Finding God: Thoughts from Sister Helen Prejean

Web Posted: July 21, 2003

In 1996 Sister Helen Prejean (featured in the film, Dead Man Walking), spoke at Marquette. The following excerpts are conversational reflections on her spiritual journey and how she experiences a sense of purpose in her life. Her words draw each of us to examine the same questions, personally and in our work together at the university.

The most direct road that I have found to God is in the faces of poor and struggling people. For me, it was the connection with people in the St. Thomas housing projects, then with people on death row and in prison, and then with the murder victims' families.

I was forty years old before I realized the connection between the Jesus who had said, "I was in prison and you came to me, I was hungry and you gave me to eat" and real-life experience where I was actually with people who were hungry and people who were in prison and people who were struggling with the racism that permeates this society. And it was like the feeling of coming home. Finding God in the poor was like coming home, because you just say, "Where have I been all my life?"

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I feel that everybody needs to be in contact with poor people --- that in fact, as Jim Wallis of the Sojourners community has said, we need to accept that one of the spiritual disciplines --- just like reading the Scriptures and praying and liturgy --- is physical contact with the poor. It's an essential ingredient. If we are never in their presence, if we never eat with them, if we never hear their stories, if we are always separated from them, then I think something really vital is missing.

The other thing I would want to add to the whole question of finding God is that the journey, wherever it takes us --- to me it has been the poor and the struggling --- must be coupled with a reflection and a centeredness that comes from prayer and meditation. It's very important to assimilate what's happening in our lives. I find that I can't function if I don't have that sense of being at the center of myself and in the soul of my soul, so that I am truly operating from the inside out. And it's important to be very self-directed, because it is so possible to be caught on other people's eddies in the river and to get into a stimulus/response situation. It's so possible not even to realize that we are really moved by other people's vision of life, other people's insights, other people's agendas, and just to be caught on one current to another, that we have no rudder on our own boat.

When you hit something big like this, and you know that it's bigger than you --- like working for justice in the world, or trying to connect faith with going against powerful and entrenched systems --- you have this sense of "Yes, I am doing my part." But then you also need to be able to put it down and let God run the universe, so you can play a clarinet or be with your friends or work in a garden.

To be whole is very important. Wholeness, I think, is part of godliness. I don't think it's cleanliness anymore that's next to godliness --- I think its wholeness! To have a well-rounded life. To have a good intellectual life, where you're reading and thinking and discussing. To have a strong emotional life where you can give and receive intimacy with people. To develop friendships like a garden. Because there's just no room for these Lone Rangers who go and try to save the world by themselves.

Sister Helen Prejean: Excerpt from How Can I Find God? by Jim Martin, copyright ©1997. Redemptorist publications can be reprinted with permission of Liguori Publications, Liguori, MO 63057-9999. No other reproduction of this material is permitted.