Can reading good books bring one closer to God?  Nancy Malone believes it can and cites long experience as a Roman Catholic nun to support her view.

Can personal humiliation lead a person to a deeper appreciation of God’s role in her life?  Again, Sister Nancy finds in a personal crisis the way to a more honest spirituality.

These are the main messages in her book: “Walking a Literary Labyrinth: A Spirituality of Reading,” recently published by Riverhead Books. As an old friend of the author, I read this work with particular interest and I value its insights into the life of the spirit.

The author does not intend simply to deliver messages, however. She writes a memoir, tracing her life from the early days in Bridgeport, Connecticut to the present, on City Island in the Bronx. Along the way she details many varied experiences leading up to her major crisis.

As Sister Nancy searches for the God within her, she does not proceed by straight lines but by an erratic course of abrupt turns and swings away from the center and then back again. This progress she compares to a labyrinth that brings the traveler to an unseen destination through byways where one often feels lost.

Along her way, she had to discover that “spirituality is meant to be the living breath, the soul, enlivening the creed, moral code, and cult – worship – that constitute any religion.”

She also came to a new appreciation of what reading can do for the spiritual life. In fact, from another author she learned the phrase “book providence” to indicate “that certain books come into our lives at certain times for some God-given purpose.” For Sister Nancy the books she was reading while recuperating from a serious illness led her to change fields and prepare herself to teach theology.

Throughout her book, the author shares appreciation of the books that she has found most valuable. After the last chapter she adds a short list of the writers and books of special value to her and offers appraisals of them. She makes a point of including books that are not considered “spiritual” but which speak to her of human beings in all of our God-given complexity.

The great crisis that has transformed Sister Nancy’s life lasted from 1975 to 1983.  During this period she experienced what she describes as a “dark night.” She felt her spirit to be dead and she could no longer pray or even read. Worse still, she felt “hopelessness, self-loathing, and shame.”

Finally, in January of 1983 she admitted to herself that she was an alcoholic. Facing this fact involved for her the humiliation of acknowledging how far drinking had led her to contradicting the ideals of the religious life to which she had dedicated herself. Recognizing herself as an alcoholic, she gradually came to see that her life would have to change radically. This in itself was painful, to accept the need for transformation of a life that had once seemed straightforward.  

It was through Alcoholic Anonymous that Sister Nancy’s life turned around. Thanks in large part to AA, she has been able to put off the false self that brought her such pain. She praises the AA text “Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions” because “it offers as good a description of spirituality as any I’ve read elsewhere.”

Of herself, she now says: “In the years since 1983, I have been in recovery, never cured, with every kind of support in fellowship and from God that I could ask for – and this is where I always hope to be.”

She feels herself to have discovered anew “the meaning of life, a portrayal of who I am called to be.” This discovery now seems to her “what I have been looking for in all the reading that I have done.”

At the same time she continues to feel a deep human aloneness, something she connects with her vow of life-long celibacy. But she also feels it to be an invitation into “God’s interiority.” As she now sees it, that is the destination to which her labyrinth will finally bring her when she completes her adventure of the spirit.

Richard Griffin

“If I had two hands, I would be more arrogant than I am now, I would have made a lot of money, and I would have hurt a lot of people.”

This is what Rick Curry, a Jesuit brother based in Manhattan, says of his disability. He was born without a right forearm, making him a different person, he is convinced, from what he would have been otherwise.

About his disability he comments further: “My disability means nothing to me and it means everything.” Having only one arm has not stopped him from achieving many of his life goals. And, positively, it has given him a spiritual reach that is making a difference.

Brother Curry founded and directs the National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped, with a residential school in Maine and a theatre in New York City. Now age 59, he has been working with the disabled (that’s what he calls people with handicaps) for 25 years.

In his experience, disabled performers have special gifts and he identifies four of these. For one, they enjoy much greater powers of concentration than do others. They also understand audiences, as if they were barometers walking into a room. Disabled actors and actresses have learned to “accept their own instrument.” Finally, they understand conflict and drama, and they see into what audiences need to understand but usually do not.

