Category Archives: Articles

A Cell, At Last

Finally, I have succumbed to the craze. After several years of resistance on my part, the battering ram of popular practice has broken down my defenses. I have joined the ranks of cell phone users.

Now, fortunately, I have gained access to all sorts of new social privileges.

At airports, I can talk more loudly than ever before. Other passengers, while waiting in the lounge for their next flight, will share the privilege of listening in on my conversations. They can follow blow-by-blow accounts of my latest fall-out with a friend or a giant business deal about to come together. And it will all come at a high pitch of volume ensuring that whatever attention they had been giving to reading a best seller or holding a face-to-face conversation with a companion will have to give way to my talk.

I can also demonstrate my personal importance by receiving calls during professional meetings or at lunch with friends. Associates will surely be impressed as a dark-blue device smaller than my hand relays a message from a friend in San Francisco or Paris. Up to now they may have considered me as an old guy of not much account in the larger world, but they will now realize that I rate. Friends will come to know even better how widely I am known from coast to coast and abroad.

People can now reach me even during the Sunday liturgy in my parish church. The priest may be approaching the most solemn part, commemorating the Last Supper of Jesus, but I will rattle on about the next party on my social schedule. And the same priest’s efforts to present a coherent sermon will be enhanced by the pseudo-musical ring of my phone.

Another benefit comes in my no longer needing to walk around town unaccompanied. Now abject solitude will find relief any time I want. In my town, however, so many people are already talking to themselves without need of a cell phone that they should not easily presume I am using one. Perhaps this fact will motivate me to talk even more loudly into my new hand-held device so that everyone will recognize me as in touch and not isolated.

If I leave the cell phone connected, then I can also hope for someone to contact me during a movie. Others in the theater, absorbed as they are in their popcorn and ongoing conversation with the person next to them, will surely not mind if I interrupt Renée Zellweger or Sean Penn in whatever they are trying to say.

Also I will feel free to drive my car while talking with friends in the Berkshires or snowbirds in Florida. It will serve as a pleasant relief from devoting tiresome attention to the roadway. Maybe cats and dogs will run some risk of encountering me but I suspect that most humans will escape my onrushing Toyota.  

Perhaps the phone will prove valuable during Sunday softball games as well. When stranded at second base (a fairly rare event, given my batting prowess), I can talk with someone at home (in either sense), relieving the tedium created by a pitcher who cannot get the ball over the plate.

Also routine physical exams can be rather boring, especially when your doctor does not have much to say. I heard recently of a patient who carried on a cell phone conversation during the process, a practice that strikes me as a fine remedy for the ho-humness of so much medical practice.

Readers can gather from the irony in all of the above what were the factors that kept me from purchasing a cell phone up to now. So much about the use of these devices puts me off. I consider them to have unleashed a torrent of anti-social habits like those parodied here.

Paradoxically enough, a gadget invented to put people in touch with one another too often alienates us. Rather than enhancing the pleasure of being in the actual presence of others, it abstracts people from the present situation in favor of a distant relationship. I begrudge having the person I am talking with spurn me for someone else far removed.

Despite these gripes, however, I also hail the cell phone as one of the finest inventions of our time. Especially for those of us in later life, it comes as a great boon. Used selectively, it enhances both our social life and our security. If we should need assistance at almost any time, help can be more easily summoned than ever before.

Joseph Coughlin of MIT's AgeLab shares this view of mine. He considers it a model of the way technology can serve the needs of later life. Like so many other inventions, it looks easy and obvious, but that’s only after it been invented.

Again, despite my reservations about its misuse, we are lucky to have it.

Richard Griffin

Mel Gibson’s Passion

The one new film I wanted not to see this season is The Passion of the Christ. Its absurdly inflated hype, starting over a year ago, and Mel Gibson’s stated purpose in making it (to show the death of Jesus “as it really was”) were enough to put me off. Also I felt revulsion at the violence, widely reported to be extreme.

Now, however, I have gone against my resolution and have sat through the film. I did so in order to have enough credibility to discuss in this column the reasons why it has become so controversial.

