The Heart of the Temple

Where Is the Heart of the Temple?

Many years ago, I had gone into what I thought was the heart of the temple, the point at which the spiritual life was to become full, become real. At that stage of my spiritual development, it was the trappings of the temple, not really the heart of it, that captivated me. The candles soothed my soul. The chant calmed my spirit. The stained-glass windows and familiar shrines and unending rounds of ritual steadied my sense of spiritual direction. What more could there possibly be to the spiritual life than fidelity to the tradition, regularity in its forms, orderliness in its practices?

I thought that simply being there, in the midst of the message, at the core of the call in the temple was all that constituted living the call. More than that, I thought that the temple itself embodied the whole of what it meant to be holy.

Yet the truth is that I often found religion to be a disconcerting if not a discouraging experience. Good and decent people I knew—divorced women, often abused and battered, who had married again; the gay cousin who had spent his life taking care of his mother; non-churchgoing in-laws; committed activists; friends of various ethnic backgrounds—were standing suspect outside the gates of too many temples….

So, as the years went by, I found myself in the kind of confusion which, I came later to understand, makes the spiritual real. The temple preached a message I did not yet see—even in the temple itself:
In a country full of temples the hungry among us were still starving. Too many children were sick and uneducated. The poor were dying without care.

Even the temples themselves had no room for half of creation. Women were never accepted as full members, were always invisible, were forever dismissed—as useless but useful, a kind of heavenly mistake, functional, of course, but not fully human. In many temples, blacks were segregated and homosexuals were chastised, and those the temples called “sinful” were shunned.

Obedience had become the central virtue; law was whatever the system defined. And all the while holy disobedience was what was really needed.

In a country we called “Christian,” the Jesus story had become more fancy than fact.

Then, in the 1960s, the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath called the church, the whole people of God, even the keepers of the temple, to a cataclysmic examination of conscience. From inside the temple, and because of the temple, my whole life was put in question.

Suddenly, the new institutional examination of conscience made sense. All of life had erupted in one great burst of understanding that no amount of regularity and order could possibly bring. There was a world out there that was itself “the heart of the temple.” It was now a matter of bringing the temple to the world and the world to the heart of it.

-- from the introduction to In the Heart of the Temple: My Spiritual Vision for Today's World, essays by Joan Chittister (BlueBridge)