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Obits

Ascribe it to my age, if you will, but I am becoming a fancier of obituaries. The newspaper pages that carry them do not rival my addiction to those pages devoted to sports, not yet at least. But I confess loving to read accounts of people’s lives seen from the vantage point of their deaths.

This pleasure, of course, increases when the obituary is written by a master of the genre. The writer who can combine incisive appreciation of the person’s distinctive traits with the well-turned phrase delights me. Anyone who can bring out the departed’s uniqueness, appreciate the person’s gifts while not omitting relevant faults, and treat readers to fine prose makes me happy.

You may be relieved to hear, however, that my obit love does not approach my maternal grandmother’s. As a young boy visiting her house in Peabody, MA, I would be sent downstairs to pick up her Salem Evening News. The first question she would ask me when I returned was “Who’s dead?” Then she would open to her favorite page and read about local friends and acquaintances who had passed on.

In recent weeks an obituary that I discovered in the Tablet, which calls itself an international Catholic weekly and comes out of London, provided me with warm delight. It dealt with the life of Herbert McCabe, a priest who belonged to the Dominican Order, and served as theologian, writer, and editor. Having had some association with him in the1960s added to my relish while reading his obit.

My bias is that the English write better obits than we, their former colonists, do. Or, if not, they have better material to work with. That’s because of the proud tradition of eccentricity that the Brits have maintained for so long a time. Surely they produce more characters per capita than we Americans can ever hope to do. And members of the clergy may number more of them than those of other professions.

Herbert McCabe belonged to that great tradition, as his obituary brings out. Written by Cambridge University historian Eamon Duffy, this obit in fact calls McCabe one of the British Catholic Church’s “most gargantuan characters” and then goes on to show why.

Early on, Duffy gives the flavor of the man: “To the end of his life his personal appearance with his wild shock of hair and his ancient and rarely washed sweaters, remained redolent, in more senses than one, of the student chaplaincies of the Sixties.”

Not glossing over McCabe’s faults, the obituarist says: “He was never an easy man to live with, relentlessly tenacious in argument and, especially as the evening waned and the level in the bottle dropped, sometimes cruelly scathing to those he judged guilty of woolly thought or moral evasion.”

You would not expect a man like this to rely on conventional transportation and he did not. “McCabe roared into his friends’ lives on a beaten-up motor-bike, booted and duffel-coated and ready to talk till the pubs closed, and preferably later if anyone had a bottle in their bag.”

For fear these quotes make McCabe seem merely an eccentric or even a drunk, the writer recognizes in him marvelous abilities and fierce loyalty to friends. Yet he was also what Duffy calls “essentially lonely” and often unsure of himself.  

Toward the end, the writer of this obit speaks of a fall that left McCabe enfeebled. Of his response, Duffy says “he endured this affliction with an endearing gentleness which amazed those who had known only the theological gladiator of his prime.”

Summing up with a broad sweep, Duffy finally says of his subject: “He was a rare and lovely man. God rest his mighty soul.”

This obit strikes me as a work of art. In a few hundred words the writer has given us another human being, full of achievement yet plagued by problems and personal insecurity. The writer shows rich appreciation of his colleague but also shows us that he was merely human.

This kind of obit serves as a mini-biography until someone decides to write a full one. Like skilled biographers, Eamon Duffy has the virtue of refusing to oversimplify the life of a man perhaps even more complicated than the rest of us. Without being judgmental, he brings out his subject’s contradictions, inconsistencies that mark every human life.

Growing older has given me more sympathy toward other people both living and dead. For the dead, if they have the good fortune to receive a skilled obit, it becomes easier perhaps to appreciate a person against the backdrop of their whole life course. “Nothing became him in life like the leaving of it,” words spoken about the Thane of Cawdor in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, sometimes apply to others. The ending of a life in itself can commend the person to us most, as it did for me with my friend, Herbert McCabe.

Richard Griffin

Bobo Spirituality

As author David Brooks tells it, when he went to a guest ranch in Montana in the 1980s, before going off on horseback he would be given a ten-minute safety lecture on how not to get killed riding a horse.  Now when he goes to the same place, he might receive a seventy- minute talk about the spirituality of horses and the Zen of the riding experience.

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Bobos in Paradise

Rarely does a book make me laugh out loud. But “Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There” did. It also seduced me into that often unwelcome practice of reading parts at other people.

The author, David Brooks, is one of the cleverest journalists in captivity. He brings to his writing a sharp eye for social detail and an ability to generalize provocatively.

