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A Friend Approaches Death

On entering the room, I began to weep.  For the first time in many years, I could not stop crying. The sight of my friend Jack lying on a bed, his eyes closed, his mouth open wide, and him obviously dying caught me by surprise. I had come to the Veteran’s Hospital knowing of his entering into crisis but I did not expect to see him this much changed.

Next to him in that narrow room stood a priest saying prayers that go with the Anointing of the Sick. Around the bed stood members of Jack’s family –  – his wife, their sons, and one daughter-in-law, all of them holding hands as they joined in the prayers and blessings. Seeing them stirred my emotions further, as I felt solidarity with them in our common loss.

My two companions and I, arriving late, were embraced and made to feel part of this community of shared grief. We extended our hands in the prayer circle and also received the priest’s blessing. He consoled us by saying how good it was to have other people with him as he prayed over Jack

The pity of it! The pity of it! Those words of Shakespeare welled up in me as I looked upon my friend of six decades. He was asleep so deeply as to seem already removed from the world. The disease that had worn him out was now breaking down his last walls of resistance.

It had been a long and agonizing struggle over the last eight years or so. Alzheimer’s, at first subtle in disclosing its presence, gradually took away Jack’s power to think logically and finally his ability to recognize old friends like me and even family members. In time he had become entirely dependent on others.

He had become lost several times, so lost on one occasion that a helicopter had to be dispatched to search for him. His profession had been lost too, a legal career in which he had shown much brilliance. Finally, he could no longer stay living at home.

What had stayed with him and even grown in power, however, was the love directed toward him by his wife, grown-up sons, and other family members. With courage and devotion his wife Penny had kept coming to see him and to attend to his needs, even when his responses were not identifiable.   

The old fashioned pool in which I swim every day  reminds me of Jack and our first week as college classmates. In those days, entering freshmen had to pass a swimming test in that pool, a feat I could not have accomplished since I could not swim at all. Sizing up my situation, Jack offered to take the test for me. With my connivance, he jumped in, swam competently up and down the lane, and posed as me until I was registered. Dubious ethically, this was an act of charity on his part that I still appreciate.

We had also been classmates in high school, two among the 21 boys who entered our new school in 1943. Jack was a far stronger student than I in math and science and so beat me out academically in our last two years. Instead of being resentful, I admired his all-around ability especially his excellence in analyzing  problems and solving them with confidence.

He finished his college studies in three years and then went on to law school where he continued to excel. After a stretch of military service, he did further studies in financial accounting, preparing himself carefully for his career in a prominent Boston law firm.

I provide these details, not so much for their own interest, but because they witness to the sadness of Jack’s decline. He was intellectually sharp, a person whose overall abilities and judgment stood out. To observe the relentless stripping of these native gifts has been terribly painful, as it is in all those who suffer from this illness.

When I saw him on his deathbed, I also recognized something of the fate that awaits me and everybody else. Only some of us will get Alzheimer’s, but we all know that death lies ahead. As the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins says, “It is the blight man was born for.”

I have always believed that death does not finish human existence. Faith in resurrected life continues to form part of my response to dying. I hope for Jack to live on in what my spiritual tradition calls a place of comfort, light, and peace.

But no matter what consolation I find in this faith, to see my friend dying was unutterably sad. My tears gave expression to a sorrow I could not express otherwise. I was about to lose an old friend and that loss cut into me deeply.

Richard Griffin

Food and War

For years, a truck filled with food has gone around the city where I live. On the outside of this vehicle are painted the words: “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint; when I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”

The truck belongs to an agency called “Food For Free” that purchases fresh fruit and vegetables, receives left-over bread from bakeries, and then distributes most of it at 40 centers where poor people come. Agency staff members also make home deliveries to some people who are unable to get out. In warm weather, staffers glean food from area farms and also take contributions from farmers’ markets.

