An ancient rabbi once asked his pupils how they could tell when the night had ended and the day was on its way back.

“Could it be,” asked one student, “when you can see an animal in the distance and tell whether it is a sheep or a dog?”

“It is when you look on the face of any woman or man and see that she or he is your sister or brother. Because if you cannot do this then no matter what time it is, it is still night.”

This simple story with its clearsightedness gives expression to true religion as understood by the great spiritual traditions of the world. They agree on a spiritual ideal that is uncomplicated: all you have to do is to identify with your fellow human beings and treat them as other selves.

Religious leaders at their best agree that, beyond all rules and regulations, the most important single element is love. In fact, that is how those rules and regulations get their meaning. All you have to do is love.

Of course a certain irony lies hidden in the phrase “all you have to do.” In practice, loving other people as ourselves turns out to be a formidable challenge demanding a lifetime’s self discipline.

The writer and Boston University professor Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Prize for peace, recently told an interviewer how much stories like the one told here about the ancient rabbi have meant to him. Perhaps he has drawn inspiration from this story in particular. Certainly, the title of his autobiographical novel, “Night,” starkly expresses some of the same meaning.

This book is based on Wiesel’s experiences as a boy in three Nazi death camps where he saw his fellow Jews, including members of his own family, put to humiliating and agonizing deaths. Such savagery toward fellow human beings truly did spread night across whole nations during those years of Holocaust.

Wiesel’s encounter with absolute evil shook his faith in human beings and destroyed all belief in God. For years afterward, he struggled painfully to find his way through the darkness of profound despair about humanity and its prospects.

That many people do manage to love others can give us hope in what often seems like a hopeless world. Taking a broad view of the human family, one philosopher who used to teach at Dartmouth College, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, saw the issue this way:

“The history of the human race is written on a single theme: how does love become stronger than death? The composition is recomposed in each generation by those whose love overcomes murdering and dying. So history becomes one great song.  .  . As often as the lines rhyme, love has once again become stronger than death. This rhyming, this connecting is men’s and women’s function on earth.”

Against all expectation, the last years of the twentieth century have providentially brought the people of some nations from darkness toward the light. Moves toward reconciliation among the residents of Northern Ireland, for example, have cheered those of us who desire for large national communities something like the fraternal love we want individuals to have.

Similarly, the demise of apartheid in South Africa has brought citizens, of various skin colors and ethnicities closer to a society based on respect for basic human rights. Many people look forward to the day when the people of Israel and Palestine act as brothers and sisters toward one another.

In recent weeks, the astonishing move toward undoing hostilities between the two Koreas, North and South, has encouraged the peace lovers of the world. One can now hope that these two peoples will become true friends.

If love is true enlightenment, as the story we began with suggests, then love serves as the goal of the spiritual life. Being able to see that other people are brother and sister to us stands as the best single indication that we are advancing on the right path toward God and spirit. Then, for us, as the old hymn says, morning has broken.  

Richard Griffin

My old friend George was in the rehabilitation hospital, I had been told. He was there to recover from recent surgery and would therefore not be present at the assisted care community where he has lived for the last two years. That meant George would not be there for talk I was asked to give at the residence in honor of Father’s Day.

So I decided to visit George at the hospital. There I found him looking well and in remarkably good spirits for a person in his middle eighties who had just endured major surgery. As he explained it, he had fallen and fractured his femur, the thigh bone that bears much of a person’s weight. Now he was anticipating the physical therapy needed to get him walking again.

George expressed much pleasure at my having come to see him. In conversation, I reported on some mutual friends whom neither of us had seen for a long time but with whom I had enjoyed a reunion the previous weekend. Back in 1972, George and I had concelebrated their wedding, an event that he has always loved to recall.

George is a distinguished scholar who held the oldest professorship of theology in the United States, the Hollis Chair of Divinity at Harvard University. As a leading Protestant religious historian, he had been an official observer at the Second Vatican Council (1963-65), an event that initiated profound changes in the Catholic Church and, in fact, in other Christian churches as well.

