Call To Action Nebraska

08/24/2026

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Blessed are the peacemakers

08/12/2026

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08/04/2026

"If you are a loving God, do something!" by Joan Chittister

Once upon a time, past the seeker on a prayer rug came the beggars and the broken and the beaten. Looking up to heaven, the seeker cried out, “Great and loving God, if you are a loving God, look at these and do something!”

And the voice came back from heaven, “I did do something—I made you.”

We are taught at a very early age to work for ourselves alone: our money, our status, our security are what counts, not the quality of our society as a whole. The notion that individuals can have whatever individuals can get turns greed into virtue. We criticize welfare for the poor, which we call food stamps, but have no problem at all with welfare for the rich, which we call tax breaks. We use the poor of other countries to provide labor at slave wages. We export our jobs but not our wage scales. We use work to exploit people rather than to liberate them.

For the monastic, Benedict says, work is altogether different. The sacred work of the monastic is the Divine Office and lectio divina. This work of God, the praise and practice of the will of God, is the monastic’s lifetime concentration. But then there is the manual work of taking in the harvest that will sustain both the community and the surrounding area. And just as important, there are the works of service needed to maintain the physical and familial needs of the community itself. Finally, Benedict cites the intellectual work and study required to deepen the monastic’s spiritual life and human understanding as the years go by.

Work, in other words, enriches and develops life on all levels. Work is the discipline that keeps us involved in every dimension of the communal life. Every monastic in the monastery—young and old—is to be given a task to help maintain it, one way or another. That work is a commitment to God’s service. Therefore, monks are to have specified periods of both manual labor and study. We all carry the monastery together, both its physical and its intellectual works or ministries.

In today’s world, the effect of whatever work each of us does— intellectual, artistic, social, communal, or individual—must be good for the globe as well as for the local area and the particular monastery.

The most telling indicator of the spiritual deterioration of the Western world may well be its distortion of the purpose of work. In this culture we work so that we can do something other than work as soon as possible. We work for personal profit, not for the good of the human race. And we routinely work atImage segmented tasks that have no overarching meaning to us. Without a sense of purpose in life and a sense of obligation to leave the world better than we found it, we can work in places that dump chemicals into lakes and rivers without a quiver of conscience.

A spirituality of work, the ancient Rule of Benedict implies, has five components. It sees work as your gift to the world. It builds the human community. It leads to self-fulfillment. It saves you from total self-centeredness and gives you a reason to exist that is larger than yourself. And it enables the Creator to go on creating. Clearly, work sanctifies you by calling you to save the globe for others and save others for the sake of the globe.

A spirituality of work is that process by which you finally come to know that your work is God’s work, unfinished by God because God meant it to be finished by you.

06/24/2026

05/25/2026

The Holy Spirit has spoken by Joan Chittister

Do I believe in the Holy Spirit? You bet I do. Nothing else makes sense. Either the Spirit of God who created us is with us still, either the presence of Christ who is the Way abides in us in spirit, or the God of Creation and the Redeemer of souls has never been with us at all. God’s Spirit does not abandon us, if God is really God.

If we are to understand emerging consciousness as a manifestation of the Spirit of God alive in the land, then never has an age seen revelation, consciousness, and wisdom working more clearly than in this one. The signs of new awareness of the human relationship to God are everywhere, in all nations, in all peoples. The Holy Spirit has spoken through married couples and professional personnel about birth control, for instance. The Holy Spirit has spoken through women—and other eminent theologians, theological societies and male scripture scholars as well—about the ordination of women. The Holy Spirit has spoken through laity and bishops and multiple rites of the church alike about the ordination of married men. But no one listens. The Holy Spirit in people of good will is a voice crying in the wilderness, rejected, ignored, and reviled. One element of the church determines the voice of the Spirit and does so, it seems, by refusing to listen to its other manifestations.

God the Creator and Jesus the Way—always with us on the one hand, but never with us on the other—would move humanity, the early Church was sure, by means of the promptings and presence of the Spirit of God who created us and who lives among us and is in us still. Holy Spirit was not a disembodied ghost, not an immaterial being. On the contrary. The Spirit embodied the life force of the universe, the power of God, the animating energy present in all things and captured by none. Because of the Spirit, Jesus was not gone and God was not distant, and the life force around us bore it proof. The Spirit was the restlesImages urge to life in us leading life on to its ultimate.

The Spirit of God moves us to new heights of understanding, to new types of witness, to new dimensions of life needed in the here and now. The static dies under the impulse of the Spirit of a creating God. We do not live in the past. We are not blind beggars on a dark road groping our separate ways toward God. There is a magnet in each of us, a gift for God, that repels deceit and impels us toward good. The gifts are mutual, mitered to fit into one another for strength and surety.

We are, in other words, in the most refreshingly trite, most obviously astounding way, all in this together—equally adult, equally full members, equally responsible for the church. Nor does any one dimension of the church, then, have a monopoly on insight, on grace, on the promptings of God in this place at this time. The Spirit of God is a wild thing, breathing where it will, moving as it pleases, settling on women and men alike.

