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SSQ and Bill Phillips

Bill Philips is a Methodist who sings in his church choir, says grace with his family before meals, and prays at other times, though less often then he says he should. He considers himself a person of faith who cannot imagine how he would ever stop believing in God.

In his work life, Dr. Phillips is a physicist based at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. For his scientific achievements in the field of quantum mechanics, he won the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics. He had done his graduate studies at M.I.T. where a mentor convinced him that he could do physics “at the frontiers, competing with the best in the world, and do it with openness, humanity and cooperation.”

I had the opportunity to hear Bill Phillips speak late last month at Harvard University. The occasion was a three-day conference organized by Science and the Spiritual Quest. This California-based agency promotes dialogue between scientists and scholars of religion. The Boston-area conference was one in an ongoing series of national and international events intended to stir thinking and discussion between the two cultures of science and religion.

Among the dozen or so scientists I heard speak about their own work and, in some instances, their own religious beliefs and practice, I was particularly impressed by Bill Phillips. His pleasing and witty style, his competence and, at the same time, his humility, all commended him as a model of  the religious man committed to scientific investigation.

He may have been eminent enough in his field to have won the Nobel prize, but he puts himself into perspective as another seeker looking into the mysteries of material creation and also looking for God.

He calls himself “an ordinary scientist and an ordinary Christian” but his deep understanding in both areas of his life suggest that these descriptions do not actually apply to him.

When he turns toward science, Bill Phillips has the unusual ability to explain lucidly how things work in quantum mechanics. At the submicroscopic level, he says, things behave strangely. For example, in the quantum world, an atom can be in two places at the same time and objects may have certain properties only when a person looks at them.

His specific area of research is the trapping and cooling of atoms. At the very low temperatures that he has achieved, these atoms move very slowly indeed and in doing so reveal waves that become large enough to be seen with the naked eye. Among other products, laser-cooled atoms will some day make possible quantum computers far more competent than today’s.

Dr. Phillips finds support for his faith in what he sees in his experiments. “When I examine the orderliness, understandability, and beauty of the universe,” he says, “I am led to the conclusion that a higher intelligence designed what I see. My scientific appreciation of the coherence, the delightful simplicity, of physics strengthens my belief in God.”

Belief, however, is not in itself scientific, though Dr. Phillips makes a point of saying that his scientific understanding supports his faith. In the expanded version of his talk, he goes on to write:  “ I have a feeling .   .   . that we will never find truly convincing scientific evidence about the existence of God.” But, as he takes note, faith would not be faith if you actually had such evidence.

The God of Albert Einstein is not good enough for him. The great theorist Einstein believed in a God who gave creation an order and intelligence but did not care about human beings. For Phillips, God is in personal relationship with us and loves us relentlessly. In his daily life he experiences the presence of the God who is active in the world.

Like many other thoughtful people, he also experiences doubts about God. The classical problems of evil and suffering leave this brilliant man without answers, just like everybody else. For him as a Christian, the question of Jesus’s relation to other faiths also seems perplexing.

Ultimately, however, in Bill Phillips’ view, what is most important about faith in God is how we act toward other human beings. To him, his faith-based mandate to love others as himself counts more than anything else.

Richard Griffin

Walter and Geoffrey

“I wouldn’t take a million dollars to do it again, but I would give a million for the experience.” That is how Walter Sobel of Wilmette, Illinois sums up his service in World War II.

Now 88 years old and still at work, he is happy to talk about the battles in which he was involved as a naval officer aboard the battleship New Mexico in the Pacific. His ship took part in all the invasions of islands in that war theater except for two. The New Mexico served as what he calls “sea-borne artillery,” pounding the shore to soften the defending forces for the landing troops.

Never did his ship take a hit until the Philippines campaign when a Japanese kamakazi warplane dove onto the deck. Both Walter and his captain were wounded in this attack and extensive damage done to the ship.

