The Princeton University scholar finished his second lecture by saying of his friends and associates, “they teach me that grace is everywhere.”

These words come from Albert Raboteau, whose “Lectures on Living a Spiritual Life in the Contemporary World” inspired an audience at Harvard Divin-ity School last week.

Professor Raboteau grew up in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, in a African-American/Creole family, “Roman Catholic as far back as we knew.” His great-grandmother had been a slave.

Three months before Albert’s birth, his father was shot dead by a white man with precious little provocation. Until her son prepared to leave home for college, his mother (and step father) did not share details of the murder with him “because they did not want me to grow up hating white people.”

Albert’s step father had been a Catholic priest but, under the pressures that African-American clergy felt in the church, he left the priesthood in 1947. He was the one who had baptized Albert.

Albert himself could never count on being given communion when outside a “black church.” One time, going to a “white church,” he was passed by twice, until the priest had given the host to every white person there. On another occasion, he and his mother were refused communion altogether. After this experience he went out into the street and wept.

During much of his adolescence, he wanted to become a priest himself. For this sensitive young man, “the sheer beauty and poignancy of the world could break me into tears.” And yet, “there was an edge of sadness in everything.”

At age thirteen he read Thomas Merton’s “The Seven Storey Mountain,” a book that helped shape his ideal of the spiritual life. Merton and Martin Luther King became his inspirations, and Rev. King’s preaching against the Vietnam War moved him to tears.

Notable academic success came his way both in college and later in grad-uate schools but a heavy burden weighed down his spirit. “I tried to become per-fect,” he explains, “I wanted to be a saint.”

Later, he was swept up in the civil rights and the anti-war movements. De-spite the complications this caused for his graduate studies, he managed to get master’s degrees in literature at Berkeley and theology at Marquette but neither field of study satisfied his soul.

Finally he found an academic field that suited him – history at Yale where he began study of the religion practiced by slaves. This record of faith touched him deeply, faith like that expressed in the spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen, Nobody Knows but Jesus.”

During his New Haven years he married a woman who shared his spiritual interests and aspirations. However, after the birth of three children and under the pressure of a series of administrative posts in academia, their marriage began to suffer.

He had been trying to develop faith out of his experiences of beauty and that ultimately had failed. Now two events temporarily restored his faith, one the birth of his first child, the second the death of his mother.

Much later, he accepted the deanship of the graduate school at Princeton, a prestigious post but one caused him much anguish. This job seemed to him “a disastrous success.” He felt his spirit was dying.

Next came an extramarital affair: he left his wife and entered into serious crisis. “I threw up every morning,” he recalls, and “my spirit was bleeding all over the place.”

Eventually, he resigned the deanship and set out on a new path. He has married again and found healing through discovery of the Russian Orthodox Church. Its icons, its liturgy, and its spirituality feeds his soul. He also discovered “Souls in Motion,” a Harlem-based community of caring people who were reach-ing out to those in need.

Many more details, omitted here, fill out the story of this spiritual seeker who has found both forgiveness and a new life. His first wife and he have sought and received one another’s forgiveness –this year, for the first time since their se-paration, they celebrated Christmas together.

Ultimately, says Professor Raboteau, “I realized that a community of love has surrounded me my whole life.” His personal saga of sin, suffering, and redemption belongs to the great tradition of life stories told by people who have come through turmoil to discover God more deeply.

Richard Griffin