Category Archives: Articles

Shanley

I feel sorry for Paul Shanley. This does not prevent me from feeling sorrow and deep outrage on behalf of his victims.

I also admire the courage of Shanley’s accuser whose testimony led to his tormentor’s conviction. He persevered on the stand despite the emotional turmoil he clearly had to endure. Tempted more than once to abandon his case, the unnamed firefighter managed to fight on.

Shanley has been sentenced to a prison term that will last at least until 2013. For him, this will make for an unhappy old age, to say the least. Not without reason, his victims feel this sentence altogether too lenient for what he did to them.

I first met Paul Shanley in 1962 at the parish in Stoneham where he was one of the priests on the ministerial staff. He impressed me, not only with his personal charm, but also with his dedication to ministry. There was nothing to show that, as was later alleged, he may have been already engaged in sexual abuse of young people.

In years following, I was a colleague of Paul Shanley in the campus ministry of the Archdiocese of Boston. He had a reputation for being creative, though unconventional in helping young people in trouble. Like many others of his peers, I uncritically welcomed his reaching out to street youth and did not ever imagine that he could be violating so flagrantly the trust we had in him.

What a human tragedy it is that the young priest who presumably entered the seminary with idealism and dedication is entering upon the last phase of his life in such disgrace before the world! That his life trajectory should have taken this course strikes me as an almost unimaginable tragedy.

Surely his family and friends must have felt pride on the day of his ordination, happy that Paul was setting out on a career full of promise and idealism. The contrast between the handsome smiling young man then, and the stoic 74-year-old figure who stood with head bowed listening impassively to his condemnation last week, is in itself painful. His addiction to abusive behavior strongly suggests that he should never have entered a seminary in the first place.

That he leaves behind him such a trail of havoc, having done much to ruin the lives of his victims, rates as horrible. It is hard to imagine how he can go on living with that weight of shame. And, given the scandalous fate of John Geoghan, Shanley must fear what can happen to him in a prison run by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

He must also live with relentless fury from his accusers. One of them says he wants Shanley to die in prison but “however he dies, I hope it’s slow and painful.” That same man spoke of going to bed the night of the guilty verdict “with a smile from ear to ear.”

I cannot share these sentiments about another human being, however heinous his crimes. My faith is in a God who never gives up on us, no matter how mired in sin we are. Granted, I have not been myself abused and cannot speak with the voice of those who have, but still it seems to me wrong to wish evil for another.

Just as I hope those abused will find healing, so my hope is for Paul Shanley to discover, if he has not already, God’s forgiveness and the healing of his own soul. It is clear that he will suffer grievously in prison, and he undoubtedly fears reprisals such as John Geoghan suffered. And he will almost surely be tempted to despair.

This is no idyllic way to spend old age, to be sure. Especially when you have brought the punishment upon yourself, it must be terribly bitter.

Anyone who takes his cue from Jesus, however, cannot give up on himself. The inmost soul of a human being, unknown by others, is never beyond the reach of God’s knowledge and love.

For a spiritual perspective on Paul Shanley’s situation, I consulted a man deeply versed in the Christian tradition. His first response was one that seems to me sound and worth keeping in mind. “Civil conviction has nothing to say about sin, grace, and forgiveness,” he told me.

“There is a higher order,” he continued, “and the actions of government do not necessarily reflect how God looks at it.” Churches and other religious institutions have chaplains in prisons so as to hold out the offer of divine forgiveness even for the worst kind of sins.  

The moral situation of those abused and that of Shanley are surely far different. However, they have in common the need for spiritual help that goes beyond what human beings can provide. I hope for all of them that they will experience the healing power of divine and human love.

Richard Griffin

Facing the Future

A generation ago, a surprising number of college and university students felt the world to be such an evil place that they did want to bring  children into it. It was a time when many young Americans had lost confidence in the future and could not see themselves becoming parents.

