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Going Home

I am far from home and have been gone for a long time. Soon, however, I will fly back home and be reunited with my family members. That will be a happy time but before then, I must clean up the rooms where I have been living. This task involves gathering together my possessions, packing up the things I wish to save and throwing the others out. I feel anxious about being able to finish this work on time before I must leave.

This first paragraph summarizes the most frequent of the dreams that I experience. Many other dreams (some of them shocking or humorous) come through my psyche at night but something like this one occurs over and over. Being away from home; planning to return; feeling under pressure to get things done before I can leave – – all of these features mark the typical fantasy that visits my unconscious during sleep.

It does not surprise me to experience this kind of dream.  After all, in my waking life, I have often lived away from home, notably during my two years spent in Europe. Even when living in my home state, I did so, for a long time, in monastic seclusion cut off from family members and friends. And not rarely did I have to deal with the pressure of moving from one place to another.

Also, metaphorically, as a longtime baseball player and fan and a current Sunday softball player, I know the allure of heading home. Although my stepping on home plate has become increasingly rare, I still relish feeling my foot touch that starting and finishing place.

A spiritual writer friend, Harry Moody, sees dreams as one of the ways by which we come into contact with our soul. Filled as they are with basic images of  reality, dreams can put us in touch with our deeper selves. “These images,” writes Professor Moody, “convey advice and messages to us while we sleep, appealing to our deeper need for both guidance and transcendence.”

My friend’s view of dreaming stirs in me sympathetic vibrations, and much of it is confirmed by my experience. At various points in my life, dreams have given symbolic expression to events going on in my life and to vital issues with which I was then preoccupied. I have found them valuable for the messages.

I must add one note of caution, however. Though dreams may prove exciting and enhance our fantasy life, it can be dangerous to take them as guides for living. Just because a dream may be gripping does not mean it should be the basis for important decisions.

That noted, my most frequent dream clearly points to something important in my inner life. It suggests a longing for home, a deep restlessness to return to the place where I began.  This dream tells me that “home is where the heart is,” and that is where I want to go.

Being ill at ease with where you are is a situation that always reminds me of St. Augustine’s famous phrase addressed to God: “You have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it finds rest in you.” In this perspective, nothing can satisfy human longing until the creature is united with the creator.

A verse from the Psalm 42, “As the deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you O God,” expresses the same desire. And the words I heard sung in Hebrew at a wedding last week: “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me” (a verse from the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible) suggest not only the longing that the bride and bridegroom feel for one another but the longing that seekers have for God.

The desire for God is itself a spiritual gift that can bring us closer to God. If we find material things ultimately unsatisfying, that is what many spiritual seekers have felt through the ages. Though these created realities  may have their own beauty and powerful attraction, they cannot fill the heart. God alone can offer complete satisfaction, not to say ecstatic completion.

Desire for God can be the foundation stone of one’s spiritual life. It can also serve as the engine and the content of our prayer. “You can go home again,” you can imagine God saying in open-hearted response.

Richard Griffin

Caring, Not Caring, and Sitting Still

“Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.”

These prayerful words come from T. S. Eliot, one of the most prominent poets of the 20th century. Born and raised an American, he later became a permanent resident of England. Characteristic of him, was a vision of the world and his place in it that were profoundly spirittual.

The poem from which the quoted words come is “Ash Wednesday,” a complicated but eloquent celebration of his Christian faith.

The balance between caring and not caring can be difficult for just about everybody. On the one hand, we must value our own life and we also learn to place great importance on our personal relationships, our possessions, and the beautiful things of the world.

Thus we care about our own bodies, our families and friends, our homes and their furniture, and many of the things we see around us or hear about from others.

And yet, on the other hand, every person is tempted to care about some things excessively, to his or her own spiritual harm. Marriages break up, and friendship shatter, often because of disordered caring about possessions or other human beings.

The spiritual tradition in which I was trained as a young man, namely that created by Ignatius Loyola in the 16th century, placed great emphasis upon what that saint called “indifference.” In one key passage of his little book “The Spiritual Exercises,” Ignatius said: “A person should be indifferent to all things and not wish for good health rather than infirmity, wealth rather than poverty, honor rather than dishonor, longer rather than shorter life.”

For him, the crucial task is to win the salvation and perfection or our own soul and everything else is secondary. Looking at life from this vantage point, spiritual persons should use things only in so far as they help them gain salvation and remove themselves from the things that endanger salvation.

This indifference is a combination or caring and not caring –  –  caring a whole lot about salvation and not caring about things that interfere with the spiritual health of the soul.

