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Joanne, A Valiant Woman of Faith

For Christians, the Easter season is a celebration of new life. In practice, it can often feel like a springtime festival. This year, for our family, it was not. The sudden death of Joanne, at the beginning of Holy Week, confronted us in a new way with the sorrow of Good Friday and the promise of the Resurrection.

The wife of my youngest brother, Joanne was beloved by everybody in our extended family. As we gathered for her funeral, we realized that all 13 of her nieces and nephews were there, some from long distances and agendas crowded with workplace appointments. Three generations of our family also came, along with many friends, neighbors and colleagues.

The funeral liturgy, with its ancient texts, managed to capture some of Joanne’s buoyant spirit and gifts of personality. One nephew read from chapter 31 in the Book of Proverbs in the Hebrew Bible. There, the writer speaks of the ideal woman, one filled with wisdom, practical know-how, love of her husband and children, and reverence for God.

This text is about 2500 years old, and society has been profoundly transformed in the interim. But the “valiant woman” of Proverbs can still be found in our own day.

Joanne, whose Thanksgiving dinners were legendary, and who could create Halloween costumes on five minutes’ notice, was surely a cousin of the biblical wife who rises early, provides food for her household, and puts her hand to the distaff and the spindle.

Joanne’s radiant presence was evoked for us in the verses: “Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come.” And, like her predecessor, Joanne was loved and honored by her family: “Her children rose up and called her blessed; her husband, too, and he praises her.”

Joanne’s niece read from the First Letter of John, which teaches that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God and God in them.” One family historian claims that the same passage was read at Joanne’s wedding 30 years ago. In any case, it was appropriate then and now.  Her love embraced her immediate family and reached beyond, to her nonagenarian aunts and to the children at the local school who were struggling with learning disabilities.  

The third reading was the most challenging: the passage in the Gospel of John in which Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. When the dead man comes forth from the tomb wrapped in linen bands, Jesus says: “Unbind him, and let him go.”

For the pastor commenting on this passage, and for many of us present, Jesus’ words suggest that, like Lazarus, the human soul is liberated, set free, beyond the grave. Our childhood catechisms took this approach almost as a matter of course. But when we are confronted by the sudden loss of one we love, nothing about our belief is routine.

In preparation for Easter Sunday this year, I had taken as my own the view of an Orthodox theologian who emphasizes how radical the resurrection faith of Christians really is. It is not the same, he says, as believing philosophically in the immortality of the soul.

Instead, the Easter event whereby Jesus rises from the dead calls Christians to a faith in bodily rebirth comparable to the birth that begins our life on earth. Our emergence from the womb may be the experience that comes closest to the reality of Easter.

Confronted with the sudden death of Joanne, however, I felt challenged to find this meaning in our loss. I could not deny that she had gone from this world along with all of the gifts that belonged uniquely to her. I struggled to hold on to my faith in the promise of the Lord to bring her to life once more in an entirely new and unimaginable way.

As we continue to grieve for the loss of Joanne, I commit myself to this Easter faith more deeply. This faith goes beyond believing in the soul’s survival; it looks toward our rising as embodied human beings. Standing in the darkness of Easter morning, I look forward in hope to Joanne’s  rising as did the resurrected Christ in whom she believed.

Richard Griffin

Richard Parker on American Religion

My friend Richard Parker describes himself as a seventh-generation Episcopalian. This scholar, now in his late 50s, grew up in Southern California, the son of an Episcopal priest and pastor. In recent years, my friend has served as a member of the vestry at his place of worship, Christ Church in Cambridge.

Trained as an economist, Richard Parker lectures on public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. By contrast with many other academics, he takes a serious interest in religion, both for his personal life and for its role in the public sphere.

In a recent talk to churchgoers at Harvard, Prof. Parker shared his conviction that religion has long been and continues to be a powerful force for social justice in American life. Those who think otherwise are ignoring a prime fact of our history and national character, he believes.

Some people associate religion in America with backwardness on issues of race and prejudice. But this is plainly wrong. Dr. Parker considers religion as a strong progressive force, keeping America moving forward toward greater social justice and the ideal of equal rights for all.

