Last week I traveled to Philadelphia in order to celebrate the seventieth birthday of my longtime friend David. At the end of a festive dinner at the city’s leading Chinese restaurant, many family members and friends in the group rose to speak about their feelings for him.

We cited the numerous virtues found in David’s character and recalled experiences through which our affection for him grew strong. Several of the speakers, men and women both, finished by saying explicitly that they loved him, a sentiment that struck a resonant chord in my own heart.

David thus received compelling evidence that his friends really do love him. Though it does not always work this way, I like to think that this outpouring of affection worked to strengthen the love that David has for himself.

Jesus told his listeners, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This commandment, rooted in the Hebrew Bible, is honored in virtually all the religious traditions of the world. It urges on spiritual seekers an ideal that enhances the value of human life. It tells us of our duty and privilege to treat others as we would wish to be treated.

What lies almost hidden in this sublime commandment, however, is its assumption that we ought to love ourselves first. Caring deeply about ourselves is the bedrock on which this religious requirement rests, the starting point for a love that embraces all other people.

Ironically, many people have grown up in religious surroundings that taught them a kind of self-hatred. In the name of spirituality, they learned to be harsh and unrelenting in judging themselves. For reasons that seemed spiritual, they became their own worst critics as they habitually found fault with their own actions and even with their own thoughts and feelings.

Thus, not a few people whose upbringing has been religious do not show much compassion toward themselves. While knowing about the teaching of the great spiritual leaders, they still find it difficult, even impossible, to treat themselves with tenderness. Instead they often feel a gnawing guilt that makes their life much less rewarding than it could be.

Burdened with that guilt, many people think less of themselves than do their friends. They dare not believe the appreciation that friends and family members feel for them. Instead they stay fixated on their own faults, continuing to blame themselves for past sins and mistakes.

Religion often seems to approve of this stance. “Self-love” is often advanced as something that clashes with spiritual well-being. Masters of the spiritual life typically teach their pupils to overcome their self-love by humility and acts of penance.

Used by these spiritual guides, however, the expression “self-love” means something different from what Jesus meant in his commandment. What it points to here is egotism,  the pride that cuts us off from God and other human beings. It suggests an unhealthy focus on oneself that narrows the soul.

Both good mental health and a flourishing spiritual life lead toward an appreciation of ourselves as loveable and loved. Genuine spirituality encourages us to have a high esteem for ourselves, to admire what we are. It teaches us to reject the inner voice that says “If other people really knew what I’m like inside, they could never love me.”

Of course, this should not limit our ability to recognize our own genuine faults. When we have done something wrong, feeling guilty is altogether appropriate. But this feeling of guilt remains compatible with a strong love for ourselves. In fact, a true self-love can free us to admit it when we have done wrong.

Given the wonderful way in which the life of a human person has been created, you might think that loving oneself, being compassionate toward ourselves, would be easy. But, in fact, a proper-self love has to be developed and cultivated. It is part of growing toward spiritual maturity and is a gift that becomes more precious as life goes on.

As the young pastor in Georges Bernanos’ Dairy of a Country Priest says: “How easy it is to hate oneself! True grace is to forget. Yet if pride could die in us, the supreme grace would be to love oneself in all simplicity – as one would love any one of those who themselves have suffered and loved in Christ.”

Richard Griffin

Sometimes the simplest messages carry the most precious spiritual meaning. That truth applies to words heard two summers ago by a young woman college student from the United States who was working in New Zealand on assignment for a student-run travel publication.

One Sunday, she felt homesick and went to church in the town where she was staying. Her feelings about being away from home were soon soothed when she heard the message from the pastor. (I have this account from my own pastor, Monsignor Dennis Sheehan who recently told it to a group of new collegians, their parents, and others in our congregation.)

Addressing his congregation, the New Zealand pastor made three points. First, you are welcome. This he intended to be, not just for the people as a group, but for each individual. He wanted them to feel that, wherever they had come from, whatever the color of their skin or economic standing, they belonged there. The college student felt this pledge directed to her and she took comfort in it. The words made her feel at home, something she longed to feel at that time.