Is the film anti-Semitic? To answer this question I take my cue largely from those Jewish people who have either found many parts of “The Passion” offensive or feel it likely to support the new wave of anti-Semitism that has sprung up in Europe and elsewhere.

You can make a case for its being no more anti-Semitic than the Gospels. However, the Gospels have been used through most of the last 2000 years to justify Christians persecuting the Jewish people.  

I can judge Mel Gibson sincere when he disavows any intention to blame Jews for what happened to Jesus. But you have to ask what value there is in making a film that he must have foreseen would offend and might even harm present-day Jews.

Its effect is to set back the progress made in the last few decades in mutual understanding between the Jewish and Christian communities. At the very least, it fails to reflect the spirit that inspired the Second Vatican Council in its strong rejection of anti-Semitism.

My central problem with the film, however, is what it says about Christianity. The very virtues of Gibson’s filmmaking distort the Christian faith. His cinematography is impressive: the characters are vivid, the scenery often striking, the images memorable. I will not soon forget the shots of Jesus and the two thieves outlined against the sky on a hill over Jerusalem

Filmgoers will not see things “as they really were.” That is impossible because the sources of our knowledge are the Gospels. These writings, as biblical scholars of the last two centuries have taught us, are not basically eyewitness reporting but rather documents that witness to the faith of a people. Of course, they often take as starting point real-life events, but they shape their accounts of these events so as to fit the needs of the faith community.

The writers of the Gospels were neither journalists nor academic historians. Sometimes their writings contradict each other. Nowhere in Scripture can we find what claims to be a simple, definitive version of events. In preserving four Gospels in the New Testament, the Christian church seems to reject the idea of a single such version.

My most serious quarrel with Gibson is the way he has distorted Christianity to make it seem a religion of death. By playing out in such agonizing and bloody detail the suffering and dying of Jesus, the director exalts the Passion beyond its proper place.

Of course, the sufferings of Jesus will always remain vital to the Christian faith. In a world where so many people die horribly, the example of the Lord retains its value for those facing indignity and loss.

But Easter is even more important in the life of Christians than is Good Friday. That Jesus rose from the dead must loom larger than his dying, important though the latter remains. Christianity is a faith that celebrates life rather than death. Yet Gibson gives scant notice to Christ’s resurrection.

The violence depicted in Gibson’s film is so horrific as to cause viewers of any sensitivity considerable pain and suffering. Though I am not especially sensitive to images, I felt much discomfort while watching it. I would advise parents not to allow children to see it; doing so could be seen as a form of child abuse, however unwitting. And, given the power of images over them, children may well believe that everything shown here is really happening as they watch..

The scourging of Jesus inflicted by Roman soldiers with whips and chains is agonizing to see. The victim is almost completely covered with blood. Yet all four Gospels devote only a single phrase to this action that in the film goes on and on.

Similarly with the nailing to the cross, we see what is done to Jesus in such agonizing detail as could make us sick. Is that the faith of Christians or does not the emphasis upon these physical details distort that faith?

Richard Griffin

Sacred Seeing

In the majority religion of India, Hinduism, believers want above all to see the divine. This emphasis makes them different from Christians (especially Protestants) who place more emphasis coming into contact with the divine, not through seeing, but by hearing the word of God.

Diana Eck, who teaches religion and Indian studies at Harvard, considers seeing as a key to understanding how Hindus approach the deity. She entitled her first book “Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India,” and there she explored some of the many ways religious people encounter images of the gods whom they venerate.

The word darshan means a kind of sacred seeing, whereby a deity is manifested to his worshippers in a variety of forms. Professor Eck calls darshan “the single most common and significant element of Hindu worship.”

So much does this hold true that worshippers are likely to say “I went to darshan today,” meaning that they looked on a shrine where they saw some emblems of divine presence.

In a recent talk, this Harvard scholar focused on the Hindu god Shiva and described many of the shrines where pilgrims approach him. Shiva ranks as one of the three most important deities in the Hindu faith and remains a chief object of worship throughout India. Along with Vishnu and Devi, he stands out as a principal divine being.