Pollsters continue to be amazed by the extent of religious belief and practice among Americans. Some 90 percent say they believe in God, and fewer than one percent call themselves atheists. Not even Ireland approaches such figures.

Yet recent times have seen a steep decline in numbers of those belonging to the Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, and other mainline Protestant churches. This phenomenon has led some to call this the end of the Protestant era in America. However, for Prof. Parker, it is by no means the beginning of a post-religion era, only a time of realignments.  

Some Protestant churches may continue to decline, but other groups have flourished. Currently mainline Protestant churches form one-quarter of our overall religious population, evangelicals another quarter, Roman Catholics a quarter, with Jews, Muslims, and others filling out the whole. In all, an estimated 1500 to 1800 religious denominations can be found in America, exhibiting an astonishingly wide variety of belief and practice.

The religious scene changed notably in the 1960s with the candidacy of the Catholic John Kennedy. His campaign pushed into public view the question of how free he would be to make decisions over against the authority of his church. The solution made then by Kennedy and his advisors was to assert that his religion was a private matter that would never lead to any such conflict.

That was a mistaken solution, according to Richard Parker who believes that religion cannot be removed from the public square. In time, Kennedy’s election and service as president came to lessen prejudice against Catholics and to accord to them a full place in American life. Ultimately, something of the same would happen for Jews and others.

When the Moral Majority came along in the 1970s, new battles were fought in the name of religion. Religion became what Parker calls “a proxy for the debate about race and region that has been going on since the 18th century.” But this movement, a kind of replay of the Civil War, failed and the Moral Majority lost influence.

Prof. Parker judges that those religious groups which have opposed progress in race relations, gender issues, and inter-religious connections have not succeeded in their efforts to turn back the clock. By his reckoning, both the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition have fallen far short of their goals and must be judged failures.

The Moral Majority declared bankruptcy in 1978 after having failed in efforts to recruit conservative Catholics and Jews. For its part, the Christian Coalition has also come upon hard times financially. Ultimately, both proved to be regional movements rather than truly national organizations.

For those who espouse a progressive approach to politics, this speaker offers cheering words. To his mind, the struggle for racial justice and other social goods has been a great success. The forces of reaction can seem powerful but, he asserts, they have actually been in retreat for a long time.

Religion still matters, Dr. Parker asserts, and the mainline message of the American Protestant tradition has taken firm hold in our public life. “You can be both progressive and religious, as Americans have been for 300 years,” says this man of faith and of unabashed commitment to what he regards as progressive politics in keeping with the American spirit.

Richard Griffin

Age at the MET

This is the story of a person who used the dreaded O word to get ahead.

During an intermission of a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame at the Metropolitan Opera, my sister Carol joined a long line of women waiting to use what she calls “one of the woefully inadequate ladies’ rooms.” While standing there, she observed her fellow ladies-in-waiting and was struck by their patience.

Among them was a visibly pregnant young woman just behind her. My sister briefly considered offering the mother-to-be her place in line but rejected this option, realizing the gain would be slight and the woman might resent it if she thought my sister was judging her to have a disability.

As Carol neared the entrance to the ladies room and was still pondering her decision not to relinquish her place in line, another woman came from nowhere and attempted to squeeze herself into the space between my sister and the pregnant woman.

The newcomer had no obvious physical condition meriting special consideration nor did she appear to be in any kind of distress. If either had been the case or if she had simply asked to break into the line, Carol would have been glad to accommodate her.

The intruder spoke not a word, just smiled sweetly. The body language of the other women in line suggested they were reacting the way my sister was feeling, namely annoyed at the boldness and presumption of the interloper.

Given these feelings, Carol was surprised that no one else challenged the woman, so she decided to do it herself. She turned toward the woman and explained that this was a line she was breaking into. In response the woman said: “But I’m old.”

Though astonished by this reply, Carol took no more than a half-note’s time to reply: “So am I!”

Pursuing the matter, as if she were a child on an elementary school playground, the woman said: “I bet I’m older than you.”

