Call To Action Nebraska

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.

04/20/2026

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.”

04/12/2026

Warning against an increasingly unpredictable and aggressive "delusion of omnipotence" threatening the globe, Pope Leo XIV called on world leaders and individuals to empty their hearts and minds of hatred and violence, and to start serving life.

"Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war! True strength is shown in serving life," he said during a special evening prayer vigil for peace in St. Peter's Basilica April 11.

Read the full story at: https://ow.ly/ywJ850YHtZJ

04/08/2026

03/30/2026

The transformation of the base to the beautiful by Joan Chittister

Lent, the liturgical year shows us, is about the holiness that suffering can bring. It is about bringing good where evil has been, about bringing love where hate has been. It is about the transformation of the base to the beautiful.

But don’t be fooled: Lent is not about masochism. It is about being willing to suffer for something worth suffering for, as Jesus did, without allowing ourselves to be destroyed by it. Suffering is a stepping-stone to maturity. It moves us beyond fantasy to facts. We know now that everything in life will not go our way. We will not simply get what we want or avoid what we do not. And we will know when the price is worth paying or not.

The point is that no one escapes suffering. It is part of the rhythm of life, part of the process of living. The question then is, for what are we willing to suffer?

Because suffering is part of our mortality, it is important to spend it well. Jesus, contending with the leaders of the synagogue at the cost of his life, in order to bring the synagogue to the truth of its own tradition, we can see, is worth suffering for indeed. And many others, we know, have done the same thing for the sake of truth and justice. Martin Luther King, Jr. did. So did Francis of Assisi. So did Catherine of Siena and Joan of Arc. There are simply things worth dying for as well as worth living for.

To live for the lesser things of life is to risk not really living at all. Real life is pungent with risk, with the willingness to spend all the intensity we have for one great, lasting moment of creation—like childbearing, like human liberation, like being a witness to justice and truth and love and faith, the greater things of life.

It is not what we are willing to die for with which the Gospels of Lent confront us. It is living in the way that Jesus lived—for the sake of the sick in Galilee, for the women in Israel and Samaria and Canaan, for the poor in the temple, for those burdened by taxes in Palestine, for sinners everywhere who knew themselves to be weak and did not pretend to be strong—that determines the holiness of our suffering. That is the crossover point between sanctity and a

03/25/2026

Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich has said he “cannot imagine” the Church continuing to exist if women remain excluded from ordained ministry

03/23/2026

The bridge that leads to God--Joan Chittister

The problem of the nature of faith plagues us all our lives. Is openness to other ideas infidelity, or is it the beginning of spiritual maturity? What is it that can possibly take us so far afield from the initial believing self? How do we explain to ourselves the journey of getting from there to here, from unquestioning adherence to institutional answers, to the point of asking faithful questions? It took years before I realized that maybe it is belief itself, if it is real, that carries us there. Maybe if we really believe about God what we say we believe, there comes a time when we have to go beyond the parochialisms of law. Maybe, if we are to be really spiritual people, we can’t afford the mind-binding of denominationalism. In order to find the God of life in all life, maybe we have to be willing to open ourselves to the part of it that lies outside the circles of our tiny little worlds.

The Sufi tell of disciples who, when the death of their master was clearly imminent, became totally bereft. “If you leave us, Master,” they pleaded, “how will we know what to do?” And the master replied, “I am nothing but a finger pointing at the moon. Perhaps when I am gone you will see the moon.” The meaning is clear: It is God that religion must be about, not itself. When religion makes itself God, it ceases to be religion.

But when religion becomes the bridge that leads to God, it stretches us to live to the limits of human possibility. It requires us to be everything we can possibly be: kind, generous, honest, loving, compassionate, just. It defines the standards of the human condition. It sets the parameters within which we direct our institutions. It provides the basis for the ethics that guide our human relationships. It sets out to enable us to be fully human, human beings.