I remember being inwardly appalled and saddened when I heard those students share those views with me. Like a good counselor, I tried not to be judgmental and did more listening than talking, but I certainly felt myself in serious disagreement.

Looking back on that time, I see those young people as lacking the spiritual virtue of hope. At least, their hope was insufficient, not strong enough to allow them to imagine a future that could be handed on to children.

Given all the turmoil of the current American and world scene, some young people of today may also face the future with diminished  expectations of themselves and others. And they may be joined in this feeling by people no longer young.

They may share the conviction that the future is bound to be worse than the past. They may well feel that a door has been closed, and that their generation will never be able to bring about radical change in society.

This attitude would mean that the work of building a life is not worth as much as it should be. The discipline involved in setting goals is not clearly justified. Making bread, building love relationships, a marriage, raising children surely count for what is humanly valuable but, in the face of terror, are they still viable?

Today’s situation, marked by the threat of terror, raises questions about the need to live tentatively, rather than to dig in. Can we be free enough to follow where our own truth leads even when that is outside familiar security?

Much of the beauty of religious traditions lies in their invitation to live in expectation of something better. In my own Christian practice, that is the meaning of Lent, the penitential season that is now upon us.

Lent points toward Easter; it gives us something important to look forward to. That future is worth sacrificing for. Certain practices long associated with the Lenten season may help to stir up hope in us.

Harvard University chaplain Rev. Peter Gomes suggests three such practices. The first is silence which he defines as “not simply the absence of sound but .  .  .  also the presence of that which sound ordinarily obscures.” He urges people who come to his church to try 15 minutes of silence at least one day a week.

Secondly, he proposes study, that is, reading the Bible or perhaps a book about prayer. Specifically, he suggests choosing passages from one of the four gospels or going through the Psalms. Again, only 15 minutes, one day a week, can make a difference, he believes.

Finally, this spiritual leader recommends 15 minutes of service, doing a work of kindness to benefit other people. Rev. Gomes admits  “Fifteen minutes may seem a devilishly small amount of time for good works, given the pressing needs of this world,” but he believes that it may establish a habit of doing good that may spread.

This modest program ─silence, study, service─has the virtue of being specific. It nicely answers the question of what I can do to develop spiritually. These three practices can also stir in human hearts the hope for a better future.

This hope can take root because silence, study, and service bring us into contact with another word beginning in S: Spirit. Finding silence within us; studying the word in holy scripture; serving neighbors in need: all these actions lead us to discover deeper realities than we are ordinarily aware of. Ultimately, they can bring us closer to a working partnership with God.

All sensitive people feel the temptation to give up striving for good. At least from time to time, we teeter on the edge of losing hope and we ask ourselves “What’s the use?” Discovering silence, learning from inspired words, and becoming habituated to serving others may not, at first sight, seem directed toward hope.

Putting them into practice, however, quite possibly will surprise us and leave us feeling better about ourselves and our world.

Richard Griffin

Eating Out

Given the choice, would you rather eat dinner at a restaurant or in your own home? The data on American eating habits suggest that you are likely to opt for the restaurant.

Almost half of us adults eat out at least once a day, 44 percent as the National Restaurant Association measures it. Reportedly, we spend close to 50 percent of our food money on away-from-home eating.

As a rule, I much prefer to eat at home. But when did anyone ever accuse me of being normal?

My main gripe with restaurants in general is that they serve too much food. To my taste, it’s downright unappetizing to confront plates loaded with whatever.

Almost always, I would prefer half as much food for half─or even three-quarters─as much money. And yet, only one restaurant known to me features a menu giving a choice of larger or smaller portions.

Also, eating out is often an activity hazardous to our health. As the AARP Public Policy Institute warns, good nutrition becomes much more difficult when we buy meals or snacks outside.

And the same source urges us to avoid eating places that entice customers with rich dessert carts and all-you-can-eat specials. Preferring restaurants that offer fruit, salads, and other healthy foods, instead of opting for the nearest pizza or burger joint is better for us.