Carol then pointed out that this was a line of waiting women, not a contest to see who was older. Intent on arrival at her destination, my sister then lost track of where the woman went.

However, she has continued to be intrigued by the incident, an instance, unprecedented in her experience, of someone appealing to a personal characteristic usually left unmentioned, if not disguised in the other direction.

How might one understand the action of the woman who determined to break protocol? Was she every Bostonian’s stereotype of the pushy New Yorker, the person who feels entitled?

Or was she too shy to confess, even among women, the pressing need that drove her to get ahead in this particular line?  What still seems unreal about the story is the blatant appeal to age. Most Americans avoid the word “old” at almost any price.

Perhaps she has experienced age discrimination in employment or in personal relationships and seized this opportunity to get some value out of her advancing years. If people are going to put her at a disadvantage because of her age, she may reason, I will use the power that I have to my own advantage.

She may be attracted to a certain mystique that has caught on with some older women. They have determined to wear purple, they say, and to become outrageous. If society is going to downgrade them, they will stand ready to avenge themselves by acting with a greater freedom than they exhibited when younger.

To the claim “I am old” coming from this woman, the other women might reasonably, if not politely, have replied “So what?” The presence of others in line who themselves looked comparably mature took away the edge in that claim.

Old age may have its privileges, but invoking it to break protocol is not one of them, at least not in my book.

I confess feeling tempted, at times, to indulge my elder status. At buffet dinners, for instance, when I am starving and everyone in line is moving so slowly, I want to elbow my way forward. But these are feelings that I have had since I was six; do I really have an excuse to indulge them now?

Need is valid; age in itself is not a reason for much of anything. Common sense allows a certain leeway to people obviously far advanced in years. By common agreement, those in their 80s, 90s, and 100s can be accorded a certain deference paid to age.

Still, there is something disedifying about an elder pushing herself ahead of others. It does not fit with the graciousness that some of us believe comes with age. We like to think ourselves above that kind of selfishness.

Surely the interloper at the Met could have said something to justify her breaking protocol. My sister Carol’s guess about the woman is this: she makes a habit of doing this just for the satisfaction she gets in exercising reverse ageism.

Richard Griffin

Elders and Gay Marriage

Two Sundays ago, the face of a friend known to me since her college days, some 35 years ago, appeared among the wedding announcements of the New York Times. Helen Cooksey was announcing her marriage to Susan Love, after their taking advantage of the short official-wedding gap opened by the Mayor of San Francisco in February. Both physicians who are based in Los Angeles and parents of a daughter now grown up, these two women obviously felt intense happiness at having their bond legally recognized.

Their joy reminded me of that felt by hundreds of other lesbian and gay couples in that place and in several other American cities. I was particularly struck by those first in line in San Francisco – Del Martin, 83, and Phyllis Lyon, 79 – who have been partners for 51 years. Such longevity in love ought to impress everyone.

A look at recent polls reveals, however, that 60 percent of Americans over age 65 oppose the legalization of gay marriage. This contrasts with a scant 23 percent of those under age 30 who stand against.  

Does this mean that a great many elders are taking a kill-joy attitude toward fellow members of our national community who have discovered a personal love that has stood many tests of time and has continued to bring them fulfillment?  Are older people hard of hearts as well as (sometimes) arteries? Is it that they are simply old, stuck in their ways, and unable to change? Or do they have something significant to bring to the debate?

In searching for answers to these questions, I have not simply talked to some of my age peers but have tried to untangle what may be part of their underlying mentality. The issues that polls never get deep enough to analyze are those that may play an important part here.

Many, if not most, of those over 65 must surely find some pleasure in what others see as good fortune for themselves. Is it not likely that others feel the way I do, namely joy at others having the benefits of being bound to others in love and fidelity?

Elders in good physical and mental health are certainly open to change. Their ability to transform behavior and attitudes has been documented sufficiently to chase this stereotype.

That a large percentage of those who oppose gay marriage do, at the same time, support civil rights and widespread benefits for those entering sexual unions attests to their openness. Endorsing civil unions represents a major transformation of mentality for many people who never heard of such arrangements until quite recently.

