“Surprise is my favorite name for God; every other name for God limits God.”  So says David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk attached to Mount Saint Savior monastery in Elmira, New York. Now age 75, Brother David serves as a spiritual inspiration to many people around the world. I listened to him speak several times last week and also had the privilege of engaging in a heart-to-heart conversation with him for an hour.

Just looking at the face of this man for whom the spiritual life is all-important buoyed my own spirit. It is a face with depth that carries an expression of peace of soul, a peace that goes beyond what mere resignation can provide. He speaks resonantly with a gently accented English that shows evidence of his upbringing in Austria.

As we talked, he ran his fingers through a small circlet of beads which he uses for the so-called “Jesus Prayer.”  “Lord Jesus, have mercy,” he repeats with unspoken words. Long ago these words became for him a kind of mantra. This prayer keeps him focused on God through the day, even when he is absorbed in conversation with other people and in other activities.

The reason why he values surprise so much is because it alerts us to the gifts that we have received. Usually, we are not enough awake. “We tend to go through life half asleep,” Brother David says; “it is gratefulness that wakes us up.”

In fact gratefulness is the focal point of his spirituality.  This has led him and some of his friends to establish a web site around this reality. Their reason for doing so is to build up a community of people for whom gratefulness becomes a centering magnet. After hearing about this site, www.gratefulness.org, I tapped into it and can report on its value. As a reader, you may be interested in doing so yourself and perhaps in joining this on-line spiritual community.

The web site explains the mission of this spiritual movement. “Gratefulness can transform your personal life,” the statement reads. “Gratefulness can even transform the world by setting in motion a spiral of kindness.”

This movement offers five kinds of interactive features: play, learning, practice, sharing, and reaching out. You can engage in these activities by following the directions listed on this web site. This sequence can be envisioned as a spiral by which we can move toward life, goodness, truth, and beauty.

For Brother David, gratefulness connects people with faith, hope, and love. After becoming aware of what we have received we become free to trust in God and become people who expect to receive further good gifts from God. We also feel impelled to love other selves, the people around us who are brothers and sisters to us.

To my objection that gratefulness is fine for those of us who live comfortable lives but not for others, this man of vision gives a sympathetic and thoughtful reply. Yes, he admits, there are huge numbers of people around the world for whom each day is full of pain, deprivation, and misery. But, usually, poor people are more grateful than the rich. “The less we have, the easier it is to be grateful,” he believes.

For those of us not subjected to deprivation, becoming aware of the suffering of others is an opportunity for us to act on their behalf. No matter how little our own ability to help, we can try to do something.

Of his own experience in reaching out to others on the web site, Brother David says, “I am much more alive than I was.”  He credits working with young people as a rejuvenating factor in his own life. In particular, a young Yugoslav software engineer who had no interest at all in spirituality, discovered its value through designing the web site and setting it in motion. Now his has become a deep spirituality built on the foundation of gratefulness.

Brother David also gives credit to the spiritual values found in Buddhism. Studying that tradition for three years led him to place greater value on religious experience.

As he grows older and continues to experience God in prayer and action, an ever greater gratefulness seems to him the most appropriate response. That includes expecting to be surprised.

Richard Griffin

“When I first retired, I was a lost soul. I would have gone right back to work if I hadn’t gotten so sick. With all that time, on my hands, I started wondering what I had made of my life. What was the point of it all? Did I accomplish anything worthwhile? I started picking everything apart.”

“If you stay with it, though, you start to figure things out. Maybe some of your mistakes weren’t so bad after all. Maybe they were part of your finding your way. Maybe you were heading somewhere all along, but didn’t know it. Eventually, it hit me – – Charlie, this is your work now. It’s just a different kind of work, that’s all, and there’s plenty of it to do.”

These words were spoken by Charles Robertson, age 69, to Wendy Lustbader, the author of a new book called “What’s Worth Knowing.” A geriatric social worker based in Seattle, Lustbader has summarized in this small volume her conversations with some two hundred people, most of them in later life.

At the recent New Orleans meeting of the American Society on Aging, I had the pleasure of hearing the author talk about the elders whom she has encountered. With rare skills as a public speaker, she kept the audience of professionals in the field of aging rapt, at times even moving us to tears. As I now read her book, I recall how animatedly she brought to life people like Charles Robertson.