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Hehir’s Prayer

“I don’t pray very well by myself, and therefore I am always grateful for a larger surrounding system of prayer that sweeps me up and it carries me along, makes up for my inadequacies.”

These are the words of Father J. Bryan Hehir, a Catholic priest well known for his church leadership and currently the dean of Harvard Divinity School. His surprising admission about not praying well was made at a public forum last spring at which scholars discussed their religious identity.

Two parts of this statement merit attention. First, for this priest, long experienced in the spiritual life, prayer does not come easily. And second, he finds his inadequacies in private prayer counterbalanced by belonging to a community of faith.

Of course, the prayer that he is talking about here is the prayer of silence or, at least, of few words. This kind of contemplation differs from the kind that relies mainly on words, either spoken aloud or repeated within mind or heart. Some people rely mainly on spoken prayers and may not experience the same difficulties that mark prayer that is often called “mental.”

For me, what Father Hehir says about the difficulty of wordless prayer comes as  welcome self-disclosure. In revealing his inner experience, he gives me hope because I, too, find prayer difficult. Perhaps others will be encouraged in their own attempts at praying by knowing that it does not flow easily for a person of his spiritual credentials.

The second part of his statement also touches me. In sharing with an audience how he compensates for his own inadequacies in prayer, Father Hehir gives a convincing reason for being part of a community that is committed to worship. In this instance, he is talking about the Church to which he has belonged since birth.

His words “sweeps me up and carries me along” suggest more than mere membership in that community, however. They describe something dynamic: an ongoing process whereby a spiritual force seizes him and propels him further along the spiritual journey.

For me also, belonging to a community of faith has long meant having a share in the spiritual strength that comes with access to the prayers of other people. They can compensate for my own spiritual shortcomings. I am glad at not having to go it alone spiritually. It is not all up to me.

That feeling also marks my attitude toward the five-person prayer group to which I have belonged for the last several years. Often I find myself staggering through the half-hour of silence when we sit with one another, eyes shut and attention gently fixed. Sometimes I battle the impulse to fall asleep; much of the time I fend off distracting thoughts that flood over me. But knowing that others are engaged in the same spiritual enterprise buoys me up and gives me needed courage.

For people devoted to frequent prayer, their experience of this prayer is not always difficult, of course. In times of feeling good about themselves, when welcome events are happening in their lives, their hearts can feel full and they may even find it easy to turn to God in prayers of thanksgiving.

For some, prayer may have become a comfortable habit as they have grown older. A researcher looking into the prayer life of older women has reported this of them: “Over the course of their lives, prayer has become more simple, more intimate, more meaningful, more flexible and open.”

It sounds as if their prayer life is harmonious and free of hassles. But even for these women, there will almost inevitably be occasions when praying gets to be a chore rather than a consolation. Dryness then becomes the main interior atmosphere during the time set aside for prayer and the temptation to give it up feels overwhelming.

Then you might be feeling what British author C. S. Lewis refers to as “the abyss of silence from which no echo comes back.” Mystics of various traditions have given often eloquent expression to this kind of nothingness. That is a time when you might feel especially grateful for belonging to a community of faith equipped to “sweep you up and carry you along.”

Richard Griffin

Nurturing Room

Faith Witte, the mother of an eleven-month-old baby girl, tells what she gets from contact with members of the oldest generation. “I have drawn encouragement from them for looking ahead,” she says. “They lived through it and they’re enjoying their later years.”

Of one older woman in particular, Jennie Glass, who is almost ninety-two, she says, “I thought she was around seventy-five. I really hope I can be like her. It gives me encouragement for getting older.”

These remarks sound like a gerontologist’s dream, eloquent testimony to the advantages of personal contact between generations. People who are decades younger can indeed find inspiration from older people.  And, of course, older people can in turn draw stimulus from those much younger than they.

On the afternoon of my conversation with her, Faith Witte was one of five mothers sitting on the rug and playing with their children in a living room on the top floor  of Cabot Park Village, an assisted living community located in Newtonville. This gathering place is called the Nurturing Room and is the site of an unusual, perhaps unique, set of social interactions.

The generations come together as participants in the “Nurturing Rooms for Mothers and Infants” program sponsored by Jewish Family & Children’s Service. The group at Cabot Park Village, comes together two afternoons each week. The space is filled with the noise of small children chattering, gurgling, and sometimes screaming, along with adults talking animatedly with one another. Some half dozen residents of the retirement community are usually there, among them Jennie Glass, the lead volunteer.