Now in physical decline, as he himself acknowledges, George continues to be vitally interested in religious issues and loves to talk about such matters. In recent months he completed the last major work of his career, a long history of divinity at Harvard, a manuscript that has not yet been published.

My visit with this colleague of many years standing passed quickly because we found so much to talk about. It also helped that, despite his physical crisis, George was not fixated on his own needs but took pains to make me feel welcome. When his dinner was served, I took the initiative and stood up to leave.

As parting words I promised George that he would be in my thoughts and prayers. When he heard this last word, he asked if I would pray with him there and then. So we clasped hands, and I asked God for a blessing upon our friendship and especially upon George. We prayed for healing and for the well being of George’s wife who lives in the same assisted care community.

In leaving his bedside, I felt myself to have been blessed. I had arrived unaware that my visit would be a source of grace for me. Through receiving me so warmly and by placing our visit in an explicitly spiritual setting, George had helped me to draw much value from this experience.

The Christian Church has traditionally listed visiting the sick as one of the seven “corporal works of mercy.” These actions are seen as part of the spiritual person’s response to other people when they find themselves vulnerable. Anyone who is sick or hungry or homeless needs the support of others because they are in crisis.

This approach to the needy has a solid foundation in the Bible. In texts such as Isaiah 58: 6 –1 0 and Matthew 25: 34 – 40, God identifies himself with those who have basic human needs. When we reach out in these situations, the tradition says, we touch not only our brother or sister but the Lord hmself.

The beauty of my visit with George is that each of us turned out to be both giver and receiver. To his credit, George did not remain passive, open simply to receive my sympathy and concern. He accepted these gifts from me but he himself gave me much value, too. Perhaps he had the vision to see me also as a needy person, one who lacks the spiritual insight that I must have to live a full life.

So the visit resulted in an exchange of gifts that seemed to buoy up both of us. I walked out of the hospital that day with my morale high. To quote lines from the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, “So great my happiness / That I was blessed .  .  . and could bless.”

Richard Griffin

Our astronomer friend, Fred, told how he had photographed a cluster of some hundred thousand stars the previous night. Using a thirty-two inch telescope, he had taken photos and then examined the images on a computer. It added up to a spectacle that dazzled this friend so accustomed to looking at the sky professionally.

As he recounted this experience the next morning to some thirty of us gathered for a reunion, Fred’s voice broke with emotion. He spoke of what we all meant to him, people that had remained close to his heart for over thirty years despite his not having seen some of us for that long a time.

Over the past two years, Fred has been struggling with a life-threatening disease that had escaped diagnosis and even now is not amenable to treatment. It has made for a time full of anxiety for him and his wife as they face an uncertain future. But their spirituality has fortified them in this struggle and given them the courage to provide for one another and their two teenage children.

We were gathered together for the most expressive event in our informal weekend reunion, a Eucharistic celebration in the backyard led by one of our number, a Franciscan priest. As the birds sang lustily on the trees overhead, we joined our voices to theirs in praise of God, thanksgiving for God’s gifts, and petition for our many needs.

When it came time for individuals to say what the reunion had meant to them, Fred drew on his experience of the heavens and said to us all, “You are my star cluster.” For a moment he found it impossible to go on but, when he regained composure, he assured us all that we are crucial to him in the most difficult time of crisis he has ever faced.

The liturgy we were celebrating was the feast of Pentecost, the time when the church was born and when the first Christians, though they came from many different parts of the world, all heard the Spirit speaking in their own tongue. This outpouring of the Holy Spirit struck us all as appropriate to our situation.

Many of us, as noted, had not seen one another for three decades. We had scattered far and wide since the graduate school days when we were last together. Some of our spouses, our children, and others had not been part of the original friends and were thus meeting the core group for the first time.

The liturgy revealed even more clearly than we had sensed previously that the bond among us still held strong. We cared about one another perhaps even more than we had dared think. And, though acting without the mighty wind and other signs of the first Pentecost, we were clearly bound together into a single community.

In response to the readings from Scripture, we all sang “Ubi Caritas and Amor, Deus Ibi Est,” (“Where charity and love are, there God is.”) And when we exchanged the kiss of peace with one another, the fervor of feeling was evident. Ever the scientist, Fred announced a rapid calculation: we had just exchanged 551 hugs among us!