To non-Hindus, it can be confusing to discover how many different gods Hindus honor. At first, this religion can seem simply to promote worship of false idols rather than the true God. However, on closer inspection Hindus are seen to stand closer to belief in one God than Westerners commonly realize.

Professor Eck considers it a matter of seeing the divine from many different aspects rather than believing in many different gods. She likes to tell an ancient story from the Hindu scriptures about a student who asked a wise man named Yajnavalkya how many gods there are.

The sage answered: “As many as are mentioned in the Hymn to All the Gods, namely 3,306.
“Yes, said he, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?
“Thirty-three.
“Yes, said he, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?
“Six.
“Yes, said he, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?
“One and a half.
“Yes, said he, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?
“One.”

Hindus worship the divine in many different forms and they believe that the images of God are so many as to be countless. And the individual gods whom they reverence are shown in various guises and roles, notably the god Shiva.

In one of his innumerable images, Shiva is depicted as having three eyes, one hand raised in blessing, the other holding a trident. His posture is meditative and his face looks soft, to show that he combines features of male and female.

At times, this deity is shown against the backdrop of the snow-capped Himalayan Mountains, where Shiva originated. From there he moved to Banares and adopted this holy city as his own.

Shiva can be seen as present in various objects. Hindus call these objects lingas and understood them as emblems or signs of the god. At one shrine, for instance, the linga is a chunk of ice, at another a large rock.  Almost anything can serve to manifest this god.

Thus a shaft of fire reveals Shiva; so does a beam of light. Housewives are fond of drawing designs outside on the pavement outside their houses to show reverence for the god. Some people take the sand on a beach and fashion from it a pattern that honors Shiva.

Professor Eck points out the importance of understanding how the basic features of Hindu piety can connect with people of other traditions. For example, she says of the shrines where people gather to worship: “God is far larger than the place God has condescended to be.”

Worshippers know that God is everywhere but, through their creativity, they can have a divine presence at the doorway of their home. They also know that even when worshipping Shiva, there are many other deities and images of God.

The Hindu way of worshipping through lingas at shrines encourages the use of beautiful objects to bring them to a deeper sense of the divine. Their religion sharpens people’s appreciation of beauty through color, shape, and variety.

Richard Griffin

See the Fog

When the Academy Awards are given out this weekend, I will be rooting for “The Fog of War” to be chosen best documentary. I consider it not only a masterpiece of cinematic art but also a sobering statement about our chances of survival in a world continually threatened by lethal violence.  

Robert McNamara, on whom the film focuses, testifies eloquently to lessons of the catastrophic history in which he had a part.  

To be sure, McNamara’s failure to meet moral challenges can seem to disqualify him as a character witness. His part in the firebombing of Japanese civilians by the hundreds of thousands in 1945, and his refusal to speak out against the American role in the Vietnam War when he knew it to be misconceived,  remain severe blots on his integrity.

Yet, in his middle eighties, this sharp observer of 20th century history raises issues that remain vital to present-day America. His moral reasoning may be deficient, but he recognizes clearly how some of his experience can help clarify the dilemmas facing us now.

To me, two of the most important conclusions that flow from McNamara’s experience are the need to choose wise leaders and, once we choose them, the importance of the media and members of Congress and other citizens keeping a critical watch over their actions.

It still shocks me that McNamara and the president he served, Lyndon Johnson, did not know that the Vietnam conflict was basically a civil war and that, even if Vietnam fell to the Communists, the rest of the region would not necessarily follow.

Yet in the film McNamara says he was astonished to discover the first of these facts only in 1995 when he visited the former Vietnamese leaders. He could have obtained the same knowledge in the 1960s from many Americans who had studied the history of Southeast Asia.

For Johnson to have manipulated the United States Senate to pass the Tonkin Gulf resolution, with only two votes against, still ranks as a terrible failure of responsibility on the part of the president and senators elected from every state. It was a striking instance of American citizens believing in the propaganda of our own national government.

