Category Archives: Articles

Daring a Guest

What an ideal guest Tom proved to be! He and his wife Maria came down from Montreal last weekend to visit. Maria herself is a marvelous person, always welcome for her own gifts of personality and her flexibility as a guest. Whatever plans you as host have, she is ready and willing to accommodate herself to them.

On this occasion, the arriving guests found me just about to leave the house for my weekly softball came. It was a steaming hot day, not the kind of climate the ordinary person would choose to run around a shadeless field. Though neither an Englishman nor (presumably) a madman, I was eager for the noontime sun.

Did my duties as host require me to stay home? Certainly not. Instead I invited Tom to come and play with us. Mind you this is a guy then on the eve of his 65th birthday, someone who grew up in Poland, France, and England, all countries not enlightened enough to have chosen baseball as their chief sport.

With no perceptible hesitation, Tom agreed to accompany me and play ball. So I gave him a fielder’s glove, lent him a Red Sox cap, and off we went to the field in Allston , next to Harvard Stadium.

After a warm-up period, the game started. Tom, chosen for the other team, took his position at second base and batted low in the order. During the game I observed his play closely because, without acknowledging it, I felt somewhat protective of my guest.

Well might I have felt solicitude for Tom’s well-being. Though a frequent tennis player and daily swimmer, he had presumably not played softball for years and I was not sure how he would handle drives hit hard in his direction. Our players do get injured sometimes; I would have been thoroughly chagrined to have Tom spend his 65th in a local hospital.

It would be heartwarming to report that Tom’s performance in the field and at bat was outstanding. The fact is that he allowed several shots to get by him; at bat, he got one good clean hit, a drive that carried between the third baseman and the shortstop into left field. The rest of his contacts resulted in either outs or errors.

My own efforts were little better. Though I do not recall making any errors at first base, I made precious few solid contacts at bat. The one notably hard shot off my bat went back at the pitcher with dazzling speed; somehow, he was able to catch it, thus preserving his vital parts from injury.

So Tom and I, later-life warriors both, experienced failure at first hand. We freely endured the frustrations built into the game of baseball. Is any other sport so designed that those who claim success themselves fail at least six times out of ten when in the batter’s box and other times when deployed in the field?

Former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, speaking of people who have grown up with the game, said the same thing better: “Baseball teaches us, or has taught most of us, how to deal with failure. We learn at a very young age that failure is the norm in baseball, and precisely because we have failed , we hold in high regard those who have failed less often.”

This quotation I have borrowed from a book recently sent me by an old friend, Ernest Kurtz. He and his co-author, Katherine Ketcham, entitle their 1992 volume, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Modern Wisdom from Classic Stories. Their writing pleases me because it provides a rationale for what I did many years ago: give up the effort to become perfect.

Mind you, these authors stand in favor of spiritual growth; it’s just that trying for human perfection, in their view, can block such growth by falsifying one’s life. They draw on stories from many of the great spiritual traditions of world history to show that wisdom requires us to accept ourselves as we are, rather than as some abstract ideal would have us be.

So this forms the background to my perseverance in playing the game, inglorious as so much of my play continues to be. I make outs, often in clutch situations. And I screw up in the field, sometimes even allowing runners to advance because I fall asleep while awake. But it’s good for my soul as well as exercise for my body.

Whether Tom clutched failure to his heart that day and grew in true spirituality, I have not discovered. Nor should I try to impose my rationale for the game on him. But he and I, as the oldest players on the field, may have served the others as outstanding models of  failure. At game’s end, we could leave the field with the hope of having shown our juniors the wisdom and beauty of self-acceptance.

Richard Griffin

Times and Seasons

My daughter, recently rooting around in our attic, has rediscovered some old prayer books. These slim volumes used to serve my spiritual life on a daily basis. One contains all the Psalms from the Hebrew Bible, prayers here presented to suit the needs of each day. They come with ink drawings that show the psalmist in various poses, illustrating key verses.

Since King David is traditionally the author to whom the Psalms are credited, one sketch  portrays him as a majestic figure with a sword in one hand and his harp in another.

I used to carry this little book in my pocket and, from time to time in the course of the day, especially on solitary walks, I would take it out and read parts of it. Or I would bear in my mind and heart lines from these inspired prayers and repeat them over and over. These verses would form a kind of leitmotif, a theme for each hour.

