Category Archives: Articles

Jimmy Carter, Peace Prize Winner

What are the most important realities in life? According to Jimmy Carter, the right answer can be found in the words of St. Paul. These realities are the spiritual things that cannot be seen. The former president lists justice, humility, love, and compassion among the unseen qualities that make human life precious.

This was his comment in response to the announcement last week about his winning the Nobel Peace Prize. In the midst of his fellow townspeople of Plains, Georgia – – all 637 of them it seemed – – he was shown on television celebrating the news. Despite his having been honored numerous times previously for his work in bringing peace to various parts of the world, this recognition of his efforts came as especially sweet.

Asked on television to comment on the award, historian Douglas Brinkley said of him: “Jimmy Carter does not wear his religion on his sleeve, but in his heart.”

Zbigniev Brezinsky, his former national security advisor, spoke in admiration of the way Jimmy Carter, when president, “combined the spiritual dimension with the use of power.”

Another commentator, columnist Thomas Oliphant, said that “hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, are alive today because of him.”

According to the Nobel Committee that chose him, Jimmy Carter’s brokering of the accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978 could have won him the peace prize by itself. That mediation brought about a peace between those two countries that has endured through many crises, although it is seriously threatened today.

After retirement from the presidency in 1981, Mr. Carter has traveled to far sections of the world, in the cause of peace. His work of conflict resolution and election monitoring in Ethiopia, North Korea, Bosnia, Sudan, and Uganda, among other places has won him the world’s admiration.

To each site he brings the prestige of a former president along with an ability to listen to all sides. The charm of his famous smile also must win him friends who see in him the power of benevolence.

Some consider his greatest achievement in this era to be persuading the military junta in Haiti to step down, thus saving that small nation a bloody confrontation involving United States military forces.

So this is a man eminently deserving of the world’s most honored peace prize. The only question about it is why it was so long coming.

What strikes me as deserving of attention is not only the scope of this man’s achievement, astounding though this certainly is. But I like to focus on President Carter’s motivation. He is a man who lives by the spirit. His religious heritage continues to be the most important force in his life.

Carter is not simply a do-gooder. His service of others gives every evidence of coming from a deeply rooted love of God and other human beings. Steeped in the Bible and the teachings of his Baptist tradition, he believes in using his personal gifts for the benefit of others. His is a classic spirituality that sees in other people other Christs and gives highest priority to their service.

At a press conference in Orlando three years ago, I had the opportunity to see him answer questions from journalists interested in the subject of aging. I also asked him a question of my own, about whether, with the advance of years, his ideas of God had changed.

In response, he indicated that his ideas had indeed changed and he went on to talk more broadly about his spiritual life. Having taught Sunday school since the age of 18, Carter reflects on the teachings of his faith. As he approaches the end of life, he thinks more about the hereafter. “Members of my family,” he noted, “have approached the end of life with a very healthy attitude, with a sense of humor.”

He then added: “I think that whether or not we believe in life after death, we do have to face the prospect of what we’re going to do in our final days, how we’re going to be a blessing instead of a curse to the people we leave behind.”

As the Nobel Peace Prize confirms, Jimmy Carter has already been a blessing to a whole lot of people.

Richard Griffin

Older and Younger Together

At the end of a lecture I gave last week about ministry to older people, a member of the audience asked me how he could promote better relations between the younger and the older members of his religious community. He belongs to a Catholic order in Peru where he will be returning after his theological studies here.

To hear him tell it, men of different generations within his religious household have trouble communicating with one another. They experience a fair amount of tension because of differing outlooks and values. He would like to find a way of easing those tensions and opening hearts among older and younger members.

Like many questions posed in public, this one was difficult. Anyone can ask a question that I cannot answer. And what do I know about religious communities in Peru?

Making a brave effort, however, I shared with him my own experience of living in religious communities in a past era when tensions between generations had grown large. It was a time of great change in the church and many older men felt their values and way of life under threat.

I remember one older colleague who, to my consternation, literally would not exchange a single word with me during dinner. If I had asked him for the salt shaker, he would not have passed it to me. Such was the degree of bitterness he felt about people like me who favored changes so threatening to him.

