Do the letters WWJD mean anything to you? To large numbers of people in America they hold an altogether special significance. You may see these four letters in-scribed on bracelets, rings, necklaces, key chains, and other items used by millions of Christians. Followed by a question mark, the letters pose a formidable challenge to these believers.

The letters stand for the question “What would Jesus do?” This is what many people, especially the young, have promised to ask themselves whenever they are about to make important decisions. These individuals take the presumed action of Jesus as their guide for doing the right thing, the loving thing, the heroic thing.

The WWJD slogan got its start in 1896 when Charles Sheldon, a Protestant minister based in Topeka, Kansas, published In His Steps. It’s a novel but one closely based on the real-life experience of Rev. Sheldon. Almost immediately, the book found extraordinary success, selling millions of copies in this country and being translated into 23 other languages.

The Sheldon novel tells about a minister in a mid-western city who receives a visit from a poor man who has no work and no place to live. The same man, in his early thir-ties, also interrupts the pastor’s Sunday church service and presents his desperate situation to parishioners. After speaking, the man collapses in church, is taken to the minister’s house, and soon dies.

Following this upsetting experience, the pastor proposes to members of his congregation that they adopt as their rule of thumb for all that they do the question “What Would Jesus Do?”

The novel goes on to tell how this principle of conduct transforms the lives of some individuals and has an impact on the whole city. For example, the publisher of the leading newspaper changes his journalistic approach so that he no longer includes reports of  prizefights and announces that the newspaper will stop issuing an edition on Sundays. Measures like these cause chaos within the newspaper company and lead to severe losses in circulation and advertising revenue.

Another establishment figure, Donald Marsh, the president of Lincoln College, breaks his longtime habit of standoffishness from civic affairs, gets involved in local politics, and, allied with other reformers, tries to oust a clique of self-serving office-holders. For his part, the minister decides to devote himself to the poor and erects a tent for people to gather in the most deprived section of town.

My route to the book was a college assignment given to my daughter. In a tutorial on American social thought, she studied the book and then urged me to read it. I did so with intense interest, even though I quickly came to agree with Ralph Luker who writes in American National Biography  that In His Steps is “a simple story with little literary merit.”

Though the book possesses a certain eloquence, I also found it to be quite dated in its tendency to moralize and editorialize rather than letting the action and characterization speak for themselves

But the main message of In His Steps still resounds in modern America. The WWJD approach shows surprising power when you consider the difficulties of applying this norm to a time and place so different from that of Jesus in the Palestine of two thou-sand years ago.

What started the current WWJD movement? Apparently it began in 1989 when a woman named Janie Tinklenberg, a  lay minister in Holland, Michigan, got her youth group  to read In His Steps and devised the bracelet idea that has proven so popular.

A prominent professional youth minister in the Greater Boston area, Bob Doolittle, has used the WWJD bracelet during one of his retreats. He tells me of the good ef-fects wearing the WWJD bracelet has had on at least one young man in his group. “When he makes a decision, he looks at it and it keeps him straight,”  reports Bob. “It’s like a prayer – it reminds him to listen to what the Lord is saying to him.”

According to Bob Doolittle, the recent high school graduate has drawn yet another benefit from the bracelet. “It helped him say ‘no’ to violence.” Not surprisingly, Bob says of the WWJD movement, “I like it a lot.”

Richard Griffin

“The kingdom of God is a reality that you can live every day. It is available to us; are we available to it?”

These are words of Thich Nhat Hanh, spoken by him last week before a large and receptive gathering in the Harvard University church. A thousand students and others came to hear this Vietnamese Buddhist monk with a wide reputation for spiritual insight combined with zeal to bring peace, inner and outer, to the world at large.

This is the man whom Martin Luther King nominated for the Nobel peace prize. He often receives some credit for the spread of Zen Buddhism in the United States, France, and other western nations.