Asked to sum up his dominant reflections about this wartime experience, Walter lists three:

  1. The way that a group of 2000 people took responsibility and made the battleship function so effectively. He still marvels that such a diverse group of people became melded into a formidable fighting machine.
  2. “The will of the Lord to let me live.” Another of the New Mexico’s captains was killed in action and Walter knows that could easily have happened to him.
  3. “I feel grateful for having had the opportunity.” Already a practicing architect before the war, he did not enter the navy until he was 29. After a few months’ naval training at Princeton and Ohio State, he soon found himself an officer of the deck on a battleship.

Walter expresses surprise at how the world has changed since those days. “When I left the service, I had a great animosity for the Japanese,” he confesses. This feeling was strong enough to make him refuse opportunities to visit Japan in later years.

However, the time came when his wife told him: “Forty years is long enough to hold a grudge,” a sentiment that moved him to visit and develop friendships with former enemies. He now foresees a new world in which relationships will be transformed further.

Another veteran of epic naval encounters in World War II is Geoffrey Brooke, an 81 year old Englishman who is a long-distance friend of Walter Sobel, their friendship based in part on shared memories of shipboard warfare in the Pacific. Reached at his home south of London, Geoffrey spoke freely about his wartime adventures at sea.

Unlike Walter, Geoffrey Brooke was a career officer, serving in the British navy. When only thirteen years old, he went off to the naval college for training and was a midshipman at age nineteen when the war began. So psyched was he for the coming conflict that he says now, “I would have been disappointed if there hadn’t been a war.”

Steeped in this seagoing military tradition, Geoffrey has an encyclopedic knowledge of naval warfare and the lore of the people who made the British navy preeminent.

This fascinating gentleman describes his wartime experiences in two books, both of them published in the 1980s. The first, “Alarm Starboard!,” covers his entire war, with detailed accounts of his service on the battleships Nelson and the Prince of Wales, as well as on aircraft carriers and other ships.

His memory for events is truly remarkable, although he gives credit to his mother for having saved his letters home. His dramatic accounts of battles at sea, for example the encounter in which the Prince of Wales took on the formidable German battleship Bismarck, held this reader entranced.

Asking him the same questions that Walter answered, I received from Geoffrey one general conclusion and two detailed memories of events:

  1. “I was incredibly lucky on about six different occasions to have survived at all.” He then lists the times when those about him were killed and he could have been easily killed himself.
  2. “The cold on the Russian convoys.” When on a destroyer escorting merchant ships to the Soviet Union, he recalls shivering in the frigid temperatures.
  3. “On the Prince of Wales when it was sunk.” Like other desperate crew members, he had to haul himself along a rope attached from the deck of the doomed battleship to a destroyer alongside. He vividly remembers feeling exhausted and tempted to let go and drop into the sea below. But “I looked into the water filled with black oil and I thought that’s not for me.” Shortly after he reached the destroyer’s deck, the destroyer captain had to order the lines cut, thus dooming many other crew members.

The two seasoned veterans I have chosen to write about here in honor of Veterans’ Day carry on a flourishing exchange of letters sharing memories of dramatic days. This correspondence will now, perhaps, take on a new resonance as the two old allies, the United States and Great Britain, take on together the daunting new challenges posed by international terrorism.

Richard Griffin

Kindling Your Inner Fire

“Kindling Your Inner Fire” was the name for a gathering of lay ministers, all alums of Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge. We assembled two weeks ago for a day of sharing stories about working in parish churches, hospitals, schools, nursing homes, and other settings. Some twenty women and men, we welcomed the opportunity to explore with others spirituality relevant to our ministry.

As a way to stir reflection on our spiritual life, the group leader proposed identifying five themes that have helped shape the persons we have become. She herself led the way, listing the following themes in her own life and explaining how each had brought her to a new stage of development.

In turn, her life has been characterized by Helping, Longing for God, Making the World Better, Holiness, and the Global Family. For each of them she supplied detail so that everyone could understand how each stage affected her life. Of course, these stages were not entirely separate from one another but, rather, all of them flowed into and out of the others.

Another woman had become a priest in middle age and now serves in an Episcopal parish church. The five themes that she identified and shared with the group sound like classical expressions of the great spiritual tradition. Starting with her thirties, she first felt Restlessness, then experienced Hurt, Discovery, Desire for God, and the Call.