These initial thoughts may tempt you to indict me for nutritional perfectionism. Not guilty. I do stand for healthy eating habits, but pleasure in eating remains important to me.

Over-analyzing food robs diners of enjoyment. Focusing mainly on the nutritional effect of meals is a surefire way of depriving us of pleasure. This attitude can drive us into judging that whenever food tastes good it must be bad for us and vice versa.

Such a negative approach to eating can make us wish for the innocent days of our youth when we ate Spam or Franco-American spaghetti without giving a thought to their nutritional impact. Canned hash, slices of bread topped with butter and sugar, and thick frappes were other features in my young eating life.

But that was long before Americans worried about such things as fat.

Risking cultural elitism, let me cite as good eaters our old allies, the French. The recently published book “French Women Don’t Get Fat,” shares some reasons why one does not often see overweight women (and men) on the streets of Paris.

What makes the difference? “French women take pleasure in staying thin,” says the author Mireille Guiliano, “while American women see it as a conflict and obsess over it.” Both women and men in the United States have become obsessed with weight, much to the detriment of our enjoying food.

Weight will remain an important issue in the United States, however, as long as so many of us continue to eat large helpings of stuff that poses a threat to our health. For the senior generations among us, the stakes are higher: good eating habits can more easily make the difference between our physical/mental flourishing and eating-induced illness.

To help with eating well, in this time of nutritional high-mindedness, a few rules-of-thumb can help. To me, the single most important rule is not to eat too much of any one offering. This approach goes far to help us eat healthily and, I am persuaded, enjoyably.

At the risk of seeming merely precious, let me also propose the ideal of each major meal being an event. Like all ideals, it cannot always be achieved but it’s still worth aiming at.

One factor that makes it an event is not the food itself, but its presentation. The difference between serving dinner out of Styrofoam packages and dishing it out from china bowls may seem trivial, but it actually counts for a lot. People who appreciate food care about how it looks.

In the course of my work with elders, I remember meeting a retired single woman who lived alone: each evening she would lay out the tablecloth, light the candles, put on sweet music, and serve herself a well-cooked dinner. Her income was modest but she knew how to live.

If we have the luck to eat without feeling rushed, that too makes meals  incomparably better experiences. Gulping food down in a hurry makes for neither good digestion nor feelings of contentment.

Meals that bring old and young together also strike me as highly desirable: the contemporary decline of family meals surely serves to impoverish the lives of Americans young and old.

Compressing morbidity, the phrase that the medical pros use to talk about reducing the time when we are sick at the end of our lives, can in large part result from smart eating.  

A robust appetite for good food counts as one of life’s greatest gifts. If only we could eat more of what is good for us and do so in amounts suited to our best interests!

Richard Griffin

Eating Mindfully

“Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty.”

To some Americans, these prayerful words are as familiar as old friends. Many people have been long accustomed to saying them aloud before sitting down to dinnerand perhaps other meals.

For many others of us, however, there is no time for such a ritual. We are too rushed and usually grab food when and where we can. We may even lunch at our desk while continuing to work, and give precious little thought to what we eat.

In the hectic atmosphere of an office or the pressures of family schedules, eating does not allow for leisure, much less prayer. And yet, mealtime can offer precious opportunities for renewing our soul as well as our body.

The traditional words of the grace quoted above suggest some of the rich meaning that lies hidden in eating a meal.

First, it is a time for receiving God’s blessing. The Lord looks lovingly on us and we are showered with divine favor. God loves us and the meal is a sign of that love.

Secondly, the food and drink set before us come as gifts from God. They are products of the earth and human hands, yes, but the creator has made them available to us.

Thirdly, we are recipients of these goods that enable us to continue living. They also bring us pleasure, even joy. What the Psalm says of wine, applies to all nourishment: it makes joyful the human heart.

Fourth, the gifts come from a giver who overflows with goods for us. The old word “bounty” suggests an inexhaustible supply of gifts. God’s generosity toward the human family does not know limits, although our selfishness too often finds ways to deprive brother and sisters of their share.