The quotation on the truck comes from the late Helder Camara who was archbishop of Recife in Brazil. Physically small, but spiritually a giant, Dom Helder (as his people called him) was widely known because of his passion for social justice. I had the privilege of spending time with him on two occasions in the 1970s when he visited Boston.

The work of this spiritual leader, who died in 1999 at age 90, came back to me this past week as I joined others in celebrating Janet Murray, a woman who has spent many years working with  Food  for Free, serving the hungry people of our community. On the occasion of her recent retirement, those who have supported her came together in a local movie theatre to honor her for her service to the poor.

There is something spiritually uplifting being with people who reach out to others in need. For me it serves as a moral tonic to talk with fellow citizens committed to the least fortunate in the community. They strike me as what another writer has called “wisdom people,” those who have discovered how serving others makes for a fulfilled life.

Janet Murray, typically of her, seemed to be just one of us in the crowd. Unassuming, ready to give credit to others, she radiates love for family members, friends, associates, and people like me who had simply come by to do her honor. Again, contact with such a person serves as a strong stimulus to be more giving of oneself.

Two weeks  previously, on Martin Luther King Day, I had stopped by a demonstration outside our city hall to talk with people who oppose making war against Iraq. On possibly the coldest day of the winter, some 450 people were parading in a large oblong formation, many holding signs and calling out their reasons why this war should not be started.

“I wasn’t happy about going out in the cold, I hate the cold, ” 87-year old Boone Schirmer told me. “I’ve broken the same hip twice and I’m deaf as a post,” he continued, “but I’m glad I went.”

His wife, Peggy Schirmer, is a year older, walks with difficulty, and is suffering through the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. “When you get old, you are more limited,” she told me. “But you live within your limits.” She and her husband went up and down the line twice, she in a wheelchair.

I found inspiration in such courage on the part of old people. Of course, it helps that I share their misgivings about the planned attack. Taking my cue from the bishops in my spiritual tradition, I remain unconvinced about the moral justification for undertaking this military action.

The stark contrast between the preparations for war against Iraq and the plight of the poor among us at home struck me forcibly. Chad Cover, who currently serves as director of Food for Free, puts this contrast clearly: “We’re willing to spend 100 billion dollars to fight a war, but we can’t provide basic social services to the needy.”

Like many another public servant,  Chad Cover draws inspiration for serving the poor from the spiritual tradition in which he grew up. And that same tradition moves many of us to resist the war that may  be fought in our name.

Following the lead of Helder Camara, I long for the day when our nation devotes more energy to finding out why so many people here and elsewhere in the world have to scrape for food, and less energy to building up the Pentagon’s budget.

Richard Griffin

Maggie Growls

Of all the women I have met in my years of working with older people, none can quite equal Maggie Kuhn for personal dynamism. Big ambitions for changing society, willingness to defy convention, skill at manipulating politicians and media figures, courage in the face of physical decline – she had qualities of leadership that were altogether unique.

This physically small but soulfully impressive woman, who came to look like an ideal grandmother, accomplished a surprisingly large amount of her agenda. According to a new documentary on her life, “Maggie Kuhn changed the way we think about aging.”

Before Maggie, the film claims, “older people were not allowed to work, were not expected to socialize with people of other age groups, were not expected to have sex, were not expected to contribute to society.” Like other sweeping generalizations, this one cries out for qualification, but it bears enough truth to suggest what Maggie’s leadership meant.

Founder of the Gray Panthers, a name associated with militancy, Maggie Kuhn did not lack a sense of humor. In this spirit, she taught her followers how to growl. They were to stick out their tongues, turn toward another person, and make a deep sound from the throat. The new film shows an auditorium of people following Maggie’s instructions and growling with laughter.

A friend, Art Mazer, recalls another instance of Maggie’s humor when local Gray Panthers presented her at Boston City Hall. When introduced, Maggie had to rock back and forth a few times to get out of the low-slung chair in which she was sitting. Arrived at the podium she quipped: “That’s called the rock of ages.”