Despite a lifetime of trying to cope with it, Brother Curry still finds challenges in accepting his disability. “It’s very painful to this day to meet people,” he confesses openly. After a recent fundraiser at his theatre, he came home exhausted. Having to encounter so many people and smile at them wore him out.

But he continues to appreciate the spiritual values that disability has brought him. “The great gift of being born different,” he says, “is celebrating others’ differences.” It helps him to know what minorities of all sorts go through. Also this difference is the vehicle for what he calls “the grace of empathy.” He has been enabled to feel for the suffering of other people no matter who they are.

Brother Curry goes so far as to claim: “At this stage of my life, I’d rather have one arm than be bald.” When I asked him if he really meant this, he told me: “I am so secure with my disability now that I don’t want to be left with the problem of cosmetics.” Getting a hair piece or trying to cope with baldness in some other way would be upsetting to him.

Another benefit of disability is that it can stir greater trust in God. But Brother Curry’s record here is mixed. “Every morning I place my trust in God,” he says, “but by noon, I have taken half of it back.” Humbly he confesses: “There are a lot of other problems with me.”

Despite what he says about the importance of trust, he considers his own disability as a source of independence. The role of trust in his life coexists uneasily with the need to make his own way independently in a not always sympathetic world.

In some of his self-assessment, Brother Curry shows this independent streak. “I didn’t go into the religious life to hide,” he explains. Though he knew he could not become a surgeon or a priest, he chose to work in ministry, closely associated with priests. “I love being a brother,” he says, and adds proudly: “I’m an arrogant bastard. I have a Ph.D.”

In phrases that sum up the main convictions of his life, Brother Curry says: “You can only praise the Creator with the gifts God gave you. I believe disability is a gift.”

When I share with him my later life experience of having a lifelong disability, my lighthearted statement makes him laugh out loud. “Other people catch up with you,” I tell him, referring to the physical problems so many older people have. It obviously strikes a chord in him, my noting how aging introduces many to what some of us have always known.

Talking with this vibrant man of spirit has enlarged my worldview. Like the rest of us, Rick Curry is clearly a man of mixed and conflicted feelings about himself. But his central insights into the role of disability in human life offer much to ponder amid the hazards of daily existence.

Richard Griffin

Do the letters WWJD mean anything to you? To large numbers of people in America they hold an altogether special significance. You may see these four letters in-scribed on bracelets, rings, necklaces, key chains, and other items used by millions of Christians. Followed by a question mark, the letters pose a formidable challenge to these believers.

The letters stand for the question “What would Jesus do?” This is what many people, especially the young, have promised to ask themselves whenever they are about to make important decisions. These individuals take the presumed action of Jesus as their guide for doing the right thing, the loving thing, the heroic thing.

The WWJD slogan got its start in 1896 when Charles Sheldon, a Protestant minister based in Topeka, Kansas, published In His Steps. It’s a novel but one closely based on the real-life experience of Rev. Sheldon. Almost immediately, the book found extraordinary success, selling millions of copies in this country and being translated into 23 other languages.

The Sheldon novel tells about a minister in a mid-western city who receives a visit from a poor man who has no work and no place to live. The same man, in his early thir-ties, also interrupts the pastor’s Sunday church service and presents his desperate situation to parishioners. After speaking, the man collapses in church, is taken to the minister’s house, and soon dies.

Following this upsetting experience, the pastor proposes to members of his congregation that they adopt as their rule of thumb for all that they do the question “What Would Jesus Do?”

The novel goes on to tell how this principle of conduct transforms the lives of some individuals and has an impact on the whole city. For example, the publisher of the leading newspaper changes his journalistic approach so that he no longer includes reports of  prizefights and announces that the newspaper will stop issuing an edition on Sundays. Measures like these cause chaos within the newspaper company and lead to severe losses in circulation and advertising revenue.