The beauty of this approach can be summarized as Philip Zaleski and Paul Kaufman do in their book Gifts of the Spirit: “Through table blessings, we remember in our hearts and proclaim with our lips the divine source of all food, all nourishment. Gratitude for food thus becomes gratitude for creation, for life itself.”

To eat and drink with awareness of these ideas makes of mealtime a spiritual exercise of mindfulness. That is what some religious traditions would call it using a term favored in much current spirituality.

Here’s how the authors mentioned above describe mindful eating: “Be attentive to every part of the process: how your fork spears the peas or shovels the carrots, how your muscles stretch and contract as hand and arm join forces to lift the food toward your mouth. Be aware of opening your lips to receive the morsel. Attend to the tastes and smells, the dance of the tongue and teeth as you chew.”

This approach, valuable for some, surely does not suit everybody. To me, it feels extreme. Nonetheless, reading it can suggest something of the spiritual potential in an everyday activity vital to our lives.

Reverently said, the traditional grace with which this column began has enough spiritual power to transform the action of eating and drinking. It is a simpler expression of mindfulness that then frees us to enjoy eating straightforwardly without analyzing each small movement of hand or mouth.

No single meal stands alone. When eating, we can be reminded of other times when we have sat down at the table with family members and friends. Many of those gatherings were marked by laughter, celebration, commemoration, or simply quiet exchange with one other person.

Eating thus brings back events in our lives that have made them memorable. If we come from the Christian tradition, meals will remind us of the Eucharist, the sacred rite of thanksgiving to God for divine deliverance from evil.

In this setting we may also become mindful of those who do not have enough good food and drink. How the world allows any of God’s children to go hungry remains part of the mystery of evil. Including them in our own gift-giving and in our prayers has to be part of any authentic spiritual life.

Many people of faith, taught by the Bible, see in earthly meals a preparation for the great feast of heaven, when they will sit down with the angels and saints in the loving presence of God.

Richard Griffin

Wake

Attending the wake of a friend is always a spiritual experience for me. Seeing, dead, a person whom I have known alive stirs in me an awe that never fails to raise the question of what it means to be human. When something so stupendous as death happens, how can it not provoke wonder at the fact of our existence?

The first time I ever saw a dead body was at the wake of an aunt. As a 13-year-old seeing her lifeless, I felt stunned. How could the person I knew and loved have come to this fate?  Something of these feelings have remained with me ever since.

Two weeks ago, I went to the wake of my friend, Dick. Kneeling at his casket, I wondered at the meaning of it all. Before me were the mortal remains of someone who had been in the second grade with me. We had also received First Holy Communion on the same day in the same church.

By what strange providence had this age peer preceded me in death? And how were things with him now?

It struck me, as it always does, how strange it is that a human being who was once full of life and moved in innumerable ways was now immobile forever. How could it ever end, that life with all its complicated and familiar habits of action and thinking?

In this instance, so much were we alike, in name, age, religion, social class, that my friend’s wake seemed like an apt preparation for mine. Though I was not dead yet, that certain fate awaited me, no matter how well my doctors and I took care of my health. The day would surely come when people would stand around my bier and converse about all sorts of things and, at least from time to time, about me.

In a prayer made next to my friend’s body, I reflected on the last time we had seen one another. On that occasion, we were about to board a boat where we would celebrate the birthday of a lifelong friend of us both. That festive cruise now felt far removed from the body lying before me.

Thomas Lynch, in addition to being a fine poet and essayist, knows a great deal about dead bodies. By profession, he is an undertaker who, as he says, buries some 200 of his fellow townsmen each year in Milford, Michigan. He is also a man of faith who recognizes the body as a temple of the Holy Spirit.

At the end of a recent essay, Lynch extols the ministers and priests who preside over funerals and burials, reverently giving honor to the bodies they commend to God. “They stand─these local heroes, these saints and sinners, these men and women of God─in that difficult space between the living and the dead, between faith and fear, between humanity and Christianity and say out loud, ‘Behold, I show you a mystery.’”