Before his talk audience members, led by a monk from Maple Forest Monastery in Vermont, sang in order to induce a mood of calm and relaxation:

“Breathing in, breathing out.
I am blooming as a flower. I am fresh as the dew.
I am solid as a mountain. I am firm as the earth. I am free.”

Then a bell rang and we focused on our breathing, calming our thoughts.

When Thich Nhat Hanh appeared on the platform he was accompanied by some twenty Buddhist monks and nuns who showed forth the deep recollection that the master teaches. Familiarly, he is called Thây or the Teacher, a sign of the respect and affection that his followers feel for him.

In his talk, the Teacher focused on mindfulness as he outlined what its practice can do for both soul and body. Paying attention to one’s breathing, he indicated, is the way to become mindful.

“Every time you pay attention to your breathing,” he said, “something important may happen. We breathe all the time, but we seldom become aware.”

When you do become aware, “your mind comes home to your body, you are there fully present. We make the body and the mind one.”

According to Thây, this practice opens the way to great gifts. “It brings peace and happiness. You become aware of many wonderful things about yourself, inside and outside.”

This formula for happiness comes from a man who seems at peace with himself. Dressed in a simple brown robe, his head shaven, he stands before the microphone, his hands sometimes moving in and out of each other. Only the wisp of a smile appears at times, though he often mentions smiling as a product of mindfulness.

“There is no day I don’t enjoy walking in the kingdom of God,” the Teacher tells us. Then he goes on to tell us about various kinds of seeds that lay within our psyches.

“There is a seed of fear, of anger in our consciousness,” he explains. “There is a seed of stability, of love. There are energies that help us to be loving and compassionate.”

So, in his teaching, each of us has both positive and negative seeds. So does the one whom we love. “Do not water the negative seeds in her,” warns Thich Nhat Hanh. Instead ask, “How can I best love you, how can I best protect you?”

This approach, the Teacher assured listeners, brings another important value –  –  security. In his words, “When you have love, compassion, understanding within you, you will be safe.”

He shared with us an encounter with a woman terribly distressed over feeling unloved. “Your flower needs watering,” he told her. The woman’s husband also took in this message, changed his ways, and the situation changed from bitterness to peace and love.

At points in his talk, the teacher would ring a large gong and the sound would reverberate, calling listeners to renewed mindfulness. Responding to this ringing, another monk uttered a prayer: “May the sound of the bell penetrate the cosmos, even the darkest places.”

He then spoke of those, like himself, who are social activists. “We want to reduce the level of violence, but we must take care of ourselves. Every day, water the seeds of compassion,” he advised those working to change the world.

The Teacher advises a similar approach to depression. “Fear and emotion is us make us suffer,” he says, “breathing and meditation can help us calm down.” When compassion is there, you suffer much less.”

Robert Griffin

Until last July Darrel Buschkoetter had never flown in an airplane nor had he ever seen an ocean. He has spent his whole life, some forty years, on a farm in Nebraska where he and his wife are raising their three daughters.

Darrel’s wife Juanita was the main focus of a six-and-one-half hour documentary shown nationwide on public television’s “Frontline” last September. Written, produced, and directed by David Sutherland of Newton, “The Farmer’s Wife” proved engrossing at least to this viewer. For that reason I was delighted to meet Juanita and Darrel this week when they came to the Boston area for further showings of the television film.

“The Farmer’s Wife” details the struggles that this couple have had to make to preserve their way of life. Finances have been difficult for them as they work a 1,100-acre farm and attempt to hold their marriage together in the face of many threats.

Darrel Buschkoetter struck me as a person of quiet charm with a strong sense of himself. At the same time, he showed himself open to the new experiences which his tour of the East Coast is bringing to him and his family.

Of the three children I met only Whitney, the youngest. When I asked this seven-year-old what she liked best about the trip she answered “The Children’s Museum.” The oldest daughter, Audrey reads constantly, her father reports, and dreams about coming to college at Harvard.