Another establishment figure, Donald Marsh, the president of Lincoln College, breaks his longtime habit of standoffishness from civic affairs, gets involved in local politics, and, allied with other reformers, tries to oust a clique of self-serving office-holders. For his part, the minister decides to devote himself to the poor and erects a tent for people to gather in the most deprived section of town.

My route to the book was a college assignment given to my daughter. In a tutorial on American social thought, she studied the book and then urged me to read it. I did so with intense interest, even though I quickly came to agree with Ralph Luker who writes in American National Biography  that In His Steps is “a simple story with little literary merit.”

Though the book possesses a certain eloquence, I also found it to be quite dated in its tendency to moralize and editorialize rather than letting the action and characterization speak for themselves

But the main message of In His Steps still resounds in modern America. The WWJD approach shows surprising power when you consider the difficulties of applying this norm to a time and place so different from that of Jesus in the Palestine of two thou-sand years ago.

What started the current WWJD movement? Apparently it began in 1989 when a woman named Janie Tinklenberg, a  lay minister in Holland, Michigan, got her youth group  to read In His Steps and devised the bracelet idea that has proven so popular.

A prominent professional youth minister in the Greater Boston area, Bob Doolittle, has used the WWJD bracelet during one of his retreats. He tells me of the good ef-fects wearing the WWJD bracelet has had on at least one young man in his group. “When he makes a decision, he looks at it and it keeps him straight,”  reports Bob. “It’s like a prayer – it reminds him to listen to what the Lord is saying to him.”

According to Bob Doolittle, the recent high school graduate has drawn yet another benefit from the bracelet. “It helped him say ‘no’ to violence.” Not surprisingly, Bob says of the WWJD movement, “I like it a lot.”

Richard Griffin

“The kingdom of God is a reality that you can live every day. It is available to us; are we available to it?”

These are words of Thich Nhat Hanh, spoken by him last week before a large and receptive gathering in the Harvard University church. A thousand students and others came to hear this Vietnamese Buddhist monk with a wide reputation for spiritual insight combined with zeal to bring peace, inner and outer, to the world at large.

This is the man whom Martin Luther King nominated for the Nobel peace prize. He often receives some credit for the spread of Zen Buddhism in the United States, France, and other western nations.

Before his talk audience members, led by a monk from Maple Forest Monastery in Vermont, sang in order to induce a mood of calm and relaxation:

“Breathing in, breathing out.
I am blooming as a flower. I am fresh as the dew.
I am solid as a mountain. I am firm as the earth. I am free.”

Then a bell rang and we focused on our breathing, calming our thoughts.

When Thich Nhat Hanh appeared on the platform he was accompanied by some twenty Buddhist monks and nuns who showed forth the deep recollection that the master teaches. Familiarly, he is called Thây or the Teacher, a sign of the respect and affection that his followers feel for him.

In his talk, the Teacher focused on mindfulness as he outlined what its practice can do for both soul and body. Paying attention to one’s breathing, he indicated, is the way to become mindful.

“Every time you pay attention to your breathing,” he said, “something important may happen. We breathe all the time, but we seldom become aware.”

When you do become aware, “your mind comes home to your body, you are there fully present. We make the body and the mind one.”

According to Thây, this practice opens the way to great gifts. “It brings peace and happiness. You become aware of many wonderful things about yourself, inside and outside.”

This formula for happiness comes from a man who seems at peace with himself. Dressed in a simple brown robe, his head shaven, he stands before the microphone, his hands sometimes moving in and out of each other. Only the wisp of a smile appears at times, though he often mentions smiling as a product of mindfulness.

“There is no day I don’t enjoy walking in the kingdom of God,” the Teacher tells us. Then he goes on to tell us about various kinds of seeds that lay within our psyches.

“There is a seed of fear, of anger in our consciousness,” he explains. “There is a seed of stability, of love. There are energies that help us to be loving and compassionate.”