About him, Lustbader provides this background information: “Shortly after Charles Robertson retired, a sequence of illnesses chipped away at his freedom. He was forced to give up driving, which meant that his range of activities shrank to what he could do at home. He became despondent to such a degree that his wife considered taking his shotgun out of the house. Once he identified his spiritual vocation, his range of inner activities became truly boundless.”

Charles never actually says what his new work is. However, Lustbader helps explain it by writing of “his spiritual vocation” and “range of inner activities.”  He has discovered his later years as a time for taking care of his soul. And this is what turns his life around.

Incidentally, Charles makes no mention of his wife’s role in this transformation but I suspect that she had something to do with it. Knowing how women have greater insight into such matters, I am prepared to credit her with a major part in bringing her husband along to see what really counts.

About her own work with older people, Wendy Lustbader says, “I feel genuinely that every elder has something to teach me.” The question is how we can evoke the wisdom of older people. That is what she has done in her new book, one that follows two excellent volumes on care of older family members.

The author worries that too many older people have themselves internalized ageism, the prejudice against aging. It happens often that an older person speaks of himself or herself  as a “nothing who does nothing.” But for Wendy Lustbader, the attitude behind those words is all wrong. If you know how to listen, you will discover that everyone has gained some wisdom from living.

That applies even to Harry Nichols, another gentleman who appears in the book. About marriage he says: “You’re supposed to compromise. You’re supposed to talk things over. I just waited for things to blow over.  All six of my wives had the same complaints. I got sick of it. I’m better off single.”

When Wendy Lustbader quoted the words about the six wives, all of us in her audience broke into laughter. Of course, we laughed despite knowing that here was a man who lacks self-knowledge to a painful degree. He can say some of the right words about compromise and talking things over, but he cannot put them into practice enough to save even a single one of his marriages.

His social worker must have felt challenged by this man’s refusal or inability to face the reality of himself. “I had enough of women messing around in my house,” he told Lustbader defensively amid his debris-strewn, incredibly messy home.

But she believes of social workers that “if you practice with an open heart, the healing that you give elders multiplies.” In listening to her talk, I found it easy to believe that she has become a source of healing for many. Harry will be fortunate indeed if he gets any more opportunities to talk with Wendy Lustbader.

Charles, by contrast, has found a true path to take him through old age. Like many others, he has had the wisdom to redefine work and develop an agenda suitable for discovering a deeper identity as he matures further.

Richard Griffin

“One morning I was sitting at my kitchen table, staring into space. It was one of those windy days when the sun keeps coming out and going in. All of a sudden, a sunbeam crossed my kitchen table and lit up my crystal saltshaker. There were all kinds of colors and sparkles. It was one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen.

“But, you know, that very same saltshaker had been on that kitchen table for over fifty years. Surely there must have been other mornings when the sun crossed the table like that, but I was just too busy getting things done. I wondered what else I’d missed. I realized this was it, this was grace.”

These words were spoken by an 86-year old woman named Martha McCallum to Wendy Lustbader, a Seattle-based geriatric social worker and writer. Ms. Lustbader includes this quotation among many others in her new book “What’s Worth Knowing.” This small volume comes filled with meaningful encounters between the author and the older people she meets along her path.

At a recent national conference on aging, I heard Wendy Lustbader talk about her work with elders and her discoveries about their spirituality. The author’s skill in presentation dazzled me and others at the conference. There were times during one talk when tears came to the eyes of many who listened to Ms. Lustbader’s accounts of her discoveries about her clients and other people.

The revelation described by the woman quoted above happens in the midst of routine domestic life. As she herself notes, the same physical scene must have confronted her many times previously, but this occasion was different. Somehow she became aware of a reality that had escaped her notice previously. That reality was the beauty of the light.

What might have made the difference this time was not a change in the scenery but rather something inside the woman. The author describes the effect that a chronic illness had on her: “Once arthritis slowed her down, Martha McCallum would spend a lot of time sitting at her kitchen table. She had such a fully alive presence that to those who joined her at the table she herself seemed to gleam as much as her crystal saltshaker.”

Being forced to slow down, doing more sitting than she had done before, disposed the woman to be more receptive than she had been when busier. Her soul had become more sensitive to a scene that had not previously revealed its full beauty. For the moment she became like the 17th century Dutchman Jan Vermeer whose much-prized paintings display light that transforms scenes of daily life.