When I asked Darrel about spirituality he replied with great conviction, making clear that it holds a high place in his life. Without prayer and religious devotion, he is sure that Juanita and he could never have surmounted their crisis and stayed together. In fact he wonders aloud how couples without the support of a strong spiritual life ever manage to stay married.

He and his family take part in Mass at their Catholic parish each Sunday. The three girls go to parochial school and religious practice is part of their daily life, with grace before meals a prominent feature of it.

When Darrel thinks about God he knows himself to be in contact with someone who is entirely good and completely well disposed toward him. To Darrel God is “really kind, a really good leader if you just follow in the right direction.”

He regards God as a father but he also finds that God is “sometimes more of a mother.” Darrel says that he could always talk more easily to his mother than his father, so that supports his personal theology.

Juanita, for her part, also prays regularly. She spoke beautifully about the experience. It added to the value of what she said that Juanita disavowed any special virtue as a religious person. “Sometimes I don’t know that I am a good Catholic,” she says.

She adds disarmingly: “I’ve heard that faith is what you have when you have nothing else left to turn to.”

I came away from this enjoyable and refreshing encounter with the Buschkoetter family rejoicing that their family and mine are not so different spiritually. We share the same basic faith, they in a rural setting, we among highly urbanized surroundings.

The Buschkoetters’ current experience of urban America has changed their ideas about their own country. Until recently they expected to find in big cities much evidence of crime and other social ills. But instead they have seen people in Washington, New York, and Boston, among other places, who have proven to share some of their own values.

Despite the benefits that have come to them as a result of  the film, they realize that life on the farm will probably continue to pose difficulties. Darrel told me that prices are currently the lowest they have been in forty years and that is putting pressure on farmers. They may have to face other crises such as those revealed in the film.

But they show a quiet confidence in God and in one another that  gives ground for hope. The widespread public attention they have received will fade with time but the benefits of their contact with the rest of America will presumably make a difference for them in the future.

I recommend seeing “The Farmer’s Wife” if it is shown again. It is a beautiful film, both in the views it offers of the Nebraskan rural landscape and also of one family’s life with all of its ups and downs.

Richard Griffin

The longest year of my life was 1963-1964, the one I spent in Wales. It stretched endlessly across the months because I felt so isolated, cut off from home, friends, and favorite activities.

The countryside surrounding St. Bueno’s College, the large house in which I lived with some forty other Jesuits, was indeed beautiful: the valley of the River Clwyd below, Mt. Snowden off in the west, and the North Sea a few miles in that direction. But the isolation combined with the austerity of our lifestyle got me down. I used to crave the arrival of the Royal Mail truck halfway through the morning, in hopes that a letter for me would be among its deliveries.

The memory of this place rushed back to me last week as I read a new book by one of my favorite spiritual writers, Frederick Buechner. In Part One of “Speak What We Feel” he writes about a Jesuit who lived in that same house in Wales where I spent that longest year.

That Jesuit was Gerard Manley Hopkins, regarded by scholars as either a great minor poet or a minor great poet of the English language. Hopkins was born in 1845. He became a Catholic during his undergraduate days at Oxford and a Jesuit priest a few years later.

In this latter role, he was largely a misfit, too eccentric for comfort in community living and too sensitive for dealing with normal people. Worse still was the way he felt about himself. As Buechner says, “Deeper down still and even harder to bear was his sense of alienation from almost everything and everybody.”

Ironically enough for my taste, however, Hopkins loved the three years he spent studying theology at St. Bueno’s, from 1874 to 1877. There he could relish the beauty of the countryside and indulge his peculiar appreciation of God’s creation. It was there that he wrote “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” his long elegy about some Franciscan nuns who perished at sea.

This poem, now much loved by many who have grown familiar with it, was pronounced incomprehensible at the time by Robert Bridges, a college classmate, one of Hopkins’s best friends and eventual editor of his writings. Bridges even made fun of the poem, which had been rejected by a Jesuit publication.