They recognize the mystery of death and the wonder of what happens to the human body. So do I now, as I have done ever since going to my first wake at age 13. Each succeeding time when I have seen the bodies of family members and friends, the sight stirs in me the same awe. How can any one of us ever get used to the death of people we have known alive?

But at wakes, I have noticed, not everybody seems to be feeling awe at death. Some people chat as they would at a party and look to be untouched by their encounter with mortality.

It would be a mistake, however, to judge these cheerful-looking people as detached. Beneath the surface, they too may feel some of the awe that the sight of death always stirs up in me.

My faith tradition has accustomed me to thinking of death as a mystery. That term here does not so much mean a puzzle as a reality too deep for words. Death has a meaning that is so profound that we can never entirely grasp it.

I have never been able to believe that human existence ends with death. Our lives are altogether too rich for me to accept such a negative fate. In my faith, the mystery of death leads to something unimaginably wonderful. Death looks, for all the world, like the end of everything, but I continue to believe it is the transition to fuller life.

Richard Griffin

Ames In Gilead

Any novel whose narrator and central character is my own age certainly gets my attention. That’s the way it was reading Gilead, the beautiful new book written by Marilynne Robinson. I consider it the most satisfying piece of fiction that has come my way in many years.

The author already had a fine reputation with the critics. They loved her first novel, Housekeeping. But that appeared in 1981 and she had published no other novels till this past year. Gilead thus rates as a literary event in itself; beyond that, it offers valuable insights into aging and spirituality, two subjects dear to me.

The 76-year-old narrator is John Ames, a Congregationalist minister who lives in rural Iowa in 1956. Both his father and grandfather were also ministers, each quite different from the other. The elder Ames was a Civil War veteran with a missing eye to prove it, while his son─the narrator’s father─debunked that war and all others.

The novel does not come with individual chapters but takes the shape of one long letter that John Ames, at the request of his wife, addresses to their six-year-old son. It is a testament that will inform the boy about his father’s life and character, after the latter’s death. John feels that death to be imminent, following his doctor’s diagnosis of angina pectoris.

“I do hope to die with a quiet heart,” he says of his spiritual preparedness for that event. About the place which became his home two years after his birth in 1880 and where he expects to die, he turns eloquent: “I love this town. I think sometimes of going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love.”

Reverend Ames appreciates the woman, Lila, who wanted to marry him despite his being 35 years older than she. And having a son in his old age also means everything to him: “The children of old age are unspeakably precious,” he states. As one who became a parent only after 50, I can give a ringing endorsement to this sentiment.

Though he is prepared for death, he does not feel all that positive about old age. “I don’t want to be old,” he explains to his son. “I don’t want to be the tremulous coot you barely remember.”

Using a reference to baseball (a sport he loves, even to the extent of watching a Red Sox/Yankees game on television), John envisions what his body will be like in the next life. “I imagine a kind of ecstatic pirouette, a little bit like going up for a line drive when you’re so young that your body almost doesn’t know about effort.”

Belief in God is central in his life and his preaching of the word gives expression to that faith. His attachment to church, extends to the physical building where his congregation meets. He loves to slip away from his house at night when he cannot sleep, sit in one of the pews, and pray while allowing himself to fall peacefully asleep.

What he calls “the deep things of man” have become his familiars through the practice of his ministry. He speaks about “grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials.” I find touching the relish he feels for the rites of religion as he reaches out to God and the people whom he serves.

Of spiritual bravery he speaks with further eloquence: “To acknowledge that there is more beauty that our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.”

Ames’s closest friend is a fellow minister and age peer, a man identified only as “Boughton.” Their relationship brings much support to John but also has become the source of complication. His friend’s son, John Ames Boughton, now in his 30s, has led a checkered life that troubles both his father and the man for whom he is named.