Or going back further, the woman had become like Mary in the Gospel of Luke. Her sister Martha was doing the household work to provide hospitality to Jesus when he came to visit. Jesus surprises his listeners by praising Mary for “having chosen the better part.” The contemplative role of listening is the one that opens the soul to the revelation of beauty all around.

Pay attention to what Martha McCallum calls the special moment when she noticed the colors in her saltshaker – – she calls it  “grace.” This makes it a divine gift freely given to open human awareness to the beauty that lies all around. It disposes the soul to become conscious that this world contains more power than we knew.

Ms. McCallum’s statement “I wondered what else I’d missed” also suggests on her part a new awareness that, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins says, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

This grandeur is missed most of the time even by people who are convinced of its presence. “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” says T. S. Eliot in his play “Murder in the Cathedral.” But, as this incident shows, at rare moments we can be struck by sudden spiritual awareness that makes life precious.

In this instance the person receiving the sudden illumination was 86 years old. To those who may think that later life does not hold much value, this event is a forceful refutation of such a view. It is never too late for moments of revelation that suddenly provide insight into the beauty of things. No one can predict when those moments might come.    

Richard Griffin

Huston Smith, looking back over his 81 years on earth, feels grateful to his parents for the inheritance that they passed on to him. This inheritance was not money, but faith.

They were Methodist missionaries in China; there they brought up their son who would become one of this country’s foremost scholars of world religions. Through his appearances on public television, especially in a five-part program produced by Bill Moyers in 1996, Huston Smith has become well known to the many Americans to whom religion speaks meaningfully.

Now retired, Huston Smith continues to write about faith, religion, spirituality, and their importance for people of our time. Last week in New Orleans, I had the opportunity to talk with this man of insight and feeling. Looking into his deeply sympathetic face, I felt myself in the presence of someone who appreciates the splendor of human life and the mystery that surrounds it.

He summarizes the personal faith received from his parents in two simple sentences. We are in good hands. In gratitude for what we have received, we should bear one another’s burdens.

Of the inheritance from his parents he writes: “On coming to America for college, I brought that faith with me, and the rest of my life has been a struggle to keep it intact in the face of the modern winds of doctrine that assail it.”

This quotation comes from his most recent book “Why Religion Matters.” There he presents religion as a necessary way of understanding human identity and the meaning of the world.

Professor Smith knows about the modern winds of doctrine at first hand. During his long career he has taught at Washington University in St. Louis, M.I.T., Syracuse, and the  University of California at Berkeley. In academia, he had constant contact with ideologies quite closed to spiritual reality and dead to the legacy left by the great religious traditions of the world.

Professor Smith does not fail to admire science and the technology that has transformed the way modern people live. But he insists that science cannot answer the great “why” questions such as those asked by the French painter Paul Gaugin in one of his most celebrated pieces of art: “Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?”

Science, for all its wondrous achievements, cannot speak to “the basic longing that lies in the depths of the human heart.” That longing finds a response in the great religious traditions of the world, traditions that Professor Smith has devoted his life to studying.

Though most people do not see it, he believes that the modern world remains in deep crisis. “Giving a blank check to science” is the prime cause of this crisis, he says. Instead of recognizing that scientists cannot answer the “why” questions, our contemporaries expect them to know everything or, at least, be on the way to universal knowledge.

Going against the views of many Americans, especially young people, Huston Smith does not feel that spirituality by itself is the answer. “I am waging a one-man war against spirituality nosing out religion and turning it into a pejorative,” he told me with passion in his voice.

He knows and understands the criticisms people make about religion, its dogmatism and moralistic approach to life, telling you what not to do. But, he says, “I argue with them.”

“Religion is organized spirituality,” he explains. “As such, it takes on the burden of all the shadow side of the institution.”  

But, if there were no religious institutions you would not have the great treasures of spirituality, he argues. The Sermon on the Mount of Jesus and the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha would both have been quickly lost unless they were carried down over thousands of years by institutions.

What is likely to happen to the major organized religions in the twenty-first century, I asked. Professor Smith sees them as coming closer to one another in our global society. However, for those in the West, at least, they will have to come to grips with the question of their relationship to science.

These religious traditions must convince people that science does not have all the answers. The way science views the world is incomplete and requires religion to reveal a deeper reality.

Richard Griffin