It is so easy for people to come to live with others as if they were living alone. All they have to do is to stop noticing one another. But that is not a spiritual community at all. I need the conscious presence of other people to become sensitive to God’s presence, to hear the gospel Word in life through those who are speaking it around me, and to be able to express my love for Christ in a real way, in the other, in the world. Stability is the one sure tool we have to be certain that the world, for us, can really become a garden to be tilled rather than a candy store to be robbed.

Stability, the willingness to continue to grow where I am, ironically, is the ground of conversion, the willingness to be changed. With these people, in this place, at this time, I dedicate myself to rebirth and to growth and maturity, both spiritual and psychological. With the help of these others, I can commit myself to the faithfulness of a God who is also unpredictable.

Stability is what enables us, in other words, to live totally in God and totally for others. It is those two quests in life, in fact, that may be our only counterweights to pathological egotism in this self-centered world where whole nations can starve to death on our TV sets while we eat supper without so much as raising an eyebrow about it all. What else can explain human callousness of that proportion except the lack of human caring that comes only from living through things with people? What else can possibly have led the human race to accept the prospect of nuclear annihilation in the name of “defense” if not the distances that have grown up between our worlds and the lives of those around as we come and go and come and go through life, unrooted, unknown, and unattached?

Is stability easy? Not on your life. But as the Desert Monastics told us, “It is by warfare that the soul makes progress.” And if, by living as responsible members of the human community, we can come to the point where “the sun never sets on our anger,” then we will have come to the fullness of life.

—from Wisdom Distilled from the Daily (HarperSanFrancisco), by Joan Chittister