His deep dark eyes were sad. There was no doubt he understood. But then he dropped his
shoulders, clasped his hands between his knees and began to shake his head slowly from
side to side. “Jhoan, Jhoan, Jhoan,” he said. “What you say is true but you must never say it
any place but here. For the sake of the church,” he said, “you must never say these things
in public. Only here” - he gestured around the room - “only here behind closed doors,
between ourselves.”
I understood his concerns. I know as well as he did that unity is a fragile strength. But I also
knew what he didn’t. For the sake of the church, what women wanted had to be said in
public because there was nowhere else for a woman to say it. Other than a few token
women whose presence is designed to deceive us as to who really has the power, no
women ever get behind the closed doors where the final draft of church documents are
written, or the pronouns are determined, or the committees are chosen, or the boards are
set up. But if the best of them, if Pironio, couldn’t see that, then I knew that to stay in this
church was going to take a special kind of spiritual strength.
The spirituality demanded at a time of tension in the church itself requires more than
patience. “Time changes nothing,” the proverb teaches. “People do.” But while we work for
change, we need a spirituality of conviction, honesty, awareness, endurance, and faith in
the God whose time is not our time.
–from Called to Question: a spiritual memoir
by Joan Chittister
I TOLD HIM OUR TRUTH
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