When it came my turn, I needed to make two lists of five inner experiences. For me, the two groups were necessary because my spiritual life can only be understood in the light of dramatic changes that took place in my middle years.

In the first group I listed the following: Death, Priesthood, Community, Perfection, and Asceticism. These items may sound abstract but, for me, they had deep reality. In fact, they led me to leave home at age twenty-one to join a religious order.

My second group of five includes strikingly different spiritual priorities. Freedom, Ordinariness, Creativity, Fatherhood, and Friendships qualify as leading themes in the latter part of my life.

It is tempting to explain each one of the headings, some of which do not have meaning easily understood. However, I list them here to suggest one way for you, the reader, to reflect on your own spiritual life. You, too, can make a list of the dominant themes that have helped make you into the person you are.

After working in small groups to assemble our lists and explain them to one another, we lay ministers once again all came together for discussion of our findings. Attempting to find common themes, we identified several that, often in different words, ran through the lists made by individuals.

The first such general theme was called “the Hound of Heaven.” The phrase refers to a poem of the same name written by Francis Thompson, a nineteenth century English poet. There the poet envisions God as a stalker of the soul, pursuing human beings until they surrender to him in love. Some members of our group have felt themselves pursued by God.

Another such theme was described as “Churning,” the dissatisfaction that many people have felt with the world, a feeling that has stirred in them the desire to serve God. Breakthroughs, Encounters, and Struggle also came up for discussion.

Further discussion flowed from an attempt to identify those factors that have helped and hindered our “ministerial vitality and sense of God.”

Some of the resources the group found helpful include continued learning, good mentors, humor, prayer groups, annual retreats, and physical exercise. Problem areas identified included what women called “the stained glass ceiling” preventing them from going to higher levels in church jobs, isolation, possessiveness about one’s own work, and workaholism.

This brief description of the “Kindling Your Inner Fire” experience may suggest some of the wealth of spiritual experience shared by members of the group. It may also suggest to you the rich potential of your own interior life and the value to be gained from reflecting on your spiritual history. Undoubtedly you yourself have known many of the themes mentioned here and can profit from continuing to reflect on them and perhaps praying over them as well.

Richard Griffin

Who Will Provide Care?

“We are not looking for warm bodies,” says Robyn Stone talking about the crisis in finding enough skilled and reliable caregivers for older people. To her, retention of current workers is more important than recruiting new ones. “I would put almost all my eggs in the retention basket,” she announces.

Among the professionals who have expert knowledge of care-giving for pay, Robyn Stone stands out. Formerly Assistant Secretary for Aging in the federal department of Health and Human Services, she now does research for a national agency focused on caregiving issues. Dr. Stone spoke in Boston recently at a conference of the Massachusetts Gerontology Association entitled “Worker Shortage: Who will Provide Care Today and Tomorrow?”

Keeping current caregivers is a formidable challenge, given what they are paid. You can compare them to the much discussed security workers at airports who are notorious for their rapid turnover. Both groups are paid about the same: as recently as 1998, the hourly wage for nurse assistants in nursing homes was only seven and a half dollars.

In Massachusetts, about one hundred thousand people are currently dependent on long-term care services. That number is expected to grow much larger ten years from now. Nursing homes are having trouble getting sufficient staff and home care agencies find it difficult to recruit workers. And yet, according to Frank Caro, director of the UMass Boston gerontology center, policy makers do not seem much concerned about the situation.

These officials could profit from what Rosalynn Carter has written about the subject. “There are only four kinds of people in the world: those who have been caregivers; those who currently are caregivers; those who will be caregivers; those who will need caregivers.” The fourth and last category is about to get much larger.

The statistics about professional caregivers will dismay anyone concerned that older people receive the attention they need. Thirty-eight percent of home care workers and one-quarter of nursing assistants have less than a high school education. And yet, they are expected to handle stressful situations that make great demands on both their professional and their human resources.

“We can’t underestimate the level of intensity of this work,” says Stone. Somewhat indelicately, she dismisses the widespread idea of this caregiving as merely “butt wiping.”

Instead, this job involves intimate and personal involvement that can be emotionally challenging. Stone compared placing an inexperienced person into a long-term care world to “dropping a Martian into another planet.”

