Heart of Flesh: A Feminist Spirituality for Women and Men
by Joan Chittister, O.S.B.


Keynote address at the CTA National Conference Nov. 15, 1997 in Detroit, Mich. Reprinted in its entirety with the author's permission.

This presentation is in honor of two women; I don't know either of them, but I'll never forget them. They are a story in my own life. The incident took place in Ireland. I was in a church that sits in the middle of a main street in a suburb of Dublin. The locals call it "the parish church," but it has all the style of an American cathedral: massive interior, a circular dome, life-size statues, Persian rugs and a marble baldachin over the deep-set altar. I found myself looking around the church during lulls in the services, caught by this, fascinated by that. I realized that one wall was a series of memorial plaques, not the ornate kind so often found in English churches, but impressive nevertheless. The plaques were carved in marble, every major letter gilded, and they were meant to be noticed. Two of them behind the altar rail caught my eye every time I went up to communion. "What's wrong with this picture?" I could feel myself wondering as I followed the slow line up the aisle to the altar. Finally, one Sunday morning, I stayed after mass to study them more closely. And then I knew what it was that was meant to be noticed. I also knew what it was that had been troubling me.

The first plaque read: "The altar of Christ the King is erected by Canon George Fleming, PP, in memory of his mother. Pray for them."

The second plaque read: "Pray for the soul of James Clarke, in whose memory these stations are erected by his sister, Mrs. T. Farrell."

Think about it. Both plaques, ostensibly, were raised as memorials. But the one in honor of the woman carried only the name of the man who had donated it. The woman in whose honor the gift had been given was honored with a plaque, but not with an identity. The second plaque, donated by a woman, names the man being honored first, and then, at the end rather than the beginning of the memorial, in small letters, herself as donor.

There it was, carved in stone, embossed in gold: the total invisibility of women -- even when women were noticed, even when a woman was supposedly being honored. How can that happen, I thought. What is that saying to us about our spirituality? And what must we do about it if we ourselves are truly to be a spiritual people? What does the invisibility of women have to do with our need -- our ability -- to scale our own mountains in search of a contemporary spirituality in a changed world?

Scripture is very clear about the answer: Ezechiel 36:26 reads, "I will take from you your stony hearts and give you hearts of flesh..." The implications of the passage are overwhelming. A world without a soft heart lacks any reason to exist. Otherwise, the important things -- natural beauty, human bondedness, honor, honesty, suffering, kindness -- will get lost in the shuffle somewhere along the line. The world will go blind with business, lose sight of the human dimensions of the daily, forget that life rides a cycle of gain and loss until all the bric-a-brac of time which we collect as we go along drops away and only the important things are left. Bank accounts, for instance, have nothing to do with a person's last hours, let alone the quality of their lives. Power melts between our fingers like sand in an hourglass, worth nothing when we need it most. And, at the end, reason gives way to feeling with terrible intensity. Then, only the self remains. Whatever that is. Whatever by then composes it. Whatever makes a person what they have become -- hard or soft, loving or rigid, intolerant or receptive, self-righteous or accepting. A spirituality that lacks heart lacks quality of life.

Heartlessness is the terminal disease of a patriarchal society. Heartlessness barters the soul for the system: for America's sweatshop shame, for high tech intimidation, for welfare reform without educational reform, for an ecclesiastical sexism that cripples both sexes -- and all in the name of God. The fact is that the world has never known so much poverty, so much violence, so much oppression, so much institutionalized injustice. But we go to church -- and we go to church -- and we go to church. Paul Kennedy, Yale University Professor of History, calls ecological ruin, the automation of industry, the biotechnology of agriculture, the monopolization of resources and the globalization of finances, the global time bombs and tombstones of the 21st century. There has got to be something drastically wrong with a spirituality that exists in that kind of world and substitutes ritual for righteousness.