In a later series of poems, now referred to as his “Dark Sonnets,” Hopkins expressed deep feelings of abandonment. Though he had served God faithfully, accepting Jesuit assignments for which he was ill-suited and faithfully living the spiritual life, God seemed to have cut him off.

The poet speaks of hours of sleeplessness during the dark of night and then extends their meaning. “But where I say / Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament / Is cries, countless, cries like dead letters sent / To dearest him that lives alas! away.”

Here is a spiritual man who is experiencing the bitter taste of emptiness, of absence on the part of his beloved. He continues to try and communicate with God but it is as if his letters never arrive where they are addressed.

For anyone who has known the terror of the night, or worse still, the absence of God, Gerard Manley Hopkins can serve as something of a patron saint. In daily life, especially when he was teaching in Dublin during the last years of his life, he painfully felt himself the misfit, the oddball, that others thought him to be. To feel, on top of that, cast out of his relationship with God must have come as a crushing blow.

He died in 1889 at age forty-four, still unknown to the world that would later discover his poetic talents. The words written of him in a register maintained by the Jesuits are significant: “On the eighth day of June, the vigil of Pentecost, weakened by fever, he rested. May he rest in peace. He had a most subtle mind, which too quickly wore out the fragile strength of his body.”

His poetry remains perhaps a special taste; many will find it still strange now more than a century after it was written. But the spiritual life of Gerard Manley Hopkins can provide inspiration to anyone who has suffered feeling like a misfit and encountering mere darkness in the search for God.

Richard Griffin

What work of fiction sold the most copies in the United States during 2003? Why, The Da Vinci Code, of course. For the last 42 weeks this much discussed book has held a place on the New York Times’ list of best sellers and in 2004 continues to rank number one.

The author, Dan Brown, has enthralled many readers with his story of intrigue, mystery, and intricate scheming. However, the fascination that the book has roused in a wide reading public comes in large part from the writer’s use of organized religion and bizarre spirituality as the framework for his adventure.

Friends keep asking me what I think of the book, especially the author’s presentation of religion and spirituality. The simple answer to the latter question is “not much.”  

One must judge the book for its entertainment value, not for its supposed insight into spiritual reality. It should be seen as a work of the imagination, rather than as a narrative grounded in real-life religious history.

True, the Catholic Church, its history, some of its policies, and its priorities loom large in The Da Vinci Code. And a mostly lay order of men within the Church, namely Opus Dei, figures largely in the plot. But no one should attribute to the author, skilled as he is with fantasy, realistic insight into the workings of either institution.

Wildly popular as this book continues to be, it amounts to little more than fun. The writer is clever indeed, though personally I found his tale deficient in most of the qualities that make for good literature.

However, my purpose here is not to badmouth Dan Brown but to evaluate the parts of his book that touch on religion and spirituality.

The Catholic Church appears here as an institution full of vested interests, the chief one of which is preventing the truth about Jesus ever getting known.  That truth envisions Jesus as a mere man who married Mary Magdalene and who had a child by her. Instead of founding the Church himself, he entrusted that task to this Mary and enshrined around her a cult of the “sacred feminine.”  

The author imagines that a secret society was founded many centuries ago to preserve the secret location of the Holy Grail. Usually understood as the cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper, here the Grail signifies Mary Magdalene herself, the one who gives birth to the daughter of Jesus.

Another organization committed to keeping the secret from ever getting out is Opus Dei, the religious community sponsored by the Vatican. As a group of men who are pledged to support the church, Opus Dei stands ready to do anything, even murder, in order to prevent the church’s enemies from releasing the truth.

As the story unfolds, the Vatican decides to cut its support for Opus Dei, a move that changes the motivation of this community to discover the secret of the Grail. Now it will use the secret to protect itself against the Vatican, threatening to unveil the truth if the Vatican follows through on its threat to Opus Dei’s standing in the Church.