If this reminds you of a more recent military adventure, it reminds McNamara also. He calls it a mistake for the United States to invade a country when other nations that share our basic values do not agree with us. Speaking from sober experience, McNamara says: “The application of military power is so complex that the human mind is incapable of controlling all the variables.”

Another conclusion drawn by McNamara deserves pondering. This believer in taking a hardheaded approach to problems now says “Rationality will not save us.” That lesson comes from the Cuban Missile Crisis when, on three different occasions, “we came within a hair’s breath” of possibly having hundreds of millions of people wiped out and much of civilization destroyed.

Only luck, along with some last-ditch wise leadership, preserved us from that fate. The danger exists today, McNamara believes, with enormous stockpiles of nuclear missiles available for use by various nations.

Providing structure for the film, McNamara lists eleven lessons learned from his experience. Number six reads “Get the data.” This imperative is hard to argue against, but getting the data does not necessarily solve the problem. He himself provides another rule that says “Belief and seeing are both often wrong.”

McNamara seems to have placed too much trust in “facts” and not enough in wisdom, insight, law, and morality.  Granted, being able to pull off massive air raids over Japan was a great feat technologically, but it bypasses the moral issue about the legitimacy of firebombing civilians.

The former defense secretary also raises the issue of proportionality. War has become so horrible when powered by previously unthinkable machines that you have to ask what purposes make it justifiable. McNamara believes that “in order to do good, you have to engage in evil,” a truly sobering thought.

I have some sympathy with this latter viewpoint. Supported by my spiritual tradition, I find something fundamentally askew in the world, even in the best of times. As history continues to show, the human family seethes with passions that are frequently out of control, and we are highly unlikely to change our basic character any time soon.

Much discussion has gone into McNamara’s failure to apologize for mistakes that were so catastrophic to millions of people. Many people are bothered because he has not asked forgiveness for his part in massive killing. I recently met a neighbor who still feels furious with McNamara for the deaths of so many of his friends in Vietnam.

I sympathize with these views but, flawed as he remains, Robert McNamara has offered reflections that can benefit us all. Some of them are obscured by the fog of war and the complexity of things. But they may help us deal with the propaganda, manipulation, and duplicity so widely applied by our leaders today.

Richard Griffin

Seeing God

How can a story familiar to hundreds of millions of people all over the world have never been heard by me?  That is the question I ask myself after finally hearing it told two Sundays ago.

Not only is this narrative known far and wide but the event it describes is celebrated each year by communities of believers in dozens of nations, including the United States.

The story bears the title “The Ascension of the Prophet” in English. In the Arabic language it is referred to as “Al-Miraj,” a name that can also refer to the holy day that is observed on the 27th day of the seventh month of the Islamic year.

I heard the story told by Ali Asani, a scholar of Islam who teaches at Harvard University. Professor Asani, speaking to a group of Christians seeking deeper understanding of Islam, shared with us an ancient narrative that centers on the Prophet Mohammed and his face-to-face encounter with God.

In beginning his talk, Professor Asani stressed the core belief of Islam, namely that God is one. Each believer bears witness to that basic fact about God.

“There is no god but God” expresses the faith of every Muslim.These words contain both a negation and an affirmation, the denial of existence to false gods, and the full acknowledgement of the one true God.

What all Muslims must do is submit to Allah. This submission involves turning away from being centered on oneself and instead becoming centered on God.

The holy book of Islam, the Qur’an, frequently mentions seeing God, though it also teaches that human beings cannot physically do so. The Prophet Mohammed, however, receives the privilege of a personal meeting with God.

When Mohammed ascends toward God, he leaves from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem under the guidance of the angel Gabriel. This guide will not be allowed to go all the way up, however. Only the Prophet himself does so.

Muslim tradition has sweetly interpreted God’s motive for having Mohammed make the ascent. The reason is: God could not bear being separated from his beloved so he had Gabriel call him forth.

Returning to an earlier theme, the storyteller emphasized that submitting one’s ego is a prerequisite for seeing God. You must “die before you die” said Professor Asani as he explained the self-transformation that Muslims understand to be the goal of life.