Finally, these reflections come out of the long, low wail that stays in me when I remember again the words of an old Sufi woman who, like us, looked at life and found it wanting. "Old woman," a young girl asked her, "What is the greatest burden in life?" And the old woman answered, "Young woman, the greatest burden of all in life is to have no burden to carry at all."

Listening to the wisdom of women
To refuse to recognize wisdom, wherever it is, is not only to diminish the development of peoples, it is also to despoil spirituality itself at its roots. A spirituality that listens only to the spiritual wisdom of some, but not of all, to men but not to women, is no spirituality at all. It is simply the ecclesiastical offshoot of a sinful system. How can a people possibly hope to restore the spirit of the nation and renew the soul of the church when the insights of half the world are ignored like that?

Between the years 1000 and 1900, historian Philip Sheldrake tells us, about 87 percent of saints named were men. What's more, he notes, in this century, in this period of great feminine consciousness and the "progress" of women, only 25 percent of those named and canonized by the Holy Roman Catholic Church have been women; the other 75 percent are yet men. What is that saying about the church's recognition of the spiritual gifts of women? Clearly, it is precisely a woman's experience of God that this world lacks. God the lawgiver, God the judge, God the omnipotent being has consumed western spirituality, and, in the end, shriveled its heart and swallowed its soul.

The point is that there is a new question in the spiritual life, and it is the spirituality of the spiritual life itself. Life here and the way we relate to it, rather than life to come and how we guarantee it for ourselves, has become the spiritual conundrum of the age. A world on the brink of social breakdown, urban violence, international conflict, and global deterioration demonstrates without doubt that spirituality-as-usual has not worked. And no wonder. When traditional spirituality requires the invisibility of half the human race, the spiritual resources of the world go bankrupt. When spirituality means private piety, the public arena is left to develop devoid of the kind of values that give heart to the world at large. When spirituality does more to undergird a system than to challenge it, the system eventually falls under the weight of its own decay, and a counterfeit spirituality with it. When young people prefer the green movement and the peace movement and the women's movement to the church, the social signs are clear: something is missing from spirituality as we have known it because something is missing from life as we have designed it. Women have been left out of its conceptual development. Men have been distorted and diminished by its assumptions; and the world itself has been threatened by the hierarchical implications of its conclusions.

The question is, what kind of spirituality is needed now, and why? Like the Jesus who walked through dust from Galilee to Jerusalem listening to the poor, talking to women and contending with the system, we must learn to live deeply involved in the world and consciously immersed in an abiding sense of the God who spoke not only from one mountain but from two: from Sinai with its emphasis on laws written on stone, and from the Mount of the Beatitudes with its emphasis on blessings that come from the heart. The first is social, the second spiritual and one without the other is, we see in Jesus, always bogus. We are asked to see life through the filter of commandments, yes, but through the beatitudes, too. Through an ethics of right, yes, but through an ethics of care, as well. From a masculine perspective on life, indeed, but from a feminist perspective, as well. Feminist spirituality points us towards a contemporary spirituality, a new world view: it is a cry for wholeness in a world and a church intent on division and domination, on power rather than on perspective. Feminist spirituality asks both men and women to look at life from the bias of the beatitudes with hearts of flesh where hearts of stone once went unchallenged.

The values driving western society, the social psychologist Stanley Rothman tells us, are profit, personal comfort, exploitation, control, individualism and dominance -- all of them a blueprint for disaster, all of them hallmarks of a patriarchal culture where differences lead to dualism, to norming, to measuring, to excluding, to counting. When personal comfort ranks first in the human agenda, compassion goes sour. When exploitation takes hold of a people, every relationship becomes a "deal," every deal becomes a scam, every scam becomes deadly. When control seeps into the soul, we reduce people to things and the things to cogs in someone else's wheel. When individualism becomes pathological, life becomes one long series of internecine struggles, good, eventually, for no one. When dominance replaces equality, society finds itself limited to the abilities of only one part of the group rather than energized by the creative insights that are present but unexpressed in all of it. What can possibly be missing in a society that would lead it to take such a self-destructive route in the first place?