In this way I learned a form of detachment from things and even from other people. However, this austere way of living the spiritual life made me quite rigid; only with time did I learn to become flexible in applying this framework to daily life.

At my current stage of life, I now doubt whether the notions of indifference and detachment were good for me. These ideas perhaps required more maturity than I could muster when they were first presented to me.

I still find some value in these ideas. However, I now take them as rules of thumb rather than as commands. They are too abstract for my personality and tend to reinforce character traits that unduly limit spontaneity.

The parables of Jesus, the stories told by the Hasidic rabbis, and the anecdotes from the spiritual masters of the Far East warm my heart the way principles such as indifference and detachment can never do.

Mind you, many of the narratives with spiritual punch teach the same principles. But they do so with a human touch that is much more compelling for people like me.

“Teach us to care and not to care” remains a beautiful prayer, simple sounding but full of meaning. This attitude of soul is something we have to learn all of our lives. The prayer asks God to become teacher of this subtle spiritual art.

“Teach us to sit still” prays for another spiritual gift, the ability to do nothing. Meditation is a very respectable way of doing nothing because it occupies us in a receiving rather than a giving role.

In a hyperactive society like ours it is hard to stop for anything. Most of us must scramble to make a living, provide for our families, and maintain social contacts. Often we do not find time to just sit there and soak in the silence.

Even for those of us not pressed for time, we are out of the habit of just being there. Still, if we can ever find a short time, 15 minutes a day for example, using it for sitting in silence usually proves valuable. If we dare face doing nothing, it often pays off with an inner peace and quiet that can feed our souls the rest of the day.

Richard Griffin

Life Suddenly Changed

Certain days in our lives bring with them events that will mark us for the rest of our time on earth. This is the kind of dramatic event that arrived for me, some three weeks ago. My life will never be quite the same.

Shortly after one Friday midnight I awoke feeling intense pressure in my chest. I quickly became convinced that I was either then having a heart attack or was about to suffer one. Alarmed at the danger, I enlisted my wife to drive me to the hospital without delay.

Despite strong reluctance to pass even one night hospitalized, I agreed to be admitted, was quickly tied up to a heart monitor, and underwent tests to diagnose my problem.

For months previously, evidence for heart disease had remained unclear. No one had diagnosed clearly the reason why I so often experienced, on my daily walks, feelings of constriction in my chest.  

As soon as a veteran cardiologist at the hospital examined me, however, he was sure I needed a angiogram, whereby dye would be sent through the major arteries leading to my heart. Though I had always hoped to avoid this procedure, I was anxious enough about my condition to agree to have it done. However, I would have to wait until the following Monday, which meant a longer hospital stay than I had bargained for.

The angiogram began easily, with the wire inserted through the groin up to the heart. It quickly revealed blockage in one of the arteries. The surgeon then asked me which of two choices I wanted to make: bypass surgery or the implanting of a stent, or small metal mesh tube placed in the artery to hold it open for blood to flow unimpeded to the heart.

The stent was an easy choice because it could be inserted right then and there; bypass surgery, clearly much more drastic, would have had to be scheduled for another time.

I share these perhaps unwelcome details with the reader in order to suggest the impact on me of this sudden emergency. The revelation of having a serious heart problem shocked me into a more sober view of myself in the world.  

Now on the way to recovery, I feel myself to have entered into a new era in my life. “As you get older, life humbles you,” says my social worker friend, Wendy Lustbader. I have been humbled and now have a different self-concept as a result.

In addition to my native bones, muscles and other natural parts I now bear within myself an artificial product, a piece of technology. Though I am told the device will not set off airport alarms, I am eerily conscious of having foreign matter within my chest.

Up until two years ago, I never took any medication regularly. To me, it seemed an ideal to stay clear of prescription drugs and I believed that many other elders took too many. As a result of the new experience, however, I have become a walking drug store and take a pageful of pills every day.

I also prided myself on my low weight and my exercise disciplines. My diet, if not perfectly in accord with enlightened nutritional guidelines, was to a large extent free of junk food (with the exception of cookies, a longtime  insurmountable addiction.)

Though the oldest of six siblings, I considered myself to be the most healthy overall. My brothers and sisters had suffered some health problems that I had escaped. I qualified as something of a model elder at large in almost never having to spend a day in bed sick.

Now I have tasted vulnerability and I must continue to live with a vivid sense of my own mortality. Only by luck did I escape sudden death from a heart attack. During walks full of chest pain, I could easily have dropped dead. The intervention of a highly experienced cardiologist in response to my need for help has saved my life.

My expectations for the future have also needed trimming. The surgeon has told me that his work should bring me ten more years. Is that all? What about that online test I took two years ago that projected my living to 95.3 years of age?