Still, many advocates of civil unions refuse to accept legal marriage of same- gendered people. I would point to three separate considerations that might be moving those over 65 to opt against gay marriage. If advocates wish to change elders’ views, I would suggest taking these issues seriously.

First, to people growing up in homes shaped or influenced by classical culture, the naming of things makes a difference. Older adults, even if not highly schooled, have lived their whole lives in a mental framework that values things by their names. Literature, philosophy, and theology that have had such an impact on our lives, at least indirectly, have taught us to distinguish among things that are different.

In this view of reality, the word marriage does not apply to gay unions. Marriage means the coming together in a permanent sexual bond between people of different genders. For these “classical” thinkers, another kind of union –  –  however desirable in itself –  –  requires another name.

Secondly, there are large numbers of Catholics in Massachusetts, and the teaching of their church makes gay marriage problematic. You can believe (as I do) that the Catholic Church stands in bad need of a new approach to sexuality, but it does not have one yet. Furthermore, Catholics have the sense of belonging to a worldwide church, one that is unlikely to adopt a position that runs counter to the culture of other nations.

Finally, not a few older people may feel that society is moving too fast on this issue. After all, even the well-informed may not have heard of the legalization of gay marriage as a possibility until very recent months. People need time to think about it. Those who have reached seventy or eighty know from experience that history is full of unintended consequences. A decision of this magnitude should not be taken in haste; it deserves ongoing analysis and reflection.

These oppositional views are not those of all elderly people. As we have seen, some of the couples married in San Francisco are far from young. But the views of more skeptical or conservative elders should not be seen simply as an expression of blind prejudice. If we are to proceed in amity as a society, they should be accorded the same presumption of good faith that is owed to the proponents of gay marriage.

Richard Griffin

Easter 2004

Reaching for images of Easter, the poet Gerard Manly Hopkins calls the risen Christ an “immortal diamond, a beacon, an eternal beam, a trumpet crash.” Sound and light impress him as best suggesting the splendor of the resurrection event.

Others among us think of the Resurrection as a new birth. I feel drawn back in memory to the only birth I have ever actually seen. When my daughter was born, I felt unique awe, mixed with intense joy, at her emergence from the womb to begin life in the world outside.

The Easter event marks the single most important moment in the Christian faith, the one that gives this faith its central meaning. According to the Gospel witnesses, Jesus has risen from the dead with a new life to be shared with all who believe and love.

“Open wide your hearts that they / Let in joy this Easter Day,” the same poet Hopkins tells members of the faith community. And worshippers raise their voices to sing: “Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia.”

My Greek Orthodox friend Theo is visiting Greece this week. There he will be celebrating Easter today and exchanging with fellow Christians the greeting “Christ is Risen / He is truly risen” as the Orthodox have done for many centuries.

My friend feels glad to be celebrating this feast day in Greece. There, he says, Christians commonly recognize it as the most important single day of the year. They realize that the rising of Jesus from the dead forms the center of the Christian faith.

Theo’s full name is Theoharis Theoharis, making him the only person I know who can introduce himself with only a single repeated word. I mention it here because his name also bears a religious meaning since the Greek from which it derives means “gift of God.” That fact may make him realize, more immediately than others, how his very being, like that of every human, comes as a charism from God’s hand.

Believing in Easter brings Christians into a faith more radical than even those deeply committed usually realize. The Orthodox priest John Garvey, writing in “Commonweal,” emphasizes how different it is to believe in the Resurrection from believing only in the immortality of the soul.

“To believe in resurrection,” he says, “means that just as there was no life before conception, there can be no life after death that is not given by God’s willing it to be so.”

And he continues even more radically: “We are putting ourselves completely into the hands of a God we cannot understand, except through trust –  -stepping over the edge of a cliff in the dark, hoping that the promised net will be there –  – that what we have been told, second-hand, will be true.”