The answer, I think, lies in the principles of exclusion upon which patriarchy is based, no matter how benign, no matter how well-intentioned. The ostracism of women as a class from public policy and the long-time elimination of women from the theological development of the western world has limited the vision of the world. It makes discrimination generic. It entombs half the people of the world. Clearly, it is a feminist spirituality -- a heart of flesh -- that we need if the church is to survive. More than that, my friends: if the planet is to survive.

There are points in tension, however: first, it is necessary for all of us, at all times, to understand that female and feminist are not the same things. Feminists are people who believe that the notion of gendering, of defining the sexes by traits and limiting them in life on physical grounds to separate roles, should be replaced by the notion of universal personhood. Surely God did not make one sex simply for the sake of waiting on the other. Surely God did not give women minds in order to taunt them by not allowing them to use them -- an argument which is now losing ground somewhat in the secular community but which is alive and well in the synods and seminaries and sacristies and chanceries of the church. To feminists, then, a spirituality that does not release the feminine dimension in both women and men leaves all of humanity half-souled, the church half-graced and the world half-developed.

Second, it is necessary to realize that feminists come in two genders -- female sometimes, but not always, and male, often, though too rarely recognized either by women or the men themselves. (In fact, it is only my feminist brothers who are any proof to me whatsoever that humanity and creation as God made it is really possible. To those brothers, I owe my love.) Each of them, male and female, reflects a different experience, yes, but each is searching for the same thing -- a heart of flesh and a soul that's soft. And each of them feels the weight of sexism in both body and spirit, men as well as women. Men know the price of ignoring the feminine dimension in themselves as well as women know the price of its being obstructed and suppressed in them. Reason, forbidden to women, has diminished men by cauterizing their hearts and calling the suffering "virtue." Patriarchy denies men feeling and substitutes heart attacks and alcoholism -- Hiroshima and the Holocaust -- instead. Power consumes men, literally. They are prodded from little boys to "get ahead," "to become something," "to succeed," until the seed of dissatisfaction saps all the energy In their souls and makes of every man around them a potential threat to their own achievement. Trained to be aggressive, men know the cost of having to "prove" themselves, over and over again. Men know the sexist pain of being hunted and hazed, beaten and sneered at, of having courage and character confused.

The man who seeks a family life rather than status knows what it is to be disdained by both men and women for whom manliness means wealth, image and public "recognition." Universalism -- the epitome of humanity in maleness-- requires that men never fail, are always right, have all the answers, are responsible for everything and everyone and show no doubts, until sick of having to bluster their way through life, weighed down by the pretense of it, they crumble both inside and out, raging as they do. Authoritarianism -- the male sexist model -- demands control, sees disloyalty everywhere, and insists on submission from those who will not, ultimately, submit. That is the war between the sexes. It's the weight of sexism on men versus the search for life among women. It is not a war; it is a loss of life in both of them. Life for men in a patriarchal society becomes one long struggle to stay in charge, whatever the cost.

Feminist men know how it feels to refuse to compete. Feminist men know how it feels to be a wimp in the eyes of those around them -- friends and family -- who see failure to get to the top as failure to be a "man." Feminist men know the ridicule that comes to the man who admits his fear, his compassion, his love. Feminist priests know the pressure of being willing to recognize the creative insights of the pastoral assistant, and having a bishop tell them, "Remember, you're in charge." Men know they must be self-sufficient, that little boys are taught not to cry, ever, for anything; that being able to kill, maim and destroy without flinching marks their passage to manliness. Indeed they know the ridicule and the loneliness of it. No doubt about it: patriarchy erases, excises, patronizes and diminishes women but it is killing men! Men are trained, taught, expected to work, to succeed, to get ahead, to get money. And they literally drop dead from sexism. And men are the ones who benefit from the system? What must be the costs of patriarchy to women -- to the the real victims of the system?

