Prophetic spirituality is an active spirituality that demands as much rock-hard commitment as it does heartfelt concern.

It is not an easy spiritual path. It can be tiring, wearying, soul-saddening and at the same time electrifying. It sends us into the world with one eye on the will of God for all of it at all times. The biblical prophets of Israel—every one of them—when they came to a crossroad between truth and untruth, when they had an opportunity to settle down, to quit the resistance to evil, to accept what was, chose instead to keep on going. Despite difficulties, they chose to live and proclaim Truth for themselves and for others. The Prophets were the sirens in the night, the sowers of far-flung seeds, the eternal agitators in the soul of the people, of the nation, torches in the murk of confusion.

They chose to go on sowing the message of God’s will for the world upon which the future rested and the people depended. If they were ever to find their way out of the darkness to which a failed leadership had condemned them, the prophets knew that some truth tellers, however few, had to keep the message alive.

These prophetic people, people just like us, simple and sincere, eager and inspired—these sheep herders like Amos and small-business people like Hosea, these simple country farmers or priests like Jeremiah, these thinkers and writers like Isaiah and Ezekiel, these struggling lovers and suffering witnesses like Micah, these brave and independent judges and leaders, like Deborah and Miriam, made no small choices. They chose courage. They chose the expansion of the soul. They chose to stake their lives on what must be rather than stake their comfort, their security, the direction of their lives, on what was.

It is that steadfast, unyielding, courageous commitment to the eternal Will of God for Creation—whatever the cost to themselves—that is the prophetic tradition. It sustains the eternal Word of God while the world spins around it, making God’s Word—Love—the center, the axle, the standard of everything the faithful do in the midst of the storm of change that engulfs us as we go.

What can we learn from all of this? We must decide what to do now in a world reeling in a centrifuge of transformation, metamorphosis, and vicissitude. Like the Israelites in captivity, we find ourselves exiled from a quieter past, thrust into a cosmic village, and plunging headlong into a totally new world both here and abroad.

—from The Time Is Now: a Call for Uncommon Courage by Joan Chittister (Random House)

Click here to view a video Q&A, the first of several recorded by Sister Joan, in which she discusses why she wrote this book.