Contrary to the general impression, most professional caregivers are white, typically middle-aged women who are living at or just below the poverty level. Often, they are single mothers who have turned to this activity for lack of better paying opportunities. And, yet, much more often than not, they provide services that are much appreciated by the families of those cared for. A recent study shows how families that communicate honestly with the caregivers and keep at it develop good relationships with them.

Family members of those who receive professional care, ideally should prove the strongest advocates for improving the lot of those providing the services. They know from personal experience what a difference is made by devoted home care workers and others in the field.

Improved training for caregivers is one of the vital needs that demands attention. Robyn Stone believes that the most significant way of doing this is to help these people “to own their work.” That means taking pride in doing a good job and developing the confidence to meet challenges.

In response to Dr. Stone, three panelists added to the case for action. “Our retention rate has always stunk,” Susan Eaton said bluntly. A Harvard Kennedy School researcher, she suggested ways to treat nursing home staff members differently, as by allowing them regularly to take care of the same people and including all of them in meetings for discussion of their work and its problems.

Another respondent, Barbara Frank, agreed that the key issue is “how we care for the caregiver.” She labeled it a “cruel irony” that so many of these staffers in nursing homes do not themselves have health insurance.

Returning to the original question, we do not know who will provide care today and tomorrow and the experts cannot tell us.  However, we do know that most care will be provided by family members, as it has been for generations. A promising development here may come soon when and if the Commonwealth implements a long-standing proposal to pay members of low-income families who take care of their own relatives.

We also can expect the Commonwealth to shift expenditures for care away from nursing homes and other institutional settings to care given at home. But the need for more professional caregivers will certainly grow, as the baby boomer generation becomes old in unprecedented numbers. And the caregivers themselves will still need care, a need that our society does not show signs of meeting anytime soon.

Richard Griffin

Best Spiritual Writing 2001

By reading writers that lift my spirit, I continue to find much treasure in which others may wish to share. The publication of a new collection, “The Best Spiritual Writing 2001,” presenting many recent articles excellent in both style and substance, is an event worth celebrating.

The first selection in this new paperback is one that I have read previously. However, its excellence struck me once again. This short essay is called “Secrets of the Confessional;” in it Lorenzo Albacete shares with readers deep insights into the spiritual meaning of this ancient Catholic ritual. Father Albacete, a priest who teaches theology in the New York archdiocesan seminary, sums up his unusual views in one paragraph:

“Confession is not therapy, nor is it moral accounting. At its best, it is the affirmation that the ultimate truth of our interior life is our absolute poverty, our radical dependence, our unquenchable thirst, our desperate need to be loved. As St. Augustine knew so well, confession is ultimately about praise.”

The article from which this quotation comes is only one of twenty-five contained in this, the latest paperback in a series that began four years ago. Edited by a Smith College lecturer in religion, Philip Zaleski, this year’s edition is yet another filled with ideas that will almost surely inspire readers intent upon the interior life.

In his preface, Professor Zaleski focuses on the life of the spiritual writer. Two qualities are vital for this kind of writer, he suggests. The first is silence, a condition of soul to which writers must return often. Following the lead of Thomas Merton, Zaleski says: “The best spiritual writers are entirely at home in both the world of words and the world of silence.”

The other quality needed is close contact with the real world in which people must bear pain and hurt. In Zaleski’s judgment, “The spiritual writer expunges suffering from his work at his peril, for suffering is the greatest spiritual mystery, a path to wisdom and a mode of salvation.”

This preface and an introduction written by Andre Dubus III are themselves worth the price of the book. Dubus, a distinguished novelist and short story writer, and a native of Haverhill, Massachusetts, also defines what a spiritual writer should be. Or, rather, what such a writer should not be.

He or she should avoid everything that implies being at a remove from the real world. It is vital to shun “the implied belief that spiritual means above everything, free of the smells and texture and unanswered questions of our lives, not through an act of transcendence but one seemingly of avoidance and escape.”

For Dubus, the proper subject of fine spiritual writing is the soul. That moves him to quote approvingly the editor’s definition: “I take the best spiritual writing to be prose or poetry that addresses, in a manner both profound and beautiful, the workings of the soul.”