Feminism is a new world view. Feminism is a spirituality which the world and the church ignore to the peril of us all and to itself, as well. Feminism is not simply about femaleness. It is about another way of looking at life, about another set of values designed to nurture a dying globe and rescue any people too long ground under foot, too long ignored, unseen, invisible. Feminism is about a new way of thinking for both women and men who are tired of the carnage, sickened by the exploitation of the globe, disillusioned by the power struggles and searching -- as Ezechiel promises -- for a heart of flesh in a world of stone.

Feminism is, in other words, not a woman's question: It is the human question of the century. It is the spiritual question of all time. It's not about getting what men already have! Not on your life! What men have is not nearly enough. Feminism is about getting a better world, for everybody. But time is running out: It is time to ask how it is that we could go for centuries and never question the morality of slavery? How is it that we could possibly ever make anti-Semitism a spiritual act? How is it that we could theologize that the earth was the center of the universe, and excommunicate people who thought otherwise, because "man"-- men themselves told us -- was the centerpiece of creation. How is it that we could fight wars of religion and never see the irony of it at all? How is it that we could name women a "second sex" and treat them as a lesser sex? How is it that we do it all still?

Made in God's other image?
The problem lies in what we call holy, what we call human, what we call spiritual. We say "thou shalt not kill" to pregnant women but we do not say it to nuclearized nations. We say that all people "are made in God's image" and then close whole dimensions of life to God's other image, women. We say "thou shalt not steal" in the private sector and call third world wage packages "good business." "Making baseballs for 30 cents each on one side of the border and selling them for over $13 on the other side of the border is not just," I argued at a Lenten presentation to business people recently. "Exporting our jobs but not our medical benefits, our pension plans, our Fair Labor Standards Act or our wage scale is not just," I said.

"Wait a minute," the businessman in the group said to me after the presentation. "We couldn't possibly give those people down there the kind of wages that people here get."

"And why not?" I asked him.

"Because it wouldn't be appropriate to that culture," he shot back. But since when, I want to know, are food and housing and shoes for a child "inappropriate" to anybody's culture? How can we say we are spiritual people, a "spiritual" nation and think like that? And why? And what are the results?

The answer is an historical one: we are a patriarchal people. We are, in other words, descendants of a system based on Greek philosophy and a culture based on male supremacy and a Roman Church which built a bad theology of male superiority on a bad theory of biological inequality; a church which taught that women were inferior by nature, and deficient of soul, the servants of the men and the seducers of civilization; a church which learned from the pagan philosopher Aristotle what it then taught as doctrines in Christianity for centuries: that all life is graded from lowest to highest -- from inert matter to males (not humans), and who interpreted Genesis to demonstrate that inequality of the sexes rather than the universal equality and humanity that being "bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh" surely, clearly implies. Spirituality, in other words, is not a purely spiritual thing. Spirituality emerges out of the belief system in which it takes root. And our belief system has been patriarchal -- the rule of the fathers.

Obviously, given the philosophy of power for the powerful, patriarchy rests on four interlocking principles:

Patriarchy is a very effective philosophy. Degrade it not. It allows the people on top to rape nature, to nuke the world, to colonize peoples, and to rape, beat and marginalize women, however benignly. These are the touchstones of the patriarchal world view. And, as we can tell from reading the daily paper, they do not work. They cannot work. They have never worked. They destroy men as well as women and they destroy God, too.

What's wrong with sexism is not what it says about women: it is what sexism says about God that is sinful. The ideas that have held women in spiritual vassalage as well as in social confinement, that have lulled men into arrogant darkness and bogus omniscience, paint a picture of humanity that does the idea of God no favor. The very thought that one type of human being has been made for the pleasure and the use of the other makes of God a kind of taunting bully. The notion that God would create women with brains in order to forbid them to use them paints God as some kind of sadist. The notion that the God of Mary and Eve, and of Joseph and Adam, their helpmates, trusts more to men than to women in the divine plan for salvation ignores the very place of women in the Christian tradition. The notion that God is a sexist appalls.

