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Column Questions we didnt ask will shape the soul of new
millennium
By JOAN CHITTISTER
We are in crisis, the great Polish
journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski said, when questions arise that cant
be answered. Oh, oh.
The end of the 20th century, the end of the Western worlds
second millennium, leaves a beguiling trail of astounding human innovations and
social insights -- the dawn of universal education, the consciousness of human
rights, the invention of nuclear weaponry, the advent of global communications
and the technology it takes, in the poets words, to slip the surly
bounds of earth.
But it leaves us with a good many unanswered -- and, perhaps
worse, unasked -- questions as well. All of these developments were hard won
and painfully slow in coming. At the same time, all of them led to even more
questions writ large and uneven across the human landscape for all to see.
We learned, for instance, that dictators can be elected despite
the most democratic of processes, that education privileges and that the
underprivileged dont get much of it, that weapons dont deter
barbarity, that war is obsolete, that science is not god, that poverty is a
political policy rather than a condition of life, that the planet is fragile,
that patriarchy is insufficient to the full humanity of either women or men. We
learned it is not what we have that makes for the good life, it is the kind of
people we become.
The millennium just ended (or, by another count, the one that will
on Dec. 31, 2000) has answers to bequeath to the next one, which, we can
reasonably conclude, will form the foundation for whole new ways of being
human, of being alive, of being community.
The troublesome truth, however, is that it may not be the answers
we leave to the new millennium that will shape its soul. It may well be the
questions. In fact, it may be the questions we did not bother to ask, let alone
answer in our time, that may well be the real stuff of the next millennium.
The problem with the questions is that, at first glance, they are
disarmingly simple. Their resolution, however, challenges everything we have
come to know and exposes everything we dont. This time, like all
times, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, is a very good one -- if we but
know what to do with it.
I offer a representative set of questions with some embarrassment,
knowing that though we ignored them in our own time, they will certainly
determine the ultimate value of this age:
1. Are women fully human, human beings or not? In most parts of
the world to this day, women have few legal rights, are not free partners in
marriage, have little or no economic independence and are defined as the
helpmates of the human race, rather than its leaders, its visionaries, its
thinkers. In the church they are, officially, only invisible consumers of the
faith. As a result, the world stands on one leg, sees with one eye and thinks
with one half the human mind. And it shows. The question is whether or not
humankind can endure such myopia.
2. Has technology left us with a culture of isolates? Business is
done now by one computer in conversation with another. Businesses use answering
machines, not people, to route people from one digital voice to another. People
work at home alone or in cubicles next to people who communicate only with
screens, as they do themselves. Soldiers sit in nuclear silos waiting for
computer signals to tell them to press the nuclear button. And yet, these very
machines also link the world and make the local global. What happens to the
human bond and the ability to create community in social systems such as
these?
3. What is life? With the advent of cloning, does anyone really
know how to define when it begins as well as when it really ends? And what does
that imply for the constructs we now call theology, morality, humanity,
marriage and birth?
4. Can we really raise peaceful children in a violent society? How
shall we tell them one thing and subsidize another? How will we convince them
that our violence is good violence but their violence is bad?
5. What does it mean to be a good Catholic? Does faith demand
conformity in the name of unity? Is the increasing centralization of the church
not simply the death of collegiality but the death of Pentecost as well? And
when, if ever, will the insights of the faithful be allowed to have anything to
do with the faith?
The poet Rudyard Kipling, in his poem War, said in the
early years of this century, If any question why we died/Tell them,
because our fathers lied. May the next century find for the human race
more truthful answers than we have to the questions that measure our humanity,
our Christianity, or the crises this time may be more than either the church or
the planet can survive.
Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister writes from Erie, Pa.
National Catholic Reporter, January 28,
2000
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