~In Search of Belief (Liguori/Triumph), by Joan Chittister

05/18/2026

“Today prophets of pietism tell us to “pray for peace” and “pray that God’s will be done.” And this is certainly important. But they do not demand that we ourselves do something to ensure either. Instead, the professional pietist in us acts as if the Book of Genesis, with its emphasis on personal responsibility, had never been written. We fool ourselves into believing that we are supposed to live in this world as if we were living in the next. We create a devil’s den of complacency and call it the spiritual life. We make quietism the ideal of the age.”

04/27/2026

The person of hope by Joan Chittister

Sitting out in the middle of the channel in a little nineteen-foot fishing boat with ocean freighters and large sailboats passing us on both sides, I remember the wild and crazy joy of it: no desk, no phone, no speeches, no airplanes. Just four of us, a hot sun, an empty fish bucket, a parade of boats, and the rocking of the waves. I cast with all my might, caught the top of the channel light, and, laughing my heart out, cut free just in time to avoid wrapping the next sail in fishing line. Life, bare and simple, is a wonderful thing. How do we learn that? And what does it mean for the spiritual life itself?

We learn it by seeing it, I think. When I was a young sister, in the days before the church had negotiated a kind of truce with the world and the monastery reflected the emotional sterility that the standoff implied, Sister Marie Claire, steadfastly opposed to the suppression of joy in the name of holiness, went to her music room every Sunday afternoon to listen to records of symphonies, scores of operas, collections of piano performances. We didn’t go to concerts in those days, and only music teachers were allowed to have record players. She would sit in her rocking chair all afternoon and simply listen. I remember being very moved by the model of such bold and wanton delight in the face of such institutionalized negation of it. The lesson served me well. There are times in life when the only proper response to the dreary and the difficult is to ignore them. The person of hope, the person who knows that God is in the dailImagey, knows joy.

Embodied love, with all the joy and pleasure and beauty it brings, has been made the great enemy of the spiritual life, as if learning to be dour were a dimension of sanctity. We were trained to beware the beautiful and the pleasurable, as if beauty and pleasure distracted us from the God who made the world beautiful and gave us all a capacity for pleasure. “There is no such thing as a sad saint,” the poster says. Having come out of a Jansenist spirituality, it took me a little while to get beyond the sourness of sin to the delight of fishing boats and party times and wedding feasts at Cana. But I finally came to understand that there is no such thing as “loving God alone.” If we love God, we love everything God made because all of them are reflections of the Love that made them.

To lust for joy is to lust for the God of life. To make joy where at first it seems there is none is to become co-creator with the God of life. When we make joy, we make a holier, happier life.

—from Called To Question by Joan Chittister (Sheed & Ward)

04/20/2026

It will take a million lives--by Joan Chittister

“If you expect to see the final results of your work,” an Arab proverb teaches, “you have simply not asked a big enough question.” To sustain a stay in a dry and barren desert, it is necessary to be about something great enough to be worth a lifetime of unrewarded effort.

The great questions of life are questions that do not admit to cheap and easy answers. They are rooted in the bedrock of the culture and demand the emptying out of souls before they can really be answered. The women’s issue is an obvious one, for instance, but it is not an easy one. That women must soon be seen as equals in the church, adults in the world, artists and thinkers in society is clear. The amount of education and analysis and protest and courage that it will take, on the other hand, to reshape centuries of warped and distorted and heretical thought patterns that have been theologized and institutionalized in the name of God staggers the mind.Image

No single capital campaign will do the trick. No one speech will change the climate. No single law will undo eons of damage. It will take a million lives heaped on top of one another in the rotundas of Congress and on the marble stairways of the Vatican to burst the bonds of arrogance and superiority that make God male and males more favored by God. For women and men everywhere who realize that they are about the fulfillment of Genesis, no amount of time, no expenditure of life will be too much to ask for the lives of women and men yet to come.

We have, Genesis teaches us, been put into the Garden “to till and to keep it.” Co-creation is a human responsibility that carries with it grave implications. There are simply some divine cravings in life—the liberation of the poor, the equality of women, the humanity of the entire human race—that are worth striving for, dying for, finished or unfinished, for as long as it takes to achieve them.

04/14/2026

Pope Leo XIV said Monday that he will continue to speak out “loudly” against war, stressing that his role is to preach the Gospel, not to enter into political disputes.
Speaking to journalists aboard the papal flight to Algiers on April 13, the pope responded to a question about a post by U.S. President Donald Trump.

“I think people who read it will be able to draw their own conclusions. I am not a politician, and I have no intention of entering into a debate with him,” Leo said. The pope said he would remain outspoken in condemning war and promoting peace. “I have no fear of the Trump administration nor of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel,” he said in comments to a different journalist. “That’s what I believe I am called to do and what the Church is called to do. Weʼre not politicians. Weʼre not looking to make foreign policy, as [Trump] calls it, with the same perspective that he might understand it.” “But I do believe that the message of the Gospel, ‘blessed are the peacemakers,’ is a message that the world needs to hear today.”