However, the changes in my mentality are by no means all negative. I have gained a lively sense of the love that family members and friends hold for me. On hearing of my ordeal, they have all expressed concern for me and have rejoiced at my escape from mortal peril.

The care given to me by the hospital staff also makes me feel valued. Nurses, doctors, blood drawers and others worked hard to ensure my rescue and recovery. They have shown me that in a crisis, I can indeed count on the kindness of strangers.

I now feel a new appreciation for the wonder of ordinary life. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel once said: “Just to be is a blessing; just to live is holy.” Each day of life has become even more precious to me than it was before.

Richard Griffin

Writing Columns

Readers of this column frequently ask me where I find my materials. They also wonder if I worry about not having anything to write about.

To the first question, the short answer is – largely from my own daily experience. To the second, I usually respond “no,” except that I sometimes feel pressure when the time available for writing is short.

Running out of things to write about is impossible in a world so large and full of event and personality. This world is alive with action and interaction, and these motions lie ripe for picking. Every time I set forth from my house I open myself to encounters with the potential for reflection. And also when I stay home.

Becoming a columnist has changed the way I look at the world. Expecting to write each week heightens my inner sense of possibility and allows me to find meaning in events that otherwise would pass without my noticing them. Having this angle on the world drives me to sift an encounter with a friend whose name I cannot remember. A conversation with a stranger, as the two of us wait for a thunderstorm to blow over,has the same effect.

As too many people have already recognized, I can be a dangerous guy to talk with. My habit of taking interior notes on conversations often leads to publication. No wonder certain friends have taken to labeling certain remarks as off the record.

However, I take pains to protect privacy. Some columns have died in my computer without ever having seen the light of day. And I often disguise people or indicate that I am using pseudonyms if people have not given me permission to use their real names.

In my view, the best single benefit of writing is discovering what you did not know you knew. I resonate with Donald Murray’s provocative statement: “We write what we do not mean to write and find a meaning greater than we could have dreamt.”

For this reason I often think that almost everyone could benefit from writing. To me, it is like daily swimming or walking: both activities are so beneficial that I sometimes wonder why everyone does not do them. Physical exercise almost always makes you feel better about yourself and your world; literary efforts, no matter how modest or halting, can put you in better possession of yourself.

Heightened awareness brought by writing makes me alert to the drama in people’s lives.  If I had not inquired about the physical disabilities evident in a woman named Julie Favre, I would never have discovered how, when she was a student at Radcliffe in the 1970s, she threw herself from the roof of a college building, suffered severe and permanent injuries, only to discover God and an entirely new set of values and style of life.

Some columns write themselves inside my head. A chance event can provoke me to turn ideas over and over until their fuller meaning emerges. That happened one day when I was accosted by a person resentful of something written by a dear friend who happens to be a fellow columnist. By the time I arrived home, the column was ready to emerge from my head fully grown.

Like walking, swimming often stimulates good ideas. A few laps up and down the lane sometimes enable me to sort out ideas that were entangled and full of knots. And, of course, good writers stir me to develop my own ideas and ways of giving expression to them.

Readers often propose excellent topics. A July, 2001 column, for example, arose from two friends suggesting that I write about their fathers, both naval veterans of World War II. It led to a piece appropriate for Veterans’ Day.

Another reader suggested my visiting the house in Brookline where Jack Kennedy was born. This visit turned out to be fascinating in itself and, I like to think, interesting to readers. No one, however, urged me to write about my activities in opposition to the Vietnam War, writing that attracted a lot of grief for me.

Some readers have sent me documents that proved fine sources for columns. A young man, for example, who spoke at his grandfather’s funeral allowed me to use the list of maxims for finding value in life that his grandfather used to repeat. The old man’s daughter also shared with me her father’s account of his activities for the World War II resistance movement in France.

I have cited here only a few out of many other contributions that readers have made to my journalistic life.

One final confession: of late, I am tempted to include a deliberate mistake in each column. Finding errors wakes up many readers and, though they disguise it, they seem to enjoy catching me wrong. Perhaps I will add a “Find the Lurking Mistake” feature to each of my writings so that readers can stay entertained.

Richard Griffin

On the Windowsill

With the approach of summer, Phileas J. Fogg has taken up a favorite vantage point each morning, lying prone on the sill of an upstairs bedroom window.  This position gives him a fine opportunity to check the activities of other neighborhood cats as well as other beings, human and animal, as the area awakes to a new day.

What actually impinges most on Phil’s psyche, no one can say. Perhaps the call of the cardinal and the warbling of the other birds nearby strikes him more than any sightings. In any event, he often assumes more a meditative pose than a investigatory one as he lies there contentedly.