The program at this site is one of  only two groups thus far; the other is located in Randolph. A third is scheduled to begin in October at the Youville House, an assisted living residence in Cambridge. To credit the remarks of the people taking part in the Cabot Park setting, the nurturing room seems to be having a remarkable effect.

With well-organized succinctness, Faith Witte summarizes the impact the nurturing room has had on her: 1) her daughter gets to associate with other kids of different ages;  2) it gives the mothers a chance to relax; and 3) her grandparents do not live nearby so it makes association with older people possible.

An entirely unexpected effect on at least one older person was dramatized for me when I interviewed a woman whose name I have agreed not to publish. When I asked her what the room meant to her, she said “It’s delightful because the children are so sweet.” She went on to tell me about having had two children herself a long time ago when , she said, things were very different. Though this woman did not have much else to say, she often laughed sympathetically as she observed the children playing.

Then, I moved over to talk with a gentleman who turned out to be the woman’s husband. When he heard that his wife had talked with me about being there, he was astounded. He could not believe that I did not suspect anything about her condition. “She has Alzheimer’s,” he revealed. “I don’t know how she made out with you.”

The husband also described the good effect that coming to the nurturing room has on his wife: “When she comes here, her face lights up like she’s a new person.” Confirming the value of her visits, he adds: “It’s only because of her that I’m here.”

This exchange was instructive for me. It makes me wonder if settings like the nurturing room might be the best kind of environment for some people with dementia. Maybe contact with young children enables them to draw upon mental and emotional powers that otherwise remain inaccessible. Of course, the woman in question seems to be in the earlier stages of the disease.

Another mother, Sarah Bengelsdorf, pronounces her own grandmother “the wisest woman I know.” But the grandmother lives in Atlanta so they don’t get to see one another very often. That’s why Sarah values contact with the residents of Cabot Park.

“It’s nice to see the people from that generation,” she tells me. “They really enjoy the children and vice-versa.” With disarming humility, she says of them, “They know a lot more than I do about families and children.”

A woman whose apartment is the closest to the nurturing room, Dorothy Bronstein, enthuses about the chance to take part in the activities. “What could be better than to see the kids?” she exclaims. “It brings back wonderful memories.”

The person who invited me to visit is Diane Nahabedian, Director of Marketing Communications for JF&CS. A reader of this column, she feels pride that her agency has taken the lead in establishing the Nurturing Room.

The agency has kept up with the times in recognizing the importance of providing support for early nurturing. And yet, she says, this program is traditional and has some continuity with other services offered by her agency, founded in 1864. “It’s a program that is catching on,” she says as she looks ahead.

Richard Griffin

Human Destiny

“We want to control our own destiny.” That statement still echoes in this writer’s ears long after hearing it spoken by an elderly woman testifying before a committee of state legislators.

Those words give expression to a zeal for political and social change that many spiritual traditions of the world would endorse. What the woman said can be understood as a form of love for one’s neighbor, a love that traditions such as Judaism and Christianity, among others, highly approve.

It can also be understood as the expression of a need for political and social independence, a spirited refusal to be written off, or even patronized, by those in power. One can only applaud this assertion.

But, on a deeper level, none of us, however powerful, can control our own destiny. At least, that is how persons deeply grounded in spirituality would see it. Instead, they would locate personal destiny in the hands of God.

Another expression of destiny centered in the individual person came more recently in the final statement of Timothy McVeigh, executed for his mass murder in Oklahoma City. As his last testament, he chose a famous nineteenth century poem by the Englishman William Ernest Henley to express his view of human life.

The best known lines of that poem are the last two: “I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul.” These sentiments express a romantic viewpoint popular in the Victorian era when Great Britain was riding high and the sun never set on its empire. Looked at now, these sentiments sound naïve and thoroughly unrealistic. It was sad to hear Mr. McVeigh using them for his farewell, rather than words that might express at least a measure of regret at his monstrous deeds.

Is human destiny ours to manage or does it ultimately depend on the work of a higher being? That is the crucial issue vital for each person to determine. Modernity seems almost to require the answer that we are in complete charge of ourselves. However, huge numbers of people have discovered a different answer.

Two of the classical teachings in the Western tradition of spirituality that bear on the question have been called providence and abandonment. Both names are admittedly old-fashioned these days but the reality underlying them remains vital for many people who are searching for ways to ground their lives in the deepest reality.

Providence might be translated as divine caring. It is closely joined to God’s action in creating the world. It means that God cares about the world and watches over it with solicitude. The fall of a sparrow, the welfare of each human being matters to the maker of all creatures.