This film, entitled “Maggie Growls,” is scheduled for Boston-area showing on Monday, February 17th at 10 P.M. on the PBS channel 44. I recommend it for sheer human interest, and because the film recounts how one woman helped to change America in the period between her forced retirement in 1970 and her death in 1995 at age 90.

Maggie had radical ideas about how to improve American society. We needed to abolish compulsory retirement that put people on the shelf at 65. Our country desperately needed single-payer universal health care coverage. And we had to transform our basic ideas about older people and the experience of growing old.

A way of achieving this last goal was to help change the way older people were portrayed in the media. The “Media Watch” established by the Gray Panthers served for a time as an effective device to ensure change in television, movies, and advertising, change that has taken hold to a considerable extent.

It was not only her agenda that differed from most other people’s; so did her methods. She believed it a mistake for older people to push for change only with those of their own age. Rather, she wanted old people to join forces with the young.

Similarly, she thought old people should not advocate for changes primarily for themselves. Instead, she thought their advocacy would have much more credibility if they tried to bring about change benefiting the nation’s younger generations as well.

Despite her brilliance as a leader, Maggie was not successful in all her enterprises. Her organization, the Gray Panthers, never did turn into the alliance of old and young that she envisioned. I remember attending one national convention of the GPs, and immediately noting the absence of young people among the delegates.

And she never was able to develop effective leadership to direct the Panthers after her death. Even before 1995, her organization had lost its momentum and now has only a faint heartbeat. But it was never much of an organization; instead it was a movement with all the strengths and weaknesses of minimal structure. Never would it become an AARP, but Maggie would sooner have died rather than for that to happen.

And, of course, we still seem no closer to her goal of assured national health care for everyone. Even getting prescription drug coverage for Americans under Medicare has proven maddeningly elusive.

Maggie’s ideas about sexuality did not please everyone; in fact they shocked even many of the Panthers. She once recommended to an audience of older women the practice of lesbianism, and an embarrassed silence followed. She herself liked young men and once had an affair with one fifty years younger than herself.

When someone expressed to Maggie regret that she had no spouse or children, she replied, “I am completely happy with my life; I have no regrets.”

She suffered much pain in her latter days. I remember having dinner with her one evening and feeling some of that pain myself as I watched her eat with difficulty.

When the end came, she lay in bed in her house in Philadelphia. A friend watched her wake up, sit up in the bed and say “I am an advocate for justice and peace.” Then she went back to sleep and never woke up.

Richard Griffin

Lester Lee’s Grandmother

A friend, Lester Lee, has sent me a copy of a sermon he preached on January 19th, the Sunday before this year’s celebration of Martin Luther King Day. Professor Lee had been invited by the pastor of his church to deliver the sermon on this special occasion.

He entitled his sermon: “The Good Samaritan: Martin Luther King, Jr. and American Democracy.” The text makes me wish I had been there to hear my friend’s inspiring words, but reading them is enough to touch me with spiritual insight.

A passage that I find especially moving is one in which Lester Lee reaches back into an event in his early history:

“I know in my own personal life that I learned about being a Good Samaritan from my grandmother, Deaconess Earl Virginia Murrell.  One day when I was a youngster, walking with her through Central Square here in Cambridge, we encountered a beggar, a disheveled man, lying in a doorway.  I started to snicker at him.  But before  I could utter a disparaging word, my grandmother grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and shook me.  She said, ‘Don't you ever laugh at another human being.  He, too, had a mother and is a child of God.’  My grandmother had mercy on that man's misfortune and taught me the meaning of mercy.”

Now middle-aged, this man looks back over the decades and targets this incident as crucial in his outlook on the world. His grandmother taught him a lesson that he has never forgotten and continues to live by every day. It is a powerful lesson that goes smack against the temptation to look down on others less fortunate than ourselves. The woman’s words remain beautiful as they testify to the basic dignity of each human being as a child of God.

About the same time, I heard a report of a young teacher in a high school classroom, let’s say in Colorado, who played a similar role to my friend’s grandmother.