My own bet about what he experiences is more elemental. I would wager that Phil values most the touch of the soft balmy air currents on his skin. After the rigors of this past winter, he must love to feel the warm contact from the atmosphere, the way the rest of us often do.

Since last report, Phil has been diagnosed for diabetes, an ailment that frequently afflicts cats of his senior status. At first, the vet’s announcement came as a shock, an apparent death knell of our household member. Without insulin shots, Phil’s future seemed short indeed, and there was no way we could imagine ever giving such shots to this ornery beast.

But, if he is now terminal, it does not show. Of course, in the long run Phil is doomed to death like all other living beings. However, he does not allow  disease to cramp his life style unduly. He still moves with a tiger’s sudden speed on occasion and, like his other feline relatives, sleeps contently during much of the day.

The one noticeable difference in his habits comes from his new craving for water. Often he will leap from the floor up to the kitchen faucet hoping to slurp from its flow.  He will even poach on the water glasses of his masters, in our place settings at table. Recently he even indulged himself in a helping of black bean soup before his unvigilant masters put an end to this surprising theft.

Susan threw the rest of the soup out despite my making to eat it. She appeared horrified to envision me downing food that Phil had been into. But is he really any dirtier than we?  Would our eating what had become cat food do us in?

I am reminded of an anecdote from a niece’s childhood. She was once discovered to have been eating some dog chow.  When confronted by her aghast mother, the child confessed and promised not to do it again.

“By the way,” her mother asked, “how did it taste?” “Just like cat food,” her daughter answered.

Among Phil’s traits I most admire is his contemplative stance on the world. I actually feel envy that he can do absolutely nothing for hours on end. Why has he been given this gift and not I?

His stance reminds me of lines in T. S. Eliot’s 1930 poem “Ash Wednesday.” “Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still.” If only I had better learned sitting still. The balance between caring and not caring is another and subtler issue, suitable for longer discussion.

I often gaze into Phil’s eyes when he rests in his meditative mood and wonder about his inner life. Then the words of another poet, William Blake, always come to mind: “What immortal hand or eye / Framed thy fearful symmetry.” Of course Blake was talking about a tiger, but Phil qualifies as my tiger.

There are no escape attempts to report on here. Perhaps age has reconciled Phil to the vocation of the cloister. If given the choice at this stage of life, maybe he would even opt for the interior life of our house. After these many years, it is also his house by now, imprinted with his escapades and daily routine.

What I hope for this summer is many bright days. There is nothing Phil likes more than the play of the sun’s rays over the inner surfaces of our house. Perhaps this response to the light is to be expected in a contemplative. If enlightenment looms large in the world’s spiritualities, then Phil is in his element.

I often watch him respond to the rays as they come toward him when he lies on the master bed. He will roll over, seemingly in order to focus the sunlight to its best advantage. When, as happens too often, the morning clouds over, I grieve with Phil for the loss of the light.

I leave off here so as to go play with Phil. This I do despite my fear of having got the situation backward. When it comes right down to it, isn’t it Phil who is playing with me?

Richard Griffin

Father’s Day Homily

Bill Russell, an old friend and former colleague, has sent out a copy of his homily for Father’s Day. Now working in Kingston, Jamaica, this Jesuit priest is a person of unusual ability and special charm. His legion of friends, me among them, have come to admire his personal gifts, and I have wondered how he can be so attractive a personality. Thanks to his Father’s Day sermon, I now understand better. I would like to share some of it with a wider audience.

Father Russell recalls his father teaching him how to swim when he was hardly more than a foot tall. His father dipped him into a shallow lake, while supporting him with his arms under his son’s back. Like other young children first in this situation, the boy was terrified that he would sink, and balanced on the verge of tears. In soothing response, his father kept reassuring him that he would never let him go.

His father taught the boy his prayers, reading them from a printed card. The man also taught the child his catechism questions and answers, though he understood little of it himself, since he was not a Catholic. He took the lead in saying grace before meals, asking God’s blessing on the food Bill’s mother had prepared for her family. And, before Bill and the other children went to bed each evening, the father would bless each one of them.

While still a child, the boy was allowed to sit in his father’s lap in the driver’s seat of the family car, and turn the steering wheel and honk the horn. When Bill got his first summer job, at age 12 or so, his father informed him he had to give back to his family, to defray the family costs of  room and board, 25 of the 27 dollars that he was paid each week.