So, in his teaching, each of us has both positive and negative seeds. So does the one whom we love. “Do not water the negative seeds in her,” warns Thich Nhat Hanh. Instead ask, “How can I best love you, how can I best protect you?”

This approach, the Teacher assured listeners, brings another important value –  –  security. In his words, “When you have love, compassion, understanding within you, you will be safe.”

He shared with us an encounter with a woman terribly distressed over feeling unloved. “Your flower needs watering,” he told her. The woman’s husband also took in this message, changed his ways, and the situation changed from bitterness to peace and love.

At points in his talk, the teacher would ring a large gong and the sound would reverberate, calling listeners to renewed mindfulness. Responding to this ringing, another monk uttered a prayer: “May the sound of the bell penetrate the cosmos, even the darkest places.”

He then spoke of those, like himself, who are social activists. “We want to reduce the level of violence, but we must take care of ourselves. Every day, water the seeds of compassion,” he advised those working to change the world.

The Teacher advises a similar approach to depression. “Fear and emotion is us make us suffer,” he says, “breathing and meditation can help us calm down.” When compassion is there, you suffer much less.”

Robert Griffin

The great nineteenth-century Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh was a deeply spiritual man. His portraits, on display in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts until September 24th, reveal a man passionately interested in the character and soul of the people whom he drew and painted.

The son of a pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church, van Gogh himself did theological studies as a young man. For a time, he served as an evangelist reaching out to poor coal miners in Belgium. When, in the last ten years of his life, 1880 to 1990, he devoted himself entirely to art, he brought to this vocation the spiritual concerns that he had long felt.

What one critic has described as van Gogh’s “deep moral earnestness” comes across memorably in the portraits of a postmaster, Joseph Roulin, and his family, residents of Arles in southern France, whom  he painted in his last years. Similarly, the haunting self- portraits of this period bring sensitive viewers into the artist’s soul.

Of this kind of art, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: “The painted portrait is a thing which is felt, done with love or respect for the human being that is portrayed.”  And to his brother again: “I always feel confident when I am doing portraits, knowing that this work has much more depth – it isn’t the right word perhaps, but it is what makes me cultivate whatever is best and deepest in me.”

For these reasons, Vincent preferred to paint ordinary people rather than the rich and powerful. “I often think the servant girls so much more beautiful than the ladies, the workmen more interesting than the gentlemen; and in those common girls and fellows I find a power and vitality which,  if one wants to express them in their peculiar character ought to be painted with a firm brushstroke, with a simple technique.”

For me, van Gogh has special fascination because of the feeling that a friend, Henri Nouwen, had for the man and his work. Henri, also Dutch by birth and upbringing, was a priest who, two years after his death, still has a large and devoted following as a spiritual writer and director.

From 1971 to 1981, Henri was a professor at Yale Divinity School where he taught a course that featured the art of van Gogh. Seven volumes of lecture notes, student papers, and articles survive Father Nouwen and witness to the powerful attraction he felt toward the artist.

In the words of Netannis Arnett, a writer in a newsletter issuing from the Henri Nouwen Literary Center near Toronto, “Van Gogh’s ability to see light in darkness, to see beauty in the struggle, brought Henri to a keener awareness of brokenness and God’s love for all Creation.”

And further: “Henri appreciated van Gogh’s relentless efforts to see the divine in everyone, and to live compassionately with the most disenfranchised. He thought of van Gogh as radical in his convictions in wanting to become part of others’ misery faithfully, and noticed the vocation of a monk in van Gogh’s zeal and action.”

Van Gogh, sensitive and passionate, suffered greatly. After a break in his relationship with a friend and fellow painter Paul Gaugin, Vincent slashed his own ear. And his death, in 1890, came about after he mortally wounded himself with a gunshot. Father Nouwen was also painfully conscious of his own brokenness and could identify with the artist in his suffering.