The beauty of the Psalms is their way of giving expression to a wide range of emotions and spiritual sentiments. When you feel enthused about life, they serve you by giving you words that exult; when you feel down, with everything going wrong and everybody against you , they express your heart at those times too.

My little book contains all 150 Psalms. In front it has a guide that recommends certain ones to answer current feelings.

“Are you impatient?” Psalm 30 is a good remedy: “In God I put my trust; I shall not fear.”

“Are you wanting in confidence?” Psalm 26 begins, “The Lord is my light and my salvation: whom shall I fear?”

“Are you depressed?” In Psalm 41, the psalmist expresses great longing, “As the deer longs for the streams of water, so does my soul long for thee, O God.”

Thus one can pray in need, “O God, hear my cry, listen to my prayer./ From the ends of the earth I cry to thee, for my heart is faint.”

Or, when everything has clicked, “I will bless the Lord at all times . . . I sought the Lord and he answered me.”

Since the Psalms form such an important part of the Christian liturgy, I have never strayed far from their use. But the recovery of this little book prods me to renew daily recourse to them from now on.

Even when people have long experience with prayer, they still need the support of inspired words. Trying simply to stay in God’s presence without saying anything at all can often prove too difficult. But too many words can sometimes stifle the spirit; that’s a reason why the verses you pick and choose from the Psalms can serve your needs so well.

One psalm in particular holds a special place in my life. That’s the 23nd (or 22nd for some). “The Lord is my shepherd,” despite its frequent use, never cloys. It has survived sentimentalized illustrations and has proven its value over and over. Surprisingly enough, I owe my familiarity with it to public school. In the early grades of elementary school we used to recite the verses of this psalm often.

The lines that move me most are “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for you are with me.” This expression of confidence in divine protection even in the worst of times impels me toward a courage that I often do not feel.

I also love the prayer of Psalm 16 that says to the Lord: “Guard me as the apple of thy eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings.”

The use of the Psalms as daily prayer can respond to the frustration many people meet in trying to live the spiritual life. As Elizabeth Lesser, author of The New American Spirituality, writes: “Sometimes the spiritual quest feels like knocking, knocking, knocking on a closed door; like a volley of questions bouncing off the walls of our own limited capacity to reach beyond ourselves.”

The Psalms, I suggest, can help at times like those described and at other times as well. They can open closed doors and help us reach out further toward a loving God.

Richard Griffin

A Gap That Preserves Love

This past May third was a desperately hard day for members of my extended family and me. On that day we came together to mourn the loss of a beloved nephew who died in an automobile accident at the age of nineteen. As we said good-bye to him at his funeral, all of us – – his parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins – – found it hard to believe that Greg had left us. It seemed like something that was happening in a nightmare world.

Adopted as an infant by my brother and his wife, Greg grew up in Mont Vernon, a small New Hampshire town that nurtured his young life. Early on, he showed himself able to take on responsibility. He learned valuable skills at all sorts of practical tasks such as building, repairing machinery, and, in his last two years, helping run a business. When you wanted to get something done, Greg had already proven himself a valuable fellow to have around.

Though usually fairly quiet in family groups, he had endeared himself to all of us and we looked forward to seeing him on special occasions. As he matured, we family elders looked on Greg as a person of promise who would carve out a solid future.

With the tragic crash, all of those hopes came to a horrible end. If only, we felt, the vehicle had not ended up near the tree that killed Greg, the only passenger in the car to die. We had a hundred other “if onlys” but, to our deep chagrin, no one of them availed to bring him back.

As I, together with his other uncles, carried Greg’s casket into the church where his funeral was celebrated, the weight of our burden brought home the reality of his death. Externally, I felt hard-pressed to carry this physical weight; interiorly, I found it more difficult to bear the weight of our loss.

Looking back over a period of several weeks, I continue to regret that Greg is no longer with us. I especially grieve for his parents who provided him with such love and nurture. And I feel for his sister, two years younger, for whom Greg was an altogether special person.

Though nothing can replace him, Greg’s immediate family has received some consolation. First, signs that he was so beloved of so many people. All of his cousins came to his funeral, some from great distances. Large numbers of people resident in Mont Vernon and surrounding towns also came. Fellow students from the high school from which Greg was about to graduate helped fill the church.