By contrast with myths like these, what is the reality? Of course, there is no historical evidence for either Jesus being married or his planning to put Mary Magdalen in charge of the church.

It is true that the Catholic Church has a dubious record when it comes to women. Though it extols the mother of Jesus and a great many female saints, it forbids the ordination of women and, by and large, bars them from meaningful roles in running the Church.

As to Opus Dei, it is an organization that does, in fact, have strong support from the Vatican. It also has a reputation for secrecy in its mode of operation.

Even more than the Church to which it belongs, this lay order has a reputation for being anti-feminist. Many Catholics, in so far as they know Opus Dei at all, also feel it to favor right wing policies both in secular and ecclesiastical spheres.

So I would never recommend this book as a good source for information about or insight into religion and spirituality. However, The Da Vinci Code may entertain you thoroughly and hold you in suspense during long winter’s nights.

Richard Griffin

Few books have had such a strong impact on me as did Elie Wiesel’s novel “Night.”  First published in 1958, this slim volume was as dark as its title, reflecting the near despair of a Holocaust survivor. As a young boy, Wiesel had seen his parents and sister die in Buchenwald, one of millions lost to Nazi beastliness.

This personal account of horror, degradation, and loss of faith in goodness personalized for me one of the major horrific events of the twentieth century. At the time I wondered how anyone who had undergone such an experience could ever recover any positive attitudes about human beings and believe in our capacity for doing good.

Recently, I wondered the same thing about Robert Jay Lifton, not himself a survivor, but a psychiatrist and scholar who has made a distinguished career studying human beings connected with the Holocaust, the Hiroshima atomic bombing, and other terrible twentieth century happenings.

His research has made this Brooklyn native famous in the field of psychohistory. For a long time he was based at Yale University, but now has become a visiting professor at Harvard Medical School.

In the course of a public conversation with Dr. Lifton, two weeks ago at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, I asked him about his experience. Would having talked to such people as Nazi doctors, Hiroshima survivors, and American victims of brainwashing in the Korean War have left him unscathed? Could he have salvaged any hope from his interviews with people connected to such terror?

Of those interviewed, he says: “I’ve always focused on survivors’ capacity for resilience.”  And he himself has taken from those contacts surprisingly positive results. “I categorize myself as neither an optimist nor a pessimist” he adds, “but somebody who continues to work and behave and live with hope.”

In reflecting on the history of the twentieth century with all of its terror, this scholar sees the human psyche as having been changed by this history. At the same time, certain abiding human values continue, no matter what.

“There is always a kind of interaction between enduring psychological characteristics,” he believes, “and changeable shifts that have to do with the forces of history and collective influences.” Among the continuing traits of human beings, he cites our need to nurture and be nurtured, for sexual expression, self-esteem, and the capacity to get along with other people.

Dr. Lifton sees the present historical moment as a time when we have lost clear cut guidelines and certainty about values. Thus it has become unclear how we should act at certain ages, and what to do in the face of knowing we will die. “We are struggling with dislocation,” he says, “and we’re also struggling with the mass media and the information revolution.”

This has made for a new situation that affects our psyches, creating the many-sided self. However, we also labor under the “more dreadful and threatening knowledge that we are capable of exterminating ourselves as a species with our own technology,” Dr. Lifton warns.

Reflecting on World War II, this scholar sees that titanic conflict still touching us now, especially those of us who came of age then. He calls the terrible Nazi genocide worked against Jews and others, along with the atom bombing of Japan, “the two pivotal events of the twentieth century.”  Those events continue to reverberate in him as reminders of our capacity for self-destruction. He also thinks they have a relevance to the current state of our country.

In his research on Nazi doctors, Dr. Lifton found them using what he calls “distancing,” the ability to inflict extreme violence on other people without feeling very much themselves.  This phenomenon amounts to a serious problem in our time, making it necessary for us “to make more clear to scientists, military people, doctors and others what their responsibilities are and how what they do affects other people.”