Jesus gives poetic expression to these ideas in the Sermon on the Mount. There he speaks of the God who takes care of the lilies of the field whose splendor is “greater than Solomon in all his glory.” He urges his followers to put aside anxiety and instead trust to the Father of all creation.

Applied to personal spirituality, providence is related to the effort to decide what God wants of us. As one theologian sees it, providence is practical: it helps one “to discern God’s will in accordance with time and circumstance, to attune oneself to his calls, to distinguish between trials sent from God and devilish temptations, and to persevere in faith even through severe struggles.”

The other theme, abandonment, can be understood as letting-go. It is closely related to providence because it means the surrender of self to God. It implies a trust that God will take care of you, no matter what lies in store.

Jesus serves as a  model  of letting go, especially when he abandoned himself to the Father as he suffered on the cross. That is the meaning of his words “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” These words from a Hebrew Psalmswere probably known to Jesus as he grew up at home and may have often formed the content of his prayer.

Many other people committed to spirituality have used these words as a daily theme in their prayer. Those especially who have suffered serious illness have had recourse to this way of confiding in God. Though this kind of letting go may seem extreme and even irrational to people for whom God remains distant and uncaring, these words have brought peace of soul to many in times of stress and hardship.

Richard Griffin

A Visit to Italy

A friend has called to report on her vacation in Italy. This woman, whom I will call Janet, went there with some members of her family for three weeks in June. They stayed in the countryside but visited Florence and other cities in Tuscany as well. During this, her first sojourn among Italians, she was taken by the beauty of the country and the marvels of its artistic heritage.

Janet also confided a secret to me. This secret was a small action that she took on a kind of impulse. It was the first time in her life she had done such a thing. Even now, she is amazed at what came over her and she feels half apologetic about her action.

What she did was light a candle in a church. Two factors moved Janet to do so: first, she was moved by the atmosphere of simple piety in the church, the art and the people who came there to pray; secondly, her thoughts often turned to a sick friend back home, a woman with a life-threatening illness. So, as a kind of silent prayer for that friend she lit the candle, as many other people do.

Lighting a candle does not seem anything notable, people do it all the time. Yes, but for Janet this was no ordinary act. She considers herself an agnostic as she has for much of her adult life. She does not deny God’s existence or that of a world beyond this one but she has no confidence anything can be known about this subject. Though she is a person with high moral standards, they are not based on an ethic derived from faith.

She thus regards it as quite extraordinary to have found herself doing something that is normally associated with believers and with pious believers at that.  That she should have done what simple people of faith are accustomed to doing still strikes her as amazing.

How could this have happened? Could it have been a moment of revelation, a precious time when a person becomes suddenly aware that reality goes far beyond what we can see and touch?

Of course, no one really knows. But many people of faith would find the desire to light the candle a sign of the divine presence. They would interpret the impulse as a gift of the Spirit that leads a person to live on a higher level.

Almost certainly Rabbi Abraham Heschel, a revered New York-based spiritual leader who died in 1972, would have agreed. He once wrote: “There is no human being who does not carry a treasure in his soul, a moment of insight, a memory of love, a dream of excellence, a call to worship.”

The five spiritual gifts mentioned by the rabbi can be seen manifested in the action taken by Janet. Her soul was stirred, suggesting a richness in her inner life. The moment of insight came upon her suddenly, without warning, as she found herself in a sacred space. The memory of her ailing friend reminded her of the love that they felt for one another. Perhaps she felt some kind of aspiration toward a divine excellence. And, finally, she may have felt stirred to light the candle in recognition of a higher reality.

This one event may not prove strong enough to change Janet’s life forever. However, it may. At the very least it seems likely that she will remember the moment, reflect upon it from time to time, and perhaps find continuing inspiration in it.

That’s the way it was for me when, some fifty years ago, I felt myself to have received a sign of God’s reality. At the time, I was walking in a cemetery, in a beautiful setting featuring hills forming a giant bowl, and flowers in profusion in the nearby gardens. There, suddenly, without warning, I felt hit by the realization, not only that God was the deepest reality of life, but that I would always remember the moment. In fact, I have done so, now and at many other times.

There is no guarantee, of course, that what happened to me then was authentic. But, still, the sudden realization has stayed with me and has enriched my spiritual life. For my friend Janet too, I hope that her lighting of the candle will have permanent good effects. I would be happy if this became for her a privileged moment to which she can keep returning spiritually and find in it a source of richness, pressed down and flowing over.

Richard Griffin