Another part of the story has the Prophet meeting Moses when he returns to earth. “How was it?” Moses asks. Mohammed answers: “He told me my community should pray 50 times a day.”

Moses told him that 50 was too much, unrealistic, and suggested that the prophet return and ask God for less. The next time he bargains God down to 25 but Moses judges that still too much. Finally, the Prophet comes back with an agreement for five, and that is why Muslims pray that number of times each day.

How does the Muslim community interpret the Prophet’s encounter with God? Some take it literally but others understand it as an allegory. They call it the Prophet’s mystical vision of God.

They buttress the mystical interpretation by telling that, when the Prophet came back, his bed was still warm. In this view, every believer can have a mystical experience similar to what the Prophet had.

Ultimately, Professor Asani points out, this adventure is a story of love. It is an object lesson not only about human beings yearning to see God, but about God yearning to see human beings.

Though not as learned in the Muslim tradition as I would like to be, I find it easy to relate to this charming narrative. It smacks of authentic religious feeling and speaks beautifully of love both divine and human.

The story also validates the mystical tradition as it has unfolded over the centuries. It dramatizes an intimacy between God and God’s creatures featuring an interplay back and forth. Though God remains above human grasp, human beings can enter into a love relationship with God.

James Herrick, author of a recent book on spirituality, asserts that “mystical experience is the common core of all religious traditions.” If so, this story can feed the soul of people who are not themselves Muslim but who relate to some of the spiritual wisdom in the Muslim tradition.

Richard Griffin

Father, Fifty Years Later

The last day of January marked the 50th anniversary of my father’s death. At age 55, he drew his last breath in a New York City hospital, in the presence of my mother, one of my brothers, one of my sisters, and me. It was an event that some of us never entirely recovered from and that remains deeply imprinted on my psyche.

John Griffin died of bleeding stomach ulcers, a disease then common among journalists, but no longer fatal now as it could be in 1954. Ulcers of this sort had long afflicted my father, a newspaperman who had faced deadlines and other career pressures throughout his adult life.

As first a reporter, then Sunday editor, and finally editor-in-chief of the Boston Post, he worked for a newspaper that had been one of the largest in the United States and the most important in New England. In the years after World War II, however, it began a decline that would lead to its demise in 1956.

When I was a boy, Dad would leave the house after an early supper and go off to work until after midnight. I remember him setting out for the trolley at the bottom of our street in Watertown, headed for Newspaper Row on Washington Street in Boston. As his career progressed, he worked more conventional hours, though he would often cover stories that required him to go away.

One such assignment took him away for several weeks. That came in 1939 when he sailed to Rome with Cardinal O’Connell for the election of a new pope to succeed Pius XI.  The choice of Eugenio Pacelli who took the name Pius XII turned into one of the most fateful in history, given this pope’s still controverted role in the war.  

For my father, the main focus of the ocean voyage was suspense as to whether O’Connell would reach Rome in time to vote. The Boston prelate had missed the two previous elections, arriving too late for inclusion among the cardinals who cast ballots. This time, as the Post’s correspondent duly documented, O’Connell made it to Vatican City just in time.

A year later, father followed the trail of Wendell Wilkie during the latter’s campaign for the president. How my father felt about this Republican candidate I do not know but it must have been evident early on that Wilkie would not dislodge Franklin Roosevelt.

In time, my father became a columnist as well, writing two columns a week in one stretch of ten years. It is perhaps unsurprising that his oldest son finds himself on a similar run some 50 years later. My dad also appeared regularly on a pioneering Boston television program, “Starring the Editors,” an activity that he seems to have enjoyed but that added to a heavy work load.

The death of her husband was an especially heavy blow for my mother. Alice Griffin, like many of the women of her time, was not prepared, either practically or psychologically, to go it alone after losing her spouse. She survived for another three decades herself but never entirely regained her ability to handle effectively her own problems and those of her family.

One of my brothers recently told me that he has never been reconciled to our father’s death. “The wound heals but a scar remains,” he said. I myself was 26 and already living away from home, so the death did not have quite the same impact on me.