Neighbors reached out to Greg’s parents with food and with expressions of sympathy that were truly touching. What a grace it was to family members to realize that anyone was so loved! It seemed as if people, on this one occasion at least, were acting God-like in directing toward Greg’s family their love and support.

But still, for Greg’s parents, a long period of grieving would be just beginning. Though they carry with them the support shown them by so many others, nothing will ever quite fill up the gap in their lives made by Greg’s sudden death.

Maybe, however, this ongoing gap offers something we should try to understand. Perhaps, paradoxically enough, the continuance of this void, bitter though it may be felt, may keep Greg’s parents close to their son.

That’s what the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggests. He died in 1945 at the hands of the Nazis for his refusal to accept their hateful ideology. His words seem to me profound and important for those of us who have suffered loss.

“Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time, it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; God doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary, keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.”

Richard Griffin

Dialogue

Here’s a conversation between a man and his doctor:

“For a man of 60, you’re in remarkable shape.
Did I say I was 60? I’m 83.
My goodness, your father must have lived a long time.
Did I say my father was dead? He’s 104.
Good grief, man, how long did your grandfather live?
Did I say my grandfather was dead? He’s 124 and he’s getting married next month.
Why on earth would a 124-year-old man want to get married?
Did I say he wanted to get married?”

Absurdist humor of this sort is, admittedly, not to everyone’s taste. But you must admit it has its virtues. By holding up longevity to gentle ridicule this dialogue makes us smile at the comedic elements in growing older. Whoever the author of this playful piece drawn from the Internet, he or she deserves credit for helping us see some laughable aspects of aging.

Humor is one of the redeeming virtues of later life. Recognizing that the human condition, our being at one and the same time both rational and animal, puts us in a basically peculiar situation – – this amounts to wisdom. The ability to laugh at oneself must be accounted a precious gift.

“Humor,” writes Kathleen Fischer, “reveals that there is a ‘more’ in the midst of human life. Humor reminds us that there is a larger perspective on life than our own.”

Fischer goes further: “Humor recognizes that limitations and failures are not final and unredeemable tragedies.”

In his new book, A Map to the End of Time, philosophy teacher Ronald  Manheimer recounts a series of dialogues that he has led, over a period of several years, with men and women  much older than himself. Their talks have centered on the teaching of such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, John Stuart Mill, and Martin Buber. The chapter I liked best was the one focused on humor.

Manheimer asks the question: “Is it strength of character or some impulse of self-preservation to laugh in the face of adversity?”  He thinks that, whatever the reason, as we grow older we come to appreciate humor differently.

If with age, as this thinker suggests, “we are slow-moving targets for adversity,” then we need humor more. After all, the dangers posed by the world around us can become greater threats the older we get. Is there a better response to the sudden blow that changes everything for us? And what else besides humor responds so well to the experience of slowly falling apart?

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard saw humor as an accommodation to incompleteness. In his eyes it is a response to our recognition that we lack something. Thus it is also a form of humility and self-acceptance.

In the difficult and frustrating situations of daily life – – the bank informing you that the check you wrote has bounced and you’ve been assessed a hefty fine, or your car that you thought was parked in the right place has been towed to the ends of the city, or tripping over a rug, falling and badly bruising your leg – – given the choice between laughing and crying, don’t we sometimes find that laughing makes more sense?

When you come right down to it, humor is a manifestation of wisdom. It shows that we have not altogether lost perspective. We can see ourselves, if not exactly as others see us, still not as the measure of all things.

Perhaps we can even identify with the comic hero and laughing at him or her, laugh at ourselves. Again Manheimer: “In comedy the heroic individual, drawing from a bag of tricks, painlessly triumphs over humiliation, failure and degradation. The comic hero’s flaws – foolishness, impulsiveness, or naïveté – – can become redeeming qualities that turn the tide.”

This description reminds me of Charlie Chaplin and his misadventures on film. This great comic makes us laugh at life’s situations made difficult by other people’s actions or our own bumbling. The Little Tramp, with his formal attire, hat and cane and flat shoes, is able to help us recognize the absurd aspects of life and to draw forth from us a mirthful response.

This kind of help can move us toward a growth in wisdom that may come with later life. Manheimer gives expression to the ideal: “We learn to accept many of the contraries in life, make our peace with time. We can look at ourselves and laugh at what formerly troubled us and made us anxious. We accept our humanity.”