This Easter faith is the gift of generations of Christians who came before us and passed it along. They were not bequeathing to us a smooth reconciliation with death, making it easy to accept the fact of dying. Rather, the believers in the Easter event were offering to their inheritors a religion that would confront them with the fact of all new life coming from God.

Again Father Garvey presses the point: “Christianity is not meant to reconcile us with death, but to see it for the horror it is. Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus, and at Gethsemane he is filled with horror at what awaits him. This is a contrast with those forms of religion that console us with the idea that ‘death is just a part of life.’”

Easter means that death was not to have the last word; life would.

Easter 2004 comes into a world packed in many places with terror ready to explode without notice. The desecrations recently inflicted upon bodies already dead in Falluja reveal, in case we needed more evidence, the depths of madness to which human malice will take people.

The Easter faith shows a different way, a path of peace based on confidence in God’s desire for human beings to rise toward new life. Easter carries a promise of rebirth that remains open even now, in the conditions of our present life, and for an unimaginably bright future as well.

Richard Griffin

Shingles Experience

Few experiences absorb our attention the way illness does. Yet, when you talk about it with others, even close friends, their eyes soon grow glassy and begin to rove. How can something be of such pressing interest to us and of so little to others, I often wonder?

Despite awareness of this hazard, however, I write this week about a recent bout with shingles. This I do, not on my own initiative, but in response to a suggestion from my pastor, Dennis Sheehan. He urged me to share this experience with readers so as possibly to encourage others in coping with what can be a painful ordeal.

As a person of classical bent, I never feel myself in possession of a word’s meaning unless I know its roots. In this instance, the word “shingles” refers, not to the wooden boards that provide the exterior of some houses but rather to quite a different image.

When used to name the disease, “shingles” comes from the Latin word “cingulum,” that indicates a girdle across the middle of the body. Speakers of English in the Middle Ages with their fondness for variation apparently wore away the opening letter “c” in favor of the “sh” beginning the bizarre word that we know today.

The word describes the experience aptly because shingles sufferers usually feel themselves covered in a zone of pain that stretches part way across their body. Mine, however, has been located on my forehead, just above my left eye.

Though you do not need to have lived long to get shingles, age often brings it on. What most fascinates me about it is how this virus can have been lurking in our body since childhood. Its origin is the virus that causes chicken pox that so many of us had as kids but which may have lain dormant for decades. One member of my family got shingles in her 80s, some 70 or more years after the root disease first took hold in her body.

With this disease, our nerve ends become exposed, thus making us vulnerable to oftentimes excruciating pain. What causes the virus to erupt is still not clear, though medical authorities often point to stress. If that is the trigger, you can easily understand why shingles abounds in the general population.

If shingles carry a certain advantage, it may be the disease’s power to win sympathy. Most people know two things about it: first, it is usually very painful and second, it is not life-threatening.

That frees people to express condolences with the sufferer, a benefit I have been gathering in over the last several weeks. You can tell a person about being sorry for his trouble without worrying that your words might be inadequate. You know that the sufferer will get well.

For me, the illness has brought some other benefits as well. The most important of them for me is, once more, an acute sense of the kindness of strangers. In this instance, I mean mostly members of the medical staff at the clinic run by Harvard Vanguard.

In illness, you have to trust others to respond. My constant experience is that they do. You learn to practice a reliance on others that ultimately can enrich your own life.

Almost all people with whom I had no significant contact previously, these medical staffers have reached out to me in caring and sympathetic ways. This style of applying the healing arts has upped my morale and given me the confidence of finding relief from the disease’s effects.

That these caregivers are mostly women, some people of color, makes for a medical staff much different from what I knew earlier in life. Nurses, physicians, technicians, and others bring a diversity more representative of the world at large than in the past. I welcome the changes and believe us improved by the special gifts that women bring to the healing ministry.

Entrusting myself to the care they offer brings me to face my own dependence. Contrary to the great American cultural myth that we don’t need anyone, we all depend on one another. As a lady once told the author Mary Pipher, “Honey, life ain’t nothing but strings.”

Though not life-threatening, shingles has brought me further experience of my own mysterious vulnerabilities. How complicated we continue to be, defying all simplifications of human life!

