Ever since the Vietnam War, I have struggled between two tensions in life: to be good or to be just, to be a compliant citizen or to be a conscientious one.

If there is a major problem in spirituality today, it may be that we do not do enough to form Christians for resistance to evil. We form them for patient endurance and for civil conformity. We form them to be “good” but not necessarily to be “holy.” In the doing of it, we make compliant Christians rather than courageous ones, as if bearing evil were more important than confronting it. We go on separating life into parts, one spiritual, one not.

This tension between what is profane and what is spiritual makes all the difference between a holy life and a pious life. The pious life seeks spiritual consolation, a kind of otherworldly disinterest in the secular city. The holy life, if Jesus is any model at all, understands that one without the other is bogus. To be holy on earth we must pursue spiritual fulfillment in the midst of the sacred secular. This awareness of the prophetic power of the spiritual brought me face-to-face with the need to come to grips with a spirituality of resistance. It is, I decided, the relationship between power and justice that makes all the difference between seeking the kingdom of God and seeking spiritual self-satisfaction.

—from Called to Question by Joan Chittister (Rowman & Littlefield)