One of this young woman’s students said something in class that was derogatory about people on welfare. This boy suggested such people were lazy and undeserving.

Taking the boy aside, the teacher, only a few years older than he, pointed out to him how fortunate he was to belong to a family with adequate money and other resources. It was not his doing that had resulted in his life being so blessed but rather came from the gifts he had been given. The appropriate way to look upon people down and out, she suggested, was with compassion.

I felt buoyed up by this young teacher’s response and I feel glad to know about her intervention. She is a credit to her profession in delivering to an adolescent a lesson that may serve him well for the rest of his life. He is unlikely to learn anything more important in his high school career.

When I was a child, I remember being mystified by seeing people begging in Boston. How could it be, I wondered, that some people had so little while others had so much? What would my father do, as he and I passed a panhandler on the street? Feelings of awe still come over me, so many decades later, that the world remains so unbalanced.

Though large-hearted people will continue to try and right this imbalance, success will not come anytime soon. Meanwhile, the spiritual challenge remains to respect the God-given dignity of people who are dispossessed. Whenever we feel tempted to look down on them, we could not do better than to conjure up the image of my friend’s grandmother and the shaking she gave her beloved grandson long ago, from the scruff of his neck down.

And the young teacher’s lesson given to her student to set his values straight can remind us of our own need to recognize the dignity of others, no matter how reduced in circumstances they may be.

Only at our own spiritual peril can the rest of us afford to forget the call to compassion. When people poor in material goods and troubled in spirit come into view, it may be tempting to look down on them or even despise them for supposed shiftlessness. To give into this temptation, however, is to do harm to both them and ourselves.

Richard Griffin

Coughlin and the Age Lab

Joe Coughlin is full of provocative ideas. Talking with him, one soon discovers why the Age Lab at MIT has drawn the attention of so many people across the country who are interested in improving the experience of growing older.

Professor Coughlin founded this laboratory, a notable force for change, in 1999. He determined to bring together an interdisciplinary team of researchers and engineers in fields as disparate as health sciences and aeronautics in order to better the lives of older people.

Coughlin came to the field of aging through his work with transportation issues. He realized there was a major “infrastructure or mobility gap” between the needs of older people to get around and their available choices. After all, 70 percent of the American population live in the suburbs, but many older suburbanites have no access to transport other than the private car.

This situation highlights the contrast between our brilliant success in achieving greater longevity on the one hand, and our failure, thus far, to ensure that older people have the mobility necessary to ensure their quality of life.

In his own research, Coughlin is trying to “develop new business models that respond to the demands of today’s and tomorrow’s older adults by seamlessly integrating technology and consumer services.” This brings him into collaboration with major companies in the United States and abroad as they enter into partnerships with the Age Lab.

Already, the Age Lab, working with these industrial partners and service agencies, is developing some promising new products. In the course of a recent interview, Professor Coughlin singled out several:

  • A device, either handheld or for the shopping cart, to provide personal information about healthy diet, appropriate exercise, and prescribed medications, to help people choose among products in a grocery store;
  • A warning system in automobiles for left-hand turns. These turns –  -requiring judgments about speed and distance –  – are the number one causes of accidents among older drivers, with men better at judging speed, women at estimating distance;
  • For drivers suffering from dementia, their family members, and caretakers, the Age Lab has co-sponsored a guide developed by The Hartford Financial Services Group and designed to prepare those drivers for phasing out operating a car altogether;
  • An electronic data system that will enable people to make a daily check-up on their health. The technology already exists; the challenge is to figure out a system for professionals to respond at the other end.

Trained as a political scientist, Coughlin considers his studies to be a fine preparation for dealing with the problems of later life. “I don’t question whether or not we have the technology for fixing many of these problems,” he says. “What I question is whether society is organized in such a way as to be able to do so.”

He rates MIT’s chances high because it is accustomed to looking ahead boldly. “The real gift MIT gives any problem: it’s not afraid to be innovative.” But technology, as he sees it, is often not the issue. What he calls “the value-added part” is. Coming up with a new widget is easy compared to getting it wanted, marketed, and accepted.