Even at the most painful times, I try to ward off the unlovely emotion of self-pity. The heroic examples of friends who are engaged in long-term struggles with death-bringing diseases such as cancer shame me into placing limits on my own narcissism.

More positively, shingles speaks to me of the value in each day. Feeling unwelcome pain on some days enhances the joy of living on other days.

In this connection, I never tire of quoting Rabbi Abraham Joseph Heschel because his sentiments reinforce my continuing experience of life: “Just to be is a blessing; just to live is holy.”

Richard Griffin

Unpacking the Last Week of March

Olivia, a fellow prayer group member, has returned from visiting friends in Hawaii. While there, she went swimming with dolphins and told of the connection she felt with them that went beyond words.

The second time out, she saw a pod of 20 dolphins, below her in the clear blue water. They began to leap out of the bay with exuberance, playing on the surface and under.

“They are trying to remind us of our natural place in the world,” she says. “When I closed my eyes, I began to see their luminous forms in my inner vision.”

We agreed, Olivia and I and other group members, on this experience as an indicator of contact with the spirit at work in our world. While swimming near the dolphins she felt herself in touch with mystery. Through a kind of “architecture of light” (her words) she renewed her feeling of a deeper meaning that goes beyond appearances.

Another image of spirit has stayed with me for decades. A friend told me what it was like to land on an aircraft carrier in World War II. As a Navy pilot, he managed to touch down safely dozens of times, first in training, then in actual warfare. But it was never easy or assured.

Navigating toward the floating landing field, he would first spot the alarmingly small ship far below as it rose and fell on the vast sea. In those days, carriers were much smaller than they have since become. The pilot’s task was to have his plane hit the deck in precisely the place where the plane’s tail hook could catch the chain that would stop it. A few feet off, and the plane would go overboard, possibly killing the pilot.

My friend would often compare this exercise in courage to his experience of the spiritual life. In both arenas he would be tested by the need to trust. Trusting in God meant for him facing the unknown with courage as he placed his wellbeing in the divine hands.

Many people go through ups and downs in their pursuit of God. For the popular saint, Therese of Lisieux, it was mostly downs as she devoted herself to the spiritual life within a French Carmelite convent in the 1890s. As those in my book group discovered recently, the nickname “Little Flower” gives the wrong impression of this saint. Far from delicate, she was a young woman who was strong enough to go through agonizing experiences of both body and soul.

Writing about this saint’s trials in Easter of 1896, Kathryn Harrison says: “Thérèse was abruptly plunged into what she called ‘the thickest darkness.’ The faith that she had always taken for granted―‘living,’ ‘clear,’ uninterrupted by doubt―vanished, leaving her in a despair so profound it defied articulation. Once, she had found words inadequate to the ‘secrets of heaven’; now she discovered they were useless when trying to describe what seemed a visit to hell.”

In conversation about Thérèse, I foolishly lamented my own superficiality that prevents me from experiencing such highs and lows. In response my friend Emerson, advanced both in years and in wisdom, replied: “And you don’t need them.”  This perceptive remark came to me as a bolt of lightening, bringing me back from silly fantasy to reality. In Emerson’s view, I was already receiving what I needed for my spiritual life.

Instead of regretting what I don’t have by way of spiritual gifts, I turn with admiration toward those friends whose courage in facing life-threatening disease inspires me. Each day two of them face the prospect of death possibly coming in the near future, doing so with greater pluck than I could imagine myself summoning up.

A Lenten prayer service last week also upped my morale. The dignity and reverence that marked this simple liturgy in my parish church made it a gift to our community of faith. Reading from the Bible, singing hymns, offering prayers for the needs of the church and the world, and gathering afterward over food and drink, all made for an experience of soul.

So did the talk from the visiting speaker, a layman filled with insight along with skill at words, often humorous and graceful.

These, then, are some of the themes that I have unpacked from experiences flowing in the last week in March. No one of them perhaps carries great weight but to me they offer signals for the life of the spirit.

Richard Griffin