This scholar applies to elders what he has learned about survivors. Those of us in our 60s, 70s and beyond are survivors in two ways. We have lost many people known to us and we have also lost certain elements of our world as it used to be.  Survivors either shutdown or open out. This opening out means the capacity to take in loss and to move ahead. But to do that you must first allow yourself to feel the pain of the loss.

In answer to a question, Lifton finds it strange the way the events he has studied have all taken on a new and immediate relevance. So much of his work has dealt with apocalyptic violence, a subject that terrorism has raised anew. And he worries about our nation: “we have taken on something of an apocalyptic vision ourselves.

Asked how older people can share wisdom gained from long experience, Dr. Lipton answers forthrightly: “I think we should assert ourselves.” He believes electoral politics insufficient and urges elders to get involved in non-official organizations. “One has the right to articulate what we have learned.”

Richard Griffin

A physician friend has told me of a time when he was a young resident and responsible for the care of a woman, age 34, who was dying of lymphatic cancer. The patient had a 14-year-old son who was at the hospital waiting for news of his mother’s condition.

When the woman died, my friend had to inform the boy of his mother’s death. The doctor came to the waiting room and told him the sad news. The boy’s response was to punch the doctor in the face. As my friend told this story of something that happened many years ago, he seemed again to recoil from the punch.

Eventually the boy was able to sit down with the doctor peacefully and grieve with him over the death, so burdensome to both of them, though in different ways. For the physician, it represented a painful loss of a patient whom he had come to value as a person. For the boy, it meant being deprived of a parent whom he needed and cared about.

The story gives dramatic expression to an instinctive response toward death, especially when that death is of a young person and directly affects young people. The boy lashed out at a fate imposed on him while he was still vulnerable and even less able to understand than adults ever can why a person dies when still needed.

Though it may seem to violate spiritual ideals, this kind of initial reaction to the death of someone much loved testifies to value. The person whom we have lost to death is worth getting upset about. Not entirely without reason do we flail out at the fate imposed upon us. We may feel what the Earl of Gloucester, in Shakespeare’s King Lear, felt in his time of despair: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, / They kill us for their sport.”

Spirituality, of course, does not stop at this instinctive response to death. Rather, it tries to find meaning in the experience of dying despite what is often felt as an unacceptable assault on our human dignity.

But a sound spirituality cannot welcome suffering for itself. Certainly the Christian tradition gives no approval to a love for suffering. “It is not appropriate,” says a writer in a newly published spiritual encyclopedia, “to conclude  .  .  .  that suffering is to be welcomed or left unrelieved.”

In this tradition, at least, a loving God does not want his creatures to suffer but, in the mystery of the world’s freedom, allows it to happen as if reluctantly. That his son Jesus suffered so terribly gives Christians hope of finding some meaning in the experience of death. To discover meaning there, however, is a spiritual gift that no one can count on.

As I look back on the death of family members who passed on prematurely, the pain of their passage has lessened over the years. But the mystery remains: why were the days of my beloved nephew cut short when his presence meant so much to us all?

I no longer feel like punching someone in anger over that sudden death, though his absence still causes pain. It makes me take refuge in a spirituality that can accept what is not understood. This kind of spiritual stance toward the world can give some assurance to hearts that remain broken because of the death of loved ones.

At the same time, one cannot deny that death often inflicts harm on others that may never be repaired. My father’s death came at a time that left my mother vulnerable to anxieties that made the rest of her life terribly difficult. This unhappy effect made me mourn my father even more than I would have otherwise.

My efforts to find reasons for this death have never progressed very far. I still regret that my father did not live into old age. He had much to give that his family needed. But I do find in my spiritual tradition the continuing strength to accept what I do not understand, leaving it to God’s love.

The boy who punched the doctor has become a man long since. One can wonder whether, as an adult, he has perhaps discovered a spirituality that has enabled him to find in his mother’s premature death some consolation and even some meaning.

Richard Griffin