For this, you have to better understand the user. Coughlin is convinced that the baby boomers will demand better-designed goods and services. If a product does not work easily, they will rightly blame the designers rather than themselves, the users.

The lack of effective technology can be seen as part of the reason why so many older people are cut off from the larger community. “Society cannot afford to have 20 percent of its people disengaged,” Coughlin says. They should be demanding a place at society’s table and they would enjoy better health if they did so.

On the contemporary scene, communities are changing. They are now being defined not so much by geographical proximity as by shared interests. The Age Lab director sees new life-long learning opportunities in the future.

The Audubon Society and the Sierra Club, for instance, could provide distance learning for the many people interested in gardening. More people should live near college campuses and every high school should be turned into a community learning center. Staying involved, learning constantly, can add vibrancy to people of just about any age.

Getting new products on the market for people of any age is time consuming. Just to get anti-lock brakes into cars sold in the United States took 17 years. Ideally, it would be advisable to get to utilize products useful in old age before that time comes. No mobile person is going to buy a wheel chair at age 40 but there are other devices, such as the microwave oven, that are useful both early on and later on.

The question of assisting older people to find meaning in their lives is complex but technology can definitely help. “Everyone has to find his own meaning,” Coughlin asserts. “The role of technology is to open the doors.”

Richard Griffin

Islam and the Human Body

“It is important to emphasize here that the attitude, so prevalent in the modern world, that a person’s body and life are his or her own to do with as he or she pleases is totally alien to Islam. Our bodies and lives are not our own; they are God’s.”

These bold words come from a book so new it bears the copyright 2003. The volume carries the simple title “Islam.” Its author is a Muslim scholar, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a native of Iran who studied at Tehran University, MIT,  and Harvard. This distinguished religious thinker is now University Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University.

The Muslim view of the body flies in the face of many modern American ideas. “My body belongs to me,” we say, “and I can do with it what I wish. It is my business alone if I choose, for instance, to undergo expensive and painful plastic surgery to make my face look pretty.”

Many modern Americans suffer from an unfavorable body image. We are dissatisfied with how we look in the mirror and brood about physical defects, real or imagined. Focusing on what we see as shortcomings often undermines our self-esteem. The Muslim teaching about the body as belonging to God suggests a reason for adopting a much more positive view of our physical selves.

Professor Nasr must be painfully aware that what he says applies to the suicides carried out by terrorists and other militants, so many of them Muslim. In another passage, in fact, he explicitly mentions suicide “which is forbidden by Islamic Law and considered a great sin.”

Thus he would absolutely reject the claim made by a few militant fellow Muslims trying to justify the suicidal attacks of the terrorists on September 11, 2001. What these men did cannot be judged as being in accord with their Islamic faith but instead goes directly against its teachings.

Similarly, this scholar would brand as violations of the Muslim religion the attacks in which some Palestinians blow themselves and others up as part of the current intifada or violent uprising against Israel. However heavy their grievances, these people cannot claim the backing of their faith for killing themselves in this way, and certainly not for killing innocent civilians by any means.

One often hears mention of the Arabic word “jihad” used to justify such suicidal attacks. Almost always the word gets translated as “holy war” but Dr. Nasr calls this a mistranslation. The word really means “exertion in the path of God” and has a profound inner meaning that most non-Muslims know nothing about.

Outwardly, Dr. Nasr explains, jihad allows people to defend their homeland or religion from attack by legitimate means. But inwardly, on a deeper level, “it means to battle the negative tendencies within the soul, tendencies that prevent us from living a life of sanctity and reaching the perfection God has meant for us.”

Understood in this sense, jihad has a central role in the life of Muslims. Dr. Nasr refers to a saying of Mohammed in which the Prophet calls this latter use of the word “the greater jihad” because it amounts to “vigilance against all that distracts us from God.”