Secondly, the pastor told his listeners, “You are loved.” Again, he meant that each individual there was loved by God and by the community of faith. Each person could count on being appreciated for herself or himself, not because of their status in society or for some other distinction.

The pastor’s third point was, “You are needed.” This adds another dimension to the love pledged earlier. It meant that people were also valued for the personal gifts that they brought to church. Being loved themselves, they were now urged to reach out to others in need.

Clearly, this was a wise pastor who knew how to speak to people’s deepest needs. His was an approach that emphasized the positive and responded to the need everyone feels to be appreciated.

Being welcome, being loved, and being needed are precious human gifts and also find their roots in spiritual attitudes. When extended as wishes to others, they give evidence of something that goes beyond the surface of human life.

A time when I felt overwhelmed with hospitality takes me back in memory to Mexico City. There on a first-time visit I was welcomed into the home of a friend who had been a college classmate. I cannot forget the words he then spoke to me: “Mi casa es su casa”  (“My home is your home”), the first time anyone had said that to me.

And he followed through, giving me the best bedroom in his house, serving me delicious meals, and plying me with heady margaritas to drink. From the graceful way he made me feel welcome, I knew myself, after many years of separation, still his dear friend.

Many experiences of feeling loved stay lodged in memory. Among them, I will cite only one – the birth of my daughter. That ecstatic event evidenced for me an altogether special gift from a loving God who gave to my wife and me, in our mature years, a child healthy and full of promise.

The experience of feeling needed also has been mine many times. Probably that awareness reached fullest expression on the day of my ordination to the priesthood. In that rite, the community of faith was announcing that my services were recognized and accepted. Even though many years later I decided to leave this first calling, the memory of being needed remains for me a source of value.

As a reader of these words, you also can go back in memory to your own peak times when you have known yourself to be welcome, to be loved, and to be needed. If you sift these experiences for their deeper meaning, you can perhaps discover their spiritual roots. Deep down, they are signs of our value as human beings. Our lives do indeed go beyond appearances and have in them a meaning and a destiny that ennoble us.

The New Zealand pastor spoke a message simple yet profound. He also expressed an agenda for his community of faith –making everyone indeed feel welcome, loved, and needed. If we ourselves could adopt that triple agenda in our dealings with other people, would we not go a long way toward enriching our own lives as well?

Richard Griffin

Lucy, as I will call her, set down twelve small stones that she had picked up on a beach in Martha’s Vineyard the previous weekend. She arranged these stones on a green cloth that she spread on the floor in front of us. Next to these objects she placed a small vase that held a single rose. Within the circle of stones she put a candle and touched fire to its wick.

This simple but beautiful arrangement amounted to a still life design, suited for contemplation. The flame, however, did not stand still but moved in response to the slight currents of air circulating through the room. That flame is what fixed my attention at certain points during our small group’s discussion and the meditation that followed.

What came to fascinate me is how the flame gives light. As I continued to gaze at it, I moved into a new appreciation of this fire as a source of light. Beautiful as the rose is, that flower cannot give forth light like the flame. This fire, so insubstantial and yet so subtly brilliant, does deserve its choice as symbol of the spirit after all. Light-giving from its depths, the flame suggests the living soul deep down within us.

Another motif for our meditation came from a conversation that took place before we began. Lucy shared with us  memories of her dearest friend, a woman who had died three weeks ago. That death came at the end of a long illness, a time when the friend had shared much with Lucy as she prepared for the final day.

Lucy was not present as her friend died but family members later told Lucy of her last words. Just before she died, the woman’s face changed expression and she was heard to say, “I get it.”  

This phrase says a whole lot and also very little. What does “get” mean? Even more important, what does “it” refer to? Does anyone really know what the woman was saying?