However, the unexpected loss of my father registered deeply with me too. More times than I can count, I have replayed in memory the awful scene of his dying. I still regret my inability then to have expressed my love for him: the sight of him struggling to breathe and lying helpless as I had never seen him before overwhelmed the impulse I felt to speak to him.

Now, at age 75, I have lived 20 more years than my father did. How could my mother and my five younger siblings have been deprived of his presence when they so needed him? What brought it about that his best friend, Elliot Norton, lived to 100, almost doubling my father’s span of years? Why have I received the gift of longevity and not my dad?  And why did I never have the opportunity to talk with him about his life and mine as we both grew older together?  

These and other such mysteries will continue to haunt me no matter how many more years I live. However, at the same time I feel grateful to God for having had John Griffin as my father and I treasure the legacy he left me.

From the vantage point of 50 years later, I hold him in increasingly deeper affection and, as time goes on, I place even greater value on the heritage he passed on to me and the other members of my family.

Richard Griffin

Breaking with the Noise

“In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.” This advice from Deepak Chopra sounds inspiring but trying to do it proves hard.

For me, the better way to start is by reducing the noise outside us. How about turning off the TV, for example?  Some people leave it on all the time, making the atmosphere around them always potentially intrusive.

Others have talk radio on continually, or programs featuring music. Some cannot go outside for a walk without being wired for sound. Or they will chatter on a cell phone while hurrying to their next destination.

Many modern Americans are in thrall to their computer. Always turned on, this marvelous machine produces its own noise that can act like a drug. Movies, rap singers, news reports – all come tumbling out and cloud our minds with a surfeit of information.

It’s awfully hard to get away from this environment dominated by electronic devices. They make themselves indispensable to us. Getting along without them on any given day comes to seem like a thoroughly unacceptable deprivation.

But noise of this sort has profound disadvantages that we can too easily ignore. All-sound-all-the-time blocks the spirit from making its presence felt inside us. How can anyone cherish interior richness when there is always such din outside?

I realize that, for not a few people, the sound becomes a kind of white noise. It remains in the background of their consciousness, a presence hardly attended to. You can ask them what’s on and they might not have any idea.

For many, an environment marked by sound brings reassurance and comfort. For those left alone, especially, a talk show host can provide the sense that someone is there. At times when we need cheering up, we can all find support in music or a comedy routine that speaks to us. We all need to be distracted from ourselves from time to time.

Perhaps for those of us who have become addicted to noise it would be unrealistic to go cold turkey and shut off all our sources of sound. Going on a TV fast or a radio vacation might prove extreme. No longer would I want to keep silence for eight consecutive days, as I was required to do each year during the time of my spiritual training.

But shutting down television, radio, cell phone, computer and other noise producing devices once in a while could prove a relief. It could draw us away from the clamor of the world and enable us to confront ourselves.

More positively, it could introduce us to a whole new world, that of our own spirit. There we might taste a peace of soul previously unknown. This might not happen all at once but we might be taking the first steps in the garden of peace.

If we have a solid spiritual tradition to draw upon, it is not hard to find strong backing for such a move. In mine, the season of Lent is a time for making this kind of discovery. For Jewish people, the time of Yom Kippur provides motivation for moving in this direction as does every Sabbath, and for Muslims, Ramadan, recently ended, also offers rich incentives. And, of course, other great spiritual traditions such as those adhered to by Buddhists and Hindu offer their own rewards.

But those who do not relate to any such tradition, experimentation with silence can prove similarly rewarding. That helps explain why so many Americans love retreats, either the do-it-yourself variety or those organized by churches, monasteries and other established groups.

To practice silence is to strike a blow for freedom. It puts you on the pathway of discovery, revealing inner riches you did not realize you have. Talk with a friend who has just been on a retreat and almost invariably you will find out what a freeing experience it was.

But to taste some of this you do not need to go to a retreat house. You can stay home and find some of the same new freedom. If you dare to impose silence, for even a short time, on the noises that confine us as if with metal curtains, you may be on your way to a more satisfying experience of daily life.

Richard Griffin