Netannis Arnett draws the parallel: “Both Henri and van Gogh had a great capacity to capture in words or images the depth of  human experience – the pain and the ecstasy of the human creature in relation to the universe. Inspired by van Gogh’s brilliant palette, Henri found a new way of understanding the belovedness of every creature.”

In his notes Father Nouwen wrote about the spiritual kinship that he felt with van Gogh. Relying on this testimony, the newsletter writer says that Henri considered van Gogh his saint and a kind of spiritual companion.

Knowing my own limited capacity for contemplation, I can only envy my friend Henri’s habit of sitting for hours before a painting or sculpture. He was able to enter into world of van Gogh and appreciate its deep spiritual meaning.

Richard Griffin

The longest year of my life was 1963-1964, the one I spent in Wales. It stretched endlessly across the months because I felt so isolated, cut off from home, friends, and favorite activities.

The countryside surrounding St. Bueno’s College, the large house in which I lived with some forty other Jesuits, was indeed beautiful: the valley of the River Clwyd below, Mt. Snowden off in the west, and the North Sea a few miles in that direction. But the isolation combined with the austerity of our lifestyle got me down. I used to crave the arrival of the Royal Mail truck halfway through the morning, in hopes that a letter for me would be among its deliveries.

The memory of this place rushed back to me last week as I read a new book by one of my favorite spiritual writers, Frederick Buechner. In Part One of “Speak What We Feel” he writes about a Jesuit who lived in that same house in Wales where I spent that longest year.

That Jesuit was Gerard Manley Hopkins, regarded by scholars as either a great minor poet or a minor great poet of the English language. Hopkins was born in 1845. He became a Catholic during his undergraduate days at Oxford and a Jesuit priest a few years later.

In this latter role, he was largely a misfit, too eccentric for comfort in community living and too sensitive for dealing with normal people. Worse still was the way he felt about himself. As Buechner says, “Deeper down still and even harder to bear was his sense of alienation from almost everything and everybody.”

Ironically enough for my taste, however, Hopkins loved the three years he spent studying theology at St. Bueno’s, from 1874 to 1877. There he could relish the beauty of the countryside and indulge his peculiar appreciation of God’s creation. It was there that he wrote “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” his long elegy about some Franciscan nuns who perished at sea.

This poem, now much loved by many who have grown familiar with it, was pronounced incomprehensible at the time by Robert Bridges, a college classmate, one of Hopkins’s best friends and eventual editor of his writings. Bridges even made fun of the poem, which had been rejected by a Jesuit publication.

In a later series of poems, now referred to as his “Dark Sonnets,” Hopkins expressed deep feelings of abandonment. Though he had served God faithfully, accepting Jesuit assignments for which he was ill-suited and faithfully living the spiritual life, God seemed to have cut him off.

The poet speaks of hours of sleeplessness during the dark of night and then extends their meaning. “But where I say / Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament / Is cries, countless, cries like dead letters sent / To dearest him that lives alas! away.”

Here is a spiritual man who is experiencing the bitter taste of emptiness, of absence on the part of his beloved. He continues to try and communicate with God but it is as if his letters never arrive where they are addressed.

For anyone who has known the terror of the night, or worse still, the absence of God, Gerard Manley Hopkins can serve as something of a patron saint. In daily life, especially when he was teaching in Dublin during the last years of his life, he painfully felt himself the misfit, the oddball, that others thought him to be. To feel, on top of that, cast out of his relationship with God must have come as a crushing blow.

He died in 1889 at age forty-four, still unknown to the world that would later discover his poetic talents. The words written of him in a register maintained by the Jesuits are significant: “On the eighth day of June, the vigil of Pentecost, weakened by fever, he rested. May he rest in peace. He had a most subtle mind, which too quickly wore out the fragile strength of his body.”

His poetry remains perhaps a special taste; many will find it still strange now more than a century after it was written. But the spiritual life of Gerard Manley Hopkins can provide inspiration to anyone who has suffered feeling like a misfit and encountering mere darkness in the search for God.

Richard Griffin