Lucy, of course, does not pretend to know but, like others, feels stirred with wonder. The phrase suggests a sudden insight into reality. It is as if the woman, in her last moments of life on earth, sees a vision of the way everything holds together. A lifetime’s striving for understanding is rewarded at the last. Perhaps she sees the root of reality, the love that gives the world its ultimate meaning, the divine kindness that underlies all of life.

One can only imagine what this revelation would have meant to the dying woman. This vision into what Dante called “the love that moves the sun and the other stars” could have made death, for her,  the doorway into a new and ecstatic way of being.  She was granted a more intense appreciation of the real than she had ever experienced in her life previously.

As we pondered this death, the splendid late October light streamed in from the garden outside filling the room with subdued brilliance. One of our group rang a soft bell several times and we turned to the silence inside us. Most people sat on the floor in the lotus position, eyes closed and body still. A peace descended over us as we opened ourselves to the action of the spirit.

The spirit of the woman who had died remained a motif of the group meditation. Her vision at the last inspired in us a renewed appreciation of the mystery that lies at the heart of all creation and of our own lives. There is more to reality, it said, infinitely more than we can ever plumb.

The flame, in its own mysterious being, continued to feed my soul. So did the continuing courage of Lucy’s husband Ned (again, I have substituted another name for the real one). His serious loss of memory gives a sober dimension to our gatherings but his courage in coping with it inspires us all. On this occasion, referring to his wife, Ned says: “She is my memory.”

And she is. In giving him loving support Lucy helps us all move toward the love that undergirds our hopes. We perceive that love fitfully and need to be supported in our own weakness. As yet, we don’t “get it” but look at the flame and try to remain open to its promise.

Richard Griffin

Sharing the experience of his wife’s death two years previously, editor and writer Christopher Bamford speaks of what he has learned. “I have come to understand that life is praise and lamentation, and that these two are very close, perhaps one—and that they are transformative.”

His essay, “In the Presence of Death,” comes first in “The Best Spiritual Writing 2000,” the latest edition in a series begun two years ago. Philip Zaleski, editor of this series, deserves credit for having assembled in this paperback an excellent collection that can nourish the spiritual life of its readers.

Bamford describes the last month of his wife Tadea’s life as a time when everyone else still prayed for her to be healed while she resigned herself to approaching death. Tadea had to show patience with the people who visited because they were not prepared to hear her talk about dying. “So she just sat quietly,” her husband says, “waiting for us to understand that all was as it should be.”

Looking back, what he remembers vividly is the way time and space changed. “Everything slowed down,” he explains, “expanded, became qualititative, rather than quantitative.” Time became like a dream, with every day spread out, and every moment containing other moments, each of them a gift of grace.

Tadea herself did not allow any sad faces among visitors; she wanted them to appreciate the reality of human life, even though hers was coming to an end. As a result, the atmosphere was filled with prayer and devotion, a kind of informal liturgy that brought everyone into a subtle song of praise.

The author summarizes what this environment can produce: “When life is lived in the continuous presence of death, which is the presence of God, it is as if every moment becomes an offering, a communication, received from and given to the spiritual world.”

In Tadea’s last three days, family members and friends could feel a change. She had entered into the final stage of her struggle. At this time, a priest came to baptize and confirm her as she prepared for departure. “There was a heightened sense of being, an exceptional clarity of perception, an interiority to space and silence I had not suspected before,” recalls her husband.

Soon she died, after  opening her eyes wide and leaning forward as if she was entering her new place. Those in the house felt a sense of  “inbetweenness,” as if suspended between heaven and earth. The presence of the spirit was palpable and made people feel themselves in a kind of trance.

In the succeeding days of mourning and burial, Christopher Bamford felt the gift continuing. He reflects: “It is as if only death reveals the meaning of life. As if in death the whole of life—its task, its meaning, its fruit, above all, its mystery—is laid bare.” He also was given new insight into the meaning of life: “Life was not about getting and doing, but about creating virtue’s in one’s soul.”