Spiritual reading traditionally plays a vital role in the interior life of seekers after enlightenment. For me, it fills a need that otherwise remains unsatisfied. Whenever I go for long periods of time without reading anything that moves my heart, then my inner life remains dry. This is why I always welcome coming upon a good book, or receiving a recommendation from a friend steering me toward writing that will provide me needed inspiration.

When reading writings that speak to me, I find phrases worth underlining in red so as to make them stand out for later review. These words feed my spirit as I walk along the streets and look out at the varied scenes of each day’s outings. At times of silent reflection I seize on them interiorly in hope of renewed insight. If I am especially fortunate, these thoughts might say something further, not heard the first time I encountered them.

The authors mentioned here will serve purposes like these for some readers of this column. So will other writers represented in “The Best Spiritual Writing 2001”. The authors display a range of tastes, traditions, and styles that does further credit to the editor. They may not be everyone’s best writings of the current year, but readers will almost surely find among them authors who speak to their souls.

Richard Griffin

Forsyth Kids

Pearl Sabat, now age 84, is happy to call herself a “Forsyth Kid.” She qualifies for that title because from 1925 through 1929, Pearl took the bus twice a week from the Benedict Fenwick School in Roxbury to the Forsyth Clinic for work on her teeth. It was not a matter of cavities alone: “my teeth were marshmallow fluff,” she explains.

I talked with this lively woman at a celebration held at Forsyth for a large number of “kids” who received dental treatment sometime between the 1920s and the 1960s at this famous clinic located in the Fenway section of Boston. Founded in 1910, it was known for several decades as the Forsyth Dental Clinic for Children. In the 1950s it shifted emphasis to research and became affiliated with the Harvard School of Dental Medicine.

In 1999, they changed their name to The Forsyth Institute, in keeping with a greatly expanded research agenda. A striking example of this research came just two weeks ago when Forsyth announced development of a new vaccine that could be sprayed into the noses of young children and protect them against cavities for their whole lives.

During the last few months, Forsyth has been searching for the former children who were its patients, in order to enlist their support for a new campaign to improve the dental health of current children. The kids who received dental care decades ago tend to live in Boston’s suburbs now, in circumstances dramatically different from the poverty in which they grew up.

Another kid, Ralph Shuman, went to Boston public schools located in his neighborhood of Mattapan. Not without emotion, this 68 year old, recalls going to Forsyth starting in 1943. “Every time I go by Huntington Avenue, I remember those days.” Some of the details, such as the people in white coats and the needles, stay fixed in his memory. So does walking into the clinic: “Oh, boy, I sure do remember the turnstile.” Like other old timers, he recalls having to push a nickel into the turnstile at the entrance to the clinic.

Their families were mostly poor, struggling because of the Depression , and glad to have their children treated for problems with their teeth. Often the kids themselves did not know they were poor because everyone else in their neighborhood was in the same situation.

Among the kids who received dental care at Forsyth are Thomas Menino, mayor of Boston; Kevin Fitzgerald, state legislator from the Mission Hill area; and John Harrington, president of the Red Sox, and his wife Maureen Harrington.

To receive care a child did not have to be enrolled in a public school; parochial school students were included. Donald Hann was a pupil at St. Patrick’s school in Watertown when he came for treatment in 1929. Coming with one of his parents, he would get off public transportation at the old Boston Opera House and walk to Forsyth. He remembers the fillings and instruction in the use of a tooth brush. His sweetest memory, however, was going over to the Museum of Fine Arts after the dentistry.

Roman Micciche serves now as vice-chair of the Forsyth board of trustees. In the late 1940s he came to Forsyth on a bus from St. Joseph’s School in Medford. One of the nuns would accompany the kids to preserve good order. About being in the dental chair, he claims to be now “too old to remember the pain.”

During the formal program at the recent festivities, the Forsyth CEO, Dr. Dominick DePaola, emphasized that dental care involves much more than filling cavities. Dentists also respond to infections which can turn deadly and they deal with oral cancer as well as birth defects. These threats to good health need intensive care, something that Forsyth pledges to provide to the low-income children of Boston.  