Years later, when Bill went off to college at Holy Cross in Worcester, his father gave him back all the money, and with interest, telling his son to feel free to spend it in whatever way he wished. As his father dropped Bill off at his dorm, he sat down on a bed and told his son how proud he was to have him in college. Even though, as he explained it, he would be paying one-fifth of his salary on one-eighth of the family, this father told this son he was worth every penny.

Bill’s father also drove his son to the novitiate in Lenox, Massachusetts, when the young man first entered the Jesuit community. In those days, 50 years ago, that meant almost total isolation from face-to-face contact with parents and other family members. As the son recalls, it was a highly emotional occasion for his father who “hugged me one last time as I waved goodbye from the seminary door, watching him wipe away the tears from his eyes –  the one and only time I ever saw him cry.”

When his wife died, Bill’s father told him there would be no stone to indicate her grave. She had been too frail to support a heavy stone, his father explained; in any event, she would not be there because “she would go straight to God.”

When his own turn came to die, the father informed his children that he had nothing left, all his resources having been spent on them. For his children, he continued to have the warmest feelings. “He was the one who was so proud of all of us,” says this son, “who spoke of us as if we were unbelievably precious in his sight.”

The preacher ends with a simple sentence from the heart: “I cannot begin to tell you how proud I am to be his son.”

Only twice in this homily does Father Russell use the word “God.” But he does not need to because he finds in the person of his own earthly father so much of what his spiritual tradition attributes to God.

The heart of it is unconditional love. The son recalls his father as a man who loved him without any hedging. This father was a giver of himself to others; in fact he  found his greatest gratification in spending himself for them.

Does this not suggest the divine Father for whom, in the Bible, lovingkindness is what distinguishes him most?

Richard Griffin

Though I Walk

To change ideas about oneself, there is nothing quite like a personal encounter with the danger of death. That was my experience recently when I rushed off to the hospital in the middle of the night.

I had awakened with constriction in my chest that suggested a possible heart attack. This sudden crisis climaxed months of walks and other daily activities made uncomfortable by similar physical pressure felt within my upper body. This time, however, it had happened when I was at rest and the discomfort was much worse.

At the hospital, the cardiologist diagnosed a heart problem and, two days later, he did an angiogram. This procedure quickly revealed a blockage in one artery, which the surgeon remedied by inserting a stent that would assure normal blood flow. I was released the next day and allowed to resume daily activities after another week.

This unemotional account of what has become a standard medical procedure, undergone by many other people, leaves out one moment of intense feeling. During the placement of the stent, the surgeon momentarily cut off the blood flow from that artery, thus subjecting me to the most agonizing pressure in chest and throat than I had ever experienced. For what seemed endless minutes, I felt desperate.

The whole experience has left me with a vivid sense of my own vulnerability. Feeling vulnerable is not new to me; it has always been present not far removed from my psyche. Having a disability from birth has no doubt heightened that perception and made it part of my inner life.

Before having the catheterization, I had signed the standard paper that allowed the surgeon to perform the procedure. Those documents I always find frightening because they list the terrible things that can go wrong. Signing it can feel like sentencing yourself to great grief for an indefinite future.

But facing the unknown, coping with threats to one’s life, and living with vulnerability are familiar parts of spirituality. These challenges call for responses from the deepest part of us. They put us to the test often bring out the best in us.

Another part of it is daring to trust. I did not know the surgeon personally. Though I did ask him some questions about his track record in doing the procedure, ultimately I had to trust that he would do his best and that his best would be good enough. This counts ultimately as trust in God because I envision God as present in the healing work of human beings.

For me, trust in God has long been a key part of spirituality. Starting in the third grade of public school, I used to recite the 23rd Psalm from the Hebrew Bible, with its focal lines: “Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for Thou art with me.” These words have continued to console me through the years as they did in my recent health crisis.

As other have discovered, hospitals are not places that are conducive to prayer. Through long hours of sleepless nights, I tried to meditate but usually found it impossible. I was physically uncomfortable and often assailed by noise from the busy nurses’ station.

Despite this failing effort at spiritual exercises, however, I did put myself in the hands of God and intermittently tried to discover the spirit within me. I also practiced the spirituality of counting on kindness. For me this means expecting the people who serve me as nurses, doctors, food-bringers, bed pushers, blood drawers and others to act in my best interests.

In fact, they were kind to me and amply justified my trust. Living a few days in the hospital remained difficult but the devotion of all these people made it much better than it otherwise would have been.

Though back at work and other accustomed activities, I see myself differently. On the one side, it is easier to envision my life ending, perhaps suddenly. On the other, life has become more precious to me. Even more than in the past, I value each day and its gifts.

I have been blessed by bodily repair and I look forward to further life enhanced by renewal.

Richard Griffin