Islam’s teaching about the body belonging to God and human beings not being free to abuse it is reminiscent of the New Testament’s teaching on the same subject. In the First Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul writes: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price.”

This way of thinking about our bodies presupposes seeing ourselves as God’s handiwork. This amounts to a radical point of view that considers everything human as flowing from the creator. It means considering our physical selves as sacred. It smacks of what Rabbi Abraham Heschel once said: “Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.”

Thus, great spiritual traditions challenge us, not only to resist abuse of our bodies, but also to be deeply respectful of our physical selves. Yes, our bodies  frequently are the source of pain and other afflictions.  But, despite this reality, Islam, along with Judaism, Christianity and the world’s other spiritual legacies, prompts us to look upon our material selves as sacred and holy.

Richard Griffin

On Not Knowing

A story is told about Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), the English man of letters who wrote newspaper columns as well as essays, novels, and poems. In 1909, he was invited to give a talk to members of the London Times book club. After the talk, his admirers in the audience hurried forward to speak with this literary celebrity.

One of them, a woman, gushed: “Mr. Chesterton, you seem to know everything.” “No, Madam,” the great man replied. “I know nothing. I am a journalist.”

This reply gives me some solace for my own ignorance. Being a journalist does in fact offer me a fine perch for appreciating how little I know. As I move from one topic to the next, week by week, opportunities arise for realizing the vast extent of my nescience, if you will allow me knowledge of a somewhat pedantic Latinism meaning “lack of knowledge.”

According to the Chestertonian standard, journalists have got a head start over other people. We can glory in our superiority by reason of not knowing a whole lot more than do our friends and acquaintances. So, if you often find ignorance in this column, please take it as a strength rather than a weakness.

I have often fantasized about being suddenly dropped, like a dead weight, back into the 13th century. Were that to happen, I could dazzle people of that era by telling them about all the marvelous modern inventions we have in the 21st. Hearing of computers, airliners capable of traveling around the world, cell phones (with the social nuisance they often cause), television, indoor plumbing, plus thousands of other devices, would surely stir them to wonder.

But, if these people of the 13th century took the next logical step and asked me how these technologies are made, I would suddenly lapse into uncomfortable silence. The shocking fact is that I know practically nothing about how they work. Like most other people living in this modern age, I remain ignorant about almost all of the marvelous inventions by which my contemporaries and I live.

The advance of years has brought me an increasingly deeper awareness of ignorance. One great difference has come with this increase, however. Unlike my condition when younger, I now feel free to admit ignorance. At last, it does not bother me to face the vast sea of what I don’t know.

Of course, there is a subtle irony about this situation. The irony lies in the way in which acknowledging ignorance comes close to wisdom. Knowing what you don’t know means that you are advancing toward this virtue, so long associated with the aged. By this standard, some of the people who are aware of their ignorance are the wisest.

My doctrine on not knowing, however, should not be understood as a failure to appreciate learning. Learning something new is one of the best remedies for what ails us, whenever we get down on ourselves and the world. In fact, I love to learn and always recommend it to people at every stage of life.

One of the continuing pleasures of my life is to meet young people who are discovering new fields of knowledge and finding joy in exploring them.

When you get older, learning becomes a somewhat different experience. You do not run the risk of becoming prideful because, by this time, if you have any sense you have learned how much you do not know.

The highest form of not knowing is, of course, not knowing God. As the French social activist Madeleine Debrêl once provocatively wrote: “Faith is the knowledge of our basic ignorance.”

The way of negation, of approaching God, by denying in Him everything merely human, is a time-honored kind of theology. “My ways are not your ways,” says God to the people of the Hebrew Bible, words that the New Testament would surely endorse also.

Though God must inevitably be described by the use of human language and imagery, still the spiritual traditions of the world are at one in denying that we can ever capture God in our words. Theologians who know too much about God are not to be trusted.

No wonder that the distance between belief in God and atheism is so narrow. Serious believers and atheists have more in common than they commonly realize.

Richard Griffin