This bereaved husband felt deep gratitude for having been part of Tadea’s life. Through her love and devotion, along with her reaching for other virtues, she had taught him about spirituality. At the same time, he remained conscious of his need for forgiveness because of the ways in which he had failed her. Later he became convinced that she was forgiving him.

The author had still to struggle in coming to three realizations. First, though the dead have gone, they are still present to the world—they belong to everyone.

Second, heaven became a “powerful reality” for him. He imagined himself there with Tadea as they floated down a river of liquid light.

Thirdly, the author came to realize that from then on he would have to live in three different spheres and yet make them one. He had to find a middle way between heaven and earth whereby the death of his spouse could become “a bridge to new experience.”

This third discovery actually happened. “I found myself loving the world more than I ever had,” concludes Bamford. He has ultimately learned that “nothing of our experience is lost or worthless in the eyes of life.”

Bamford offers much more than can be summarized here. But perhaps this much will serve to stir reflection about spirituality coming from the so often agonizing experience of a loved one’s death.

Richard Griffin

Andre Dubus, the writer whose death last year at age 63 was much  mourned by his many readers, was born in Louisiana but lived in Haverhill, Massachusetts for much  of his life. Many of his short stories found their setting in this latter region and breathed the distinctive atmosphere of the area. Among these stories is one that I keep returning to for its human pathos and, especially, its bold spirituality.

“A Father’s Story” centers on the life of a middle-aged man named Luke Ripley who owns a stable of thirty horses that he rents to riders. Since the time when his wife left, taking his three sons and one daughter with her, the man suffers from loneliness and a sense of continual unease.

At the same time, what he calls “my real life” brings him into daily contact with God. This contact comes through taking part in the Catholic Mass, along with five or six other people at St. John’s, his local parish. Speaking of the Eucharist that he receives, he describes “a feeling that I am thankful not to have lost in the forty-eight years since my first Communion. At its center is excitement; spreading out from it is the peace of certainty.”

To this character, faith is a vital reality, one that he defines by contrast with belief. “Belief is believing in God; faith is believing that God believes in you.”

Yet he feels his own inability to pay constant attention to God. For that reason he appreciates the liturgy in which he takes part. “Ritual,” he says, “allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.”

Though he cares about his sons, he feels a special love for his twenty-year-old daughter Jennifer. For him, daughters are vulnerable and altogether precious in ways that male children are not. This father worries about her “the way fathers worry about daughters and not sons.”

Luke’s special friend is Father Paul LeBoeuf, his parish priest. The two of them talk together daily and often share meals. Theirs is a spiritual friendship, though it is grounded in manly interests. He can confide his deepest feelings to his priest friend, except the series of event that unfolded when his daughter came to visit.

As she was driving home, returning to her father’s house after a night out with a couple of girlfriends, Jennifer swerved to avoid something in the road. That something turned out to be a human being, though its shape was all a blur to Jennifer as her car hit this person. The car shuddered as she hit him but she continued on her way home, panicked into not stopping.

When she got home and talked with her father through her tears, she told him the horrible details as best she could remember. Later, Luke drove to the place of the accident himself and found the body of a young man in a ditch by the side of the road. He was dead, but it remained unclear whether death had come instantly from the impact.

The discovery plunged the father into a crisis of conscience. Should he, can he call the authorities and report what his daughter has done? After a sleepless night, he takes the keys to his daughter’s car, drives to church, and talks to Father Paul. The priest senses that something is wrong but Luke cannot tell him the secret. “To confess now would be unfair,” he tells himself. “It is a world of secrets, and now I have one from my from my best, in truth my only friend.”

Still, he receives the Eucharist and talks with God as before. However, now he has said good-bye to the peace that used to be his. Knowing that he would do it again, Luke tells himself that he acted as the father of a girl.

When God tells him that He is a father, too, Luke replies that God is not the father of a daughter but of a son. Then his poignant conversation with God ends this way:

“But you never had a daughter, and if You had, You could not have borne her passion.

“‘As you love me,’ I say, and I go with an apple or carrot out to the barn.”

Richard Griffin