When the younger Boughton returns to Gilead and seeks counsel from Reverend Ames, the latter feels turmoil and must wrestle with conflicting emotions. His working out of these issues ushers the minister into another stage of spiritual development.

The author brings to this novel, not only a creative talent for entering into the life of a man in old age (at least, as people used to think of it), but a sensitive understanding of religion and ministry. Insights abound but they do not impede the smoothly flowing narrative letter that John Ames writes for his son.

Marilynne Robinson is an artist who, among much else, evokes a sense of place, remote from my own. And yet, she makes me feel a kinship with this Iowa minister, a man approaching the end of his life with faith in God and love for the people God has given him.

Richard Griffin

60th Anniversary

The ringing tones of the cantor crying out the Jewish prayer for the dead carried across the bleak snow-covered grounds. Around him in stark relief were the grim reminders of industrialized murder: barbed-wire fences, huge ovens, railroad tracks. Above the main gate were the words “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes Free), surely an ironic motto for a death camp. Nothing there made free.

There were tears in the voice of this bearded cantor as he commemorated the dead of Auschwitz. It was testimony to the murder of an estimated one million Jews, along with gypsies, homosexuals, and other branded by the Nazis as deviant. Listening to the prayer sung so eloquently, one could call up in imagination whole families of people put to death, ignominiously, without a shred of mercy.

This ceremony marked the 60th anniversary of the date when advancing Russian troops freed the surviving prisoners from captivity in Auschwitz. For the occasion, many survivors had come there, those who had long ago managed to escape death at the hands of their military murderers.

World leaders were there too, as was Elie Wiesel, himself a survivor of this death camp and later Buchenwald. In his speech, Professor Wiesel appealed to his listeners, especially younger people, never to forget the event being commemorated.

“My good friends,” he said in fractured English, “if you after this day will be the same, then we have lost. An encounter with this memory, which now you are the custodians of, must do something to you and through the whole world.”

He was right to say this because the holocaust has a spiritual significance that should never be forgotten. This mass murder, carried out with all the machinery of an efficient modern state, reminds us of the evil that so often lurks within the human heart.

This is how revelations about the Nazi death camps first struck me. As a teenager during World War II, I had no idea that Jews were being persecuted for their religious and ethic identity. Like most other Americans, I lived unaware of the mass murders organized and carried out by the National Socialist machine in Germany.

When the atrocities became known, I felt shock that has stayed with me over the intervening decades. In fact, this knowledge became part of my spiritual life then and now. Among other things, this evil showed me how much we need God.  Left to ourselves, I believe, we human beings can prove thoroughly unreliable.  

Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps make easy optimism about our human condition unrealistic. There is at work in the world a power that, if we do not combat it, can readily turn us into wielders of violence against our fellow human beings. From being our brothers and sisters, they become objects of our hatred and brutality.

Despite the graphic lesson of Auschwitz, events suggest that, as a world community, we have not learned that lesson. The mass slaughter of innocent people in Rwanda and Darfur, to mention only two places among many, shows how little we have backed off from killing those who get in our way.

We can be grateful for educators such as those associated with “Facing History and Ourselves,” the Brookline-based agency that teaches young people and others the lessons of the Holocaust. For the last 25 years this organization has not let us forget the awful facts about one of the world’s most horrific crimes.

There is something dreadfully askew in human life, a fact demonstrated over and over. To me, this points toward a spirituality that is not based on pessimism about the human prospect, but one that takes such evil into account. It also points to the central position in this spiritual outlook of hope in God.

The faith traditions that speak to me hold that God is the only one deserving of complete and utter trust. God is the one who will absolutely not falter in love. One of the sayings of Jesus that I often ponder is: “Why do you call me good? No one is good, but God alone.”

Of course, Jesus does not mean that humans lack goodness completely; rather, he contrasts us with the transcendent God in whom goodness is complete. The liberation that happened 60 years ago should be seen as a call to deepen our horror of evil and to direct hope toward the one who is all good.

Richard Griffin