Joan Chittister speaks to PCUSA women

Recently Joan Chittister gave a stirring address to the churchwide gathering of Presbyterian women. As she walked through the story of Jesus’ transfiguration on Mt. Tabor, she noted: “The call of the spiritual life, then, the call of ministry, is the call to take all the insights into the life of Christ that we have ever been able to gather back down our private little mountains to the grasping, groaning world of our own time. The call to ministry in this century is the call to be aware of the root causes of suffering in this world and to work a few miracles of our own.” I suppose that this statement by itself is not so striking, but then she continues: “We minister to the hungry and the unemployed and the depressed every day—and we do that very well—but how can we say that we really minister to the poor if we never so much as question the fact that in this country we are still putting more money into weapons of destruction…Or let’s put it this way: If you were to count one trillion $1 bills, one per second, 24 hours a day, it would take you 32 years to finish counting. But with that $1 trillion, you could buy a $100,000 house for every family in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Iowa and you could put a $10,000 car in the garage of each one of those houses. Then there would be enough money left to build 250 $10 million libraries and 250 $10 million dollar hospitals for every city in those states. And after that there would still be enough money left over to put in the bank and, from the interest alone, pay 10,000 nurses and 10,000 teachers and still give a $5,000 bonus to every family in those five states. That’s what one trillion dollars will buy in this country today. But Star Wars, the death star weapon being sold as a defense system but which most credible scientists say can’t possibly work, now—this evening—while we sit here has already cost more than that and, the Brookings Institution tells us, nuclear weaponry alone already carries a price tag of over five trillion dollars.”
I remain in awe of such numbers! And whenever I can bring myself to think about their enormity, I end up disgusted by our priorities in this country. Yet another reason why there can be few priorities higher on my list these days than voting the current administration (Congress included) out of office.