Feminism, a different cluster of values, a distinct world view, comes to correct patriarchy's skewed concepts of who should be rulers and who are ruled, of who are weak and who are strong, of what is right and what is wrong, of what is a man and what is a woman. Feminist does not come to destroy men. If anything, it comes to save men from imprisonment by a system that cramps the human development of men all the while it purports to give them power. Feminists are not asking men to be less than manly. Feminists are asking women and men not to buy into patriarchal systems that destroy them both. Feminism comes to bring both men and women to the fullness of life, and wholeness of soul for which we were all made "in the image and likeness of God."

But if we are to take that scripture seriously, then, clearly, we are all surrounded by the presence of God in one another. And if we are all words of God, then each of us, all of us, have something to say. We are all a message to the rest of the world of the nature and mind of God. We are all expressions of divine presence, of divine hope, of divine truth. We are all meant to be word to one another, and feminism has a word to say. Feminism speaks from the other mountain, from the Mount of the Beatitudes, not from Sinai, from the mount of compassion over control, of feeling over reason, of empowerment for all rather than power for the powerful; from a commitment to the patient effectiveness of non-violence over the destructiveness of aggression; from the freedom that comes with the self-knowledge of humility over the imprisonment of pride.

Like patriarchy, feminism, too, is a world view, a way of relating to the rest of the world, a consciousness of the equality of differences. The difference between patriarchy and feminism is that feminism looks at life from the other side, the underside, the forgotten side. Feminism critiques a culture built on power for some and powerlessness for most. Feminism requires us to stop climbing pyramids and start forming circles. To the feminist, people are not up or down, disposable or valuable, higher or lower than others. When women claim the right to have their experiences heard and responded to, when they insist on being addressed directly in a society that has over 30 words for car and over 50 words for its various breeds of dogs but cannot spare two pronouns for the human race, feminism frees everyone to think broader thoughts.

When minorities refuse to be silent, feminism flowers. When majorities anywhere -- the poor, the indigenous, the disenfranchised, the laity, the women -- refuse to be the pawns, the footstools, the forgotten ones of a powerful male minority, the Jesus who walked from Galilee to Jerusalem talking to women, curing lepers, listening to children rises again. The Jesus born of woman without the agency of a man makes a point yet to be heard by the world, yet to be modeled by the church. Feminism sees otherness as a way to enrich a society. Conference tables, conclaves, synods, parliaments and bank boards that are all old, all white, all male and all middle class may have power but they lack perspective because they lack complexity. They lack a sense of what they do not know. They take on burdens for the rest of the human race which they have no right to consume. They assume unto themselves the wisdom that comes from universal experience but they have not had it and they do not include it in their deliberations. They name themselves "the universal subject," the ones with the right to speak for everyone else because they contain the ultimate of everything else, but without even asking the rest of the world if that's all right.

But the problem is, as Dr. Janet Martin Soskice of Cambridge University says, "The voice of truth is many; the voice of error is one." To the feminist, everyone and everything has rights. Poor people are not here to be exploited by rich people for slave wages. Women are not here to be the playtoys of men. Wives are not here to be the servants of husbands. Men are not here to be discarded in their prime by a corporate world so that more profit can seep to a few men at the top, thanks to the exploitation of people at the bottom. Animals are not here to be disposed of for idle sport. The globe is not here to be wrung dry by the people with enough guns, enough money, enough power to destroy the rain forests and colonize the moon. People are not here to stack the socio-economic pyramid so that people at the top can stand on the backs of those on the bottom.