In this one event of liturgical celebration, we were able at one and the same time to confirm that our community of friends was still bound together in affection and spiritual intimacy, and to extend those bonds further. We felt ourselves to have sealed friendships and could come away from the experience with memories that would last.

So we have returned from this reunion in Poughkeepsie, New York with new inspiration and a new appreciation of the power of the spirit in our lives. During the weekend that we spent with these old and new friends, we could sense the spirit at work in our lives. Not a few among us have had much to cope with over the last few decades, personal suffering, ailments of children, and disability of various kinds. But everyone showed a resilience that was inspiring to others around them.

There seemed evident a growth in spirit over the years that has made us more finely honed human beings than we were when younger. The varied experiences of life, both those warmly welcomed and those difficult to accept, have worked on us to help mold us into a spiritual maturity that can encourage us for the future.

Richard Griffin

Last Saturday, the sun shone early from an entirely blue sky and some of our neighbors had come outside to take in the delicious air. Among them was a woman I will call Martha, a neighbor who was working in her garden. I approached and greeted her by name. As soon as she heard my voice, she jumped, startled to be suddenly awakened from her reverie.

It was a moment that later provoked mutual laughter but, when it occurred, it seemed disruptive and even frightening. Martha had been shocked by an intrusion into her mental world, wresting her thoughts from another place.

Later, I wondered what had occupied her attention. Was it the plants that she was carefully placing in the ground? Perhaps she had focused on their beauty, on their creaturely life that would later flower into bloom. She may have reflected on the gift of exis-tence that they share with us, though on quite a different plane of being.

Part of this same experience could have been the feeling in her hands as she touched the dirt. Plunging one’s hands into the ground can give us a feeling of richness, of felt appreciation for the wealth that all of nature possesses.

I still remember the feeling of the earth that I experienced decades ago, when dig-ging up potatoes from a field. The poet Gerard Manly Hopkins was right even about dirt when he wrote, “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” a line that always gives me inspiration.

Or maybe Martha was thinking about her mother. This past year her mother died, an event that plunged Martha and her siblings into a cycle of grief, mourning, and love. Like so many other middle-aged men and women, Martha may now think of her mother every day. The spiritual writer, Frederick Buechner, from the vantage point of seventy-three, says “My father has been dead for more than sixty years, but I doubt that  a week has gone by without my thinking of him.”

In thinking about their parents, surviving sons and daughters establish a kind of spiritual dialogue with the dead or, rather, with those living in a different sphere of existence. They are somehow present to one another and can say things that were impossible to say on earth.

Maybe, however, Martha was not thinking anything at all. She might simply have been plunged into her own soul, engaged in an altogether silent dialogue with the deepest parts of her own being. She would then have come close to a spiritual ideal, that of find-ing satisfaction of soul in just being. At times like that, it seems sufficient not to be doing anything vitally important but simply to take pleasure in sheer existence.

Of course, Martha may have been carried away by distractions. She may have been wondering, for instance, why her next-door neighbors (namely my family) do not take more loving care of our own modest front yard. Thoughts of this sort tend to waylay the prayer of even the most spiritual people.

Or, like me, she could have been absorbed by worry about another project weighing on her mind. This sort of anxiety has power enough to throw other people off course, people who are serious about the spiritual life. It is so much easier to think about the next activity rather than to concentrate on what lies at hand.

I like to think, however, that Martha knows the value in the old Latin imperative, “Age quod agis,” do what you are doing. Being able to enter deeply into the task at hand is the way to appreciate human life and the world about us. The monks who invented the slogan realized that the gap between action and contemplation could be narrowed. They discovered how to find God in all things, not just in things religious.

That insight presumably sustained them in the old days as they plowed the fields and prayed in their hearts as they do even now. “Work and pray” became their motto, a sacred slogan that helped form Western civilization.

As a result of Saturday’s encounter with Martha I have resolved not so jauntily to accost her again when she appears deep in her garden work. A person’s sacred times and sacred spaces deserve respect. Something too important may be going on to suffer easy interruption.

Richard Griffin