: be a good ecologist and save the planet. This she contrasts with her catechism’s answer to the same question. Referring to God, it says that we must ‘praise Him, serve Him, and love Him’. With this quotation she opens up what will be the major theme of the rest of the book: ‘Our very notion of God becomes encased in maleness… as if Godliness was maleness writ large.’
Added to this is the familiar attack on Genesis for sanctioning human exploitation of the Earth, combined with a plea to give full weight to the second creation story. Here ‘God brings all the animals to Adam to be named… to be brought into relationship with humankind’, indeed to share in their creation. ‘Genesis is clear. God did create the world. But God did not complete it. God left the completion of that work up to us. And we are making a miserable disaster of it… Whatever theology of co-creation can be rescued from the shards of fire and water, bad air and polluted soil must rise now.’
Finally, ‘Why did God make me/us?’ This time the catechism’s answer is not rubbished: ‘To show forth His goodness and to share his everlasting happiness in heaven.’ But there follows a catalogue of women being excluded from this, and her conclusion is: ‘My theology rests on one thing: the church itself will not be fully Christian… until it realises the woman’s question is the very question on which its own holiness will be judged.’
Anthony Freeman is a retired priest in the Church of England.