Feminism and Jesus
Feminist spirituality follows the Jesus who sought out tax collectors and zealots, women and children, Pharisees and paralytics pronounced to be in sin, and raised them all to the full height of their souls, and of his. Respect for otherness, equality, mutuality, interdependence and nurturance are basic components of a feminist world view. They pledge an ethic of care, a commitment to the beatitudes, a view of life from the Mount of the Beatitudes as well as from Sinai. There is no doubt: a feminist spirituality would change marriages based on institutionalized patriarchy; change a society victimized by institutionalized patriarchy; change a church that theologizes institutionalized patriarchy; and in the end, a feminist spirituality would change the very definition of sanctity.

Feminists -- both women and men -- call us to the Christianity of a Jesus who preceded the patriarchal church, the corporate world and the nuclearized government. They call us to listen to the Caananites in our midst, to include women in our groups, to do away with rigid roles, to open synods and seminaries and chanceries everywhere, to see ourselves as part of the whole rather than its potentates, to go through life as partners rather than as power mongers, to devote ourselves to more than ourselves.

Those concepts would change domestic legislation and foreign policy, theology and corporate life, families and churches. The world would begin to operate on a spirituality of compassion, of empowerment, of dialogue, of community, of openness, of non-violence, of feeling as well as reason, of circles rather than pyramids, of hearts of flesh -- instead of hearts of stone. Those concepts would turn the world around us upside down. They are the holy-making ideas for our time. In a world exhausted by power plays, dying from power plays, destroying itself by power plays, they are the spirituality of the 21st century. If this church is to be true to itself, if this nation is to prosper, if this world is to survive, feminism is a moral imperative. Feminism is not a heresy; it is the spirit of Jesus writ anew. No wonder it threatens the system so much. The question arises repeatedly: Is it possible for a person to be a feminist and a Christian at the same time? The answer must surely be: How is it possible to be a Christian without being a feminist? This is not an option; it is the fundamental mandate of Christianity. Or to put it another way: Is God inclusive or not?

Women are the missing dimension of the church. Without them, spirituality becomes only a shell of the possible. The soul sinks at the thought of the imposition of such limitations in the name of God. The God who said, "Hail, Mary," not "Hail, Joseph," shudders in disbelief at such a perversion of creation.

Feminist spirituality would bring to the church a new sense of presence, of vision, of understanding. Feminist spirituality brings with it a new image of God to liberate both women and men from the God of the medieval courts and ancient battlefields, the rules and the stopwatch, the transcendently distant and the powerfully masculine. The feminist image of God derives from the face of God who lives in the icon, Jesus: The Jesus who bowed his head before John and felt sorry for people standing in the noonday sun. The Jesus who refused to be saved by angels and brought life to those dealing with death both in body and in heart. This dimension of God is humble and feeling, nonviolent and empowering. Jesus, the feminist image of God, cures and loves, is vulnerable and receptive, laughs and dances at wedding feasts, cries tears and feels pain.

Indeed, woman is the totally other, Other. As long as a woman is required to be less than she should be, a man will be required to be more than he can be, and to the detriment of both of them. Until the patriarchal system realizes the insufficiency of the principles of power upon which it is based, the disconnectedness of its bias for maleness from the real composition of the world, and its need for a spirituality that embraces otherness rather than excludes it, it can never become whole. It will continue to fall under the weight of having to carry a burden for which it is only half prepared. The real tragedy, of course, is that we will all suffer for the loss of it. More, underneath it all, spirituality itself will lead at best to half the image of God.

"Rabbi," the disciples asked, "How is it that the Messiah has not come, neither yesterday nor today? Has the heart of the Messiah changed toward us?''

And the Rabbi answered, "The reason the Messiah did not come, neither yesterday nor today, has nothing whatsoever to do with a change of heart in the Messiah. It is because our own hearts are no different today than they were yesterday. For the Messiah to come, it is our hearts that must change."

For the sake of the world, for the sake of the church, you and I, we, must demand otherness. We must refuse to be imprisoned by a one-sided world in a one-minded church. We must change our hearts of stone to hearts of flesh, so that the Messiah who has surely come, may finally, finally, rise again in us.