In his judgment, the best people to spread the word about children’s dental health care needs are the Forsyte kids and their families. He wants them to become “ambassadors of oral health,” spreading the word wherever they go.

When I commented on the rich sugary deserts served at the reunion and  asked Dr. DePaola whether a statute of limitations on such food was in force, he playfully answered, “For these kids, it’s not a problem.” And, indeed, no one among them mentioned the candy of their youthful years.

If you look at the current situation of our nation’s children, the statistics might make you think of the most deprived countries on earth. Nearly one-third of American children have little or zero access to oral health care; among the states, Massachusetts ranks a shocking thirty-fifth. Up to 48 percent of the children living in Boston, Cambridge, and Lawrence need restorative dental care. At one Boston high school, students have four times as many cavities as the national average.

If you are one of the half million Forsyth kids but missed the reunion, the institute would still like to hear from you and get you involved in its children’s oral health campaign. The number to call is (617) 456-7733.  

Richard Griffin

Astronomers and God

As recently as 1916, astronomers thought that the Milky Way was the entire universe. Now they know better: the Milky Way has been recognized as only one among more than a million other galaxies!

This fact I learned recently during a talk given by a university astrophysicist who stands at the forefront of research into the far reaches of the universe. Like other information coming from scientists who study the skies, this news filled me with awe.

To imagine the immensity of distances across galaxies stirs me to realize how easily I sell short the wonder of it all. Astronomers measure the breadth of the Milky Way as only one hundred thousand light years across. And there are so many other galaxies at least as wide.

The number of stars in our galaxy comes to one hundred billion, a figure easy to say but incredibly difficult to grasp.  

Our earth and the orbit in which it spins count for so little by comparison with the vast spaces and the other bodies within them. And even when our lives last long, their total time amounts to only one millisecond in the age of the universe.

Such knowledge challenges us to revise our notions of God and of our own lives. The temptation to narrow the divine to a merely human scale must be resisted if we are to preserve an appropriately awesome sense of the creator. And human life, set in a vast universe, emerges as even more precious than we usually think.

To not a few people, modern scientific discoveries about the size of the universe have been unwelcome and troubling. These findings, made possible in part by huge mountain telescopes, far from distrac6ing city lights, have threatened some familiar notions of religious faith. At least these discoveries put that faith to the test: is God really greater than the almost unimaginably vast universe?

But people of faith can embrace expanding knowledge of an expanding universe. We can interpret the growing scientific understanding of creation as a call to become discontent with the limits of our grasp of who God is. Whatever we think or say about the divine being, God goes beyond. That is what it means to call the creator infinite.

And an expansive view of the universe can help us appreciate more the wonder of our own lives. For each of us to exist at all, forces in the universe had to make it possible. You could easily imagine changes in those worlds that would have prevented our being born.

One moral of this way of thinking is to appreciate our life with deeper awareness. Some religious traditions regard “mindfulness” as an important value. I have some problems with this idea: to me, it can put too much pressure on people to have them always consciously aware of reality.

But certain times devoted to mindfulness can be valuable indeed. To choose times for reflecting on the wonder of our lives makes important sense. It can enrich our days to develop the habit of contemplation about who we are and how we fit in this vast universe. Contemplation of the vast spaces should not be the preserve of astronomers; it’s there for the rest of us to grasp at also.

When it comes to talking about meaning and ultimate answers, most scientists are reserved. Given that their profession is oriented toward observation, experimentation, and quantifiable data, this shyness is appropriate. But, since they are also human beings, they want to know more than their scientific disciplines can teach them. So they have their own views about issues that go beyond what they can measure or theorize about.

At the conclusion of his 1996 book “Our Evolving Universe,” my friend Malcolm Longair, an eminent astronomer who teaches at Cambridge University in England, tells of an exchange that he had with the chaplain of Trinity College there. After they had discussed recent findings of astronomy, the chaplain said “Whatever the correct theory for the origin of our Universe, I never cease to wonder at the work of God’s hands.”

In concluding his book, Professor Longair offers this simple and direct appraisal of the chaplain’s statement: “That seems to me a very healthy and proper attitude.”

Richard Griffin