So reading again the dialogue with which this column began, one can find in it, not the funniest of situations to be sure, but a rapid-fire, irreverent, and ironic exchange that exposes at least some of the absurdity that marks the human enterprise.

What about it? Did the 124-year-old guy want to get married?

Richard Griffin

Why Laughter?

The very old man “fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself: ‘Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old?’” His name was Abraham and his wife was called Sarah. He went on to ask, “Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?”

For her part, Sarah, when she heard the news that she was to bear a child, also burst out laughing. The impossibility of it made her greet the announcement with hilarity.

The announcement came during a visit one hot day to the couple’s tent in the desert. The visitors were three mysterious men whom Abraham treated with warm hospitality, inviting them to sit in the shade of a tree and serving them a fine meal. It was during the course of this dinner that they told Abraham that his wife would bear a son.

Sarah was listening from behind the door of the tent that she and Abraham shared. That’s when she could not help but laugh at the absurdity of a woman her age engaging in sexual intercourse and giving birth.

This event, told in the Book of Genesis, tells of people who lived thousands of years ago. They occupy a central place in the story of salvation recounted in the Hebrew Bible. The laughter of these people chosen by God for a crucial role resounds down through the centuries. It’s meaningful that the son born to them was given the name Isaac, which in Hebrew means “he laughs.”

This story can teach us that spirituality and humor are deeply connected. At first sight, they may seem to have little or nothing to do with one another but, on closer examination, they are revealed to be closely linked.

With humor you learn to laugh at what you can’t understand. Not only do the welcome events that come to you often merit laughter, but also sometimes the afflictions. But it takes rare spirit to be able to find and appreciate humorous elements in pain and suffering.

For this to happen, our vision must be widened. “Humor reveals that there is a ‘more’ in human life,” writes Kathleen Fischer. “Humor reminds us that there is a larger perspective on life than our own.”

Fischer adds: “Humor recognizes that limitations and failures are not final and un-redeemable tragedies. Like a ray of sunshine piercing a dark and overcast sky, humor suggests God’s abiding presence and brightens our human prospects.”

Seen in this way, humor can be appreciated as a spiritual gift, closely related to the gift of wisdom. It enables us to recognize and feel both the absurd aspects of human life and God’s power enabling us to draw good out of them.

The philosopher Ronald Manheimer, in a new book called A Map to the End of Time, says that “spiritual insight is sometimes heard in the laugh, the jest, the comic par-able of traditional elders such as the Zen masters, Hasidic rabbis, and Sufi sages.” Their responses “suggest the limitations of their own knowledge.”

Manheimer also points out the connection between the Abraham/Sarah story and the account of creation with which Genesis begins. “It’s the miracle of creation all over again,” he says of the conception and birth of Isaac. In both instances, God’s power is wonderfully at work in making something out of the apparently impossible.

The nineteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard even thought that humor comes before faith. According to Manheimer, Kierkegaard believed that “humor is an outlook. You accept your flawed nature, but you don’t give up, because there’s some-thing that keeps gnawing at you. That’s your godly aspect.”

He saw humor as a basic step on the way to spiritual maturity. For a person to go past being merely ethical and become truly religious, he or she would first come to appreciate humor on the way.

If this seems to be attaching too much weight to humor, look around at some of the people you know. Those who are able to laugh at themselves display a sense of perspective that helps preserve their own health of mind and body. Their approach to life of-ten proves contagious as well, and makes others appreciate being around them.

Richard Griffin

Food Pizzaz

One often hears people say “You are what you eat.”  What a frightening thought, when you consider all that has passed down our gullets! Who among us would ever want to be a pepper or a prune or a pig?

But, fortunately, in daily life becoming what you eat does not demand thought. Eating well does. And that means knowing how to be smart about food shopping.

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With Your Whole Self

My introduction to monastic life, many years ago, brought me to the practice of daily hour-long meditation. Before beginning each meditation, my fellow novices and I would stand in front of our kneeler for a few moments to collect our thoughts and then get down on our knees and kiss the floor.

At first, this practice of prostration and floor-kissing seemed to me bizarre. To make such gestures struck me as undignified, not something a rational person should ever do. Doing it with others made it seem like a lock-step surrender of individual decision-making.

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