I never did find a way to deal with such divisions within my community, nor did anyone else. Only the passage of time eased the problem as new outlooks gradually took hold and the younger generation grew older.

Since that time, I have learned some approaches to older/younger relationships that may promote mutual sympathy and understanding. Sharing these approaches with the questioner, I hoped he could act as a bridge between the two age groups in his community.

For young people, I suggested, the challenge is to come to grips with their own aging. Though it is extremely difficult for young people to imagine themselves as old, they might try to make this spiritual leap. Doing so would require them to come to grips with their own aging so as to enter with empathy into the experience of people grown old.

For young persons to enter into the experience of the aged might mean: 1) realizing that wealth, success, achievement, – welcome as they are – do not define human life; 2) seeing their own life and aging as a gift; 3) regarding old people, not as a race apart, but as their future selves; 4) recognizing that someday disability and dependence may loom large in their own life as it does with so many older people now; 5) allowing that God may have special gifts in store for them when they get old.

These would be ways for younger people to find the older person in themselves. Another approach might be to see the young self in the old man or woman. Often young people act as if they think the older person was born old. They do not realize how some people, now aged, still still think of themselves as young.

Of course, in looking for the younger person in themselves, all older people have the advantage of actually having been young. They do not have to rely upon imagination to know what it is like; they can remember.

However, it may still require spiritual power to understand how being young now differs from being young two or three generations ago. The year 1940 and the year 2002 show more than a few differences between them. The challenges and opportunities of contemporary culture are not the same as people now old once faced.

Their challenge is to bring empathy and love to younger people and take an interest in the generations that have come after them. Older people who can identify with young men and women in a disinterested and loving way will almost surely find in younger generations a precious source of renewal and revitalization.  

So, ideally, the problem posed by the questioner after my lecture calls forth a spiritual approach. It may require a revision of attitudes and values that will enable older persons to find the hidden youth in themselves and, in turn, for younger persons to discover in the aged their future selves.

Richard Griffin

Morning Has Broken

Sometimes, in later life, the simplest activities bring the most pleasure. An early morning walk on a crisp fall Sunday, for example, delivers satisfactions for both body and soul.

I pass through my front gate just after seven, the only householder to be up and out. All the neighbors are still sleeping, it seems, their cars keeping vigil for them on the street. On one bumper, scrunched together, several weighty slogans catch my eye: “Stay Human.” “Question Assumptions.” “Save Tibet.”

The first hours of the new day have a clarity about them unique to 7 A.M in early October. As I walk, the sun’s rays slant across the streetscapes, illuminating everything in sight. Each object emerges sharp in the light, with borders clearly etched. Subtle shadows shade parts of buildings, providing a delicious chiaroscuro in black and white.

The color blue holds total command of the sky, the way it will almost surely not by afternoon. No clouds yet dare spoil the splendor of the world above, a purity I want to hold on to.

Morning has broken, as the folk singer once called Cat Stevens used to sing. The world does indeed look like a new creation, fresh from the Creator’s hand. Even things made by humans look renewed in this hour.

As I follow my accustomed path through parts of the neighboring university, its structures stand out eloquently. Two rhinos, formidably sculptured in tarnished bronze, stand stolidly at the entrance to the biological labs.  

The multi-storied psychology building, soars in white stone far above my head, a temple to pure reason. The museums that I pass mix light and dark in unaccustomed formulas. Off to my right, the slender spire of the college church, sparkling white, reaches for the sky.

As well as sights, my route offers delicious sounds. Not yet ready for songs, the birds chirp to one another and, perhaps, to me. They almost have the field to themselves, the usual noisemakers – cars – being few at this early hour.

Nor does human chatter distract me since few people have yet appeared, no cell phones either. And, thank heaven, no one drives by with his car radio blaring rap.

Passersby, if any show up, may greet me now more than at other times. We walkers are few enough to appreciate the wonder of other human beings’ existence. It’s almost as if we were alone in the big world and free to be amazed that additional persons also inhabit this place.

Students nearby in their thousands will sleep for hours more, with no regrets for missing the best part of the day. Instead they have cheerfully reversed the order of nature, turning day into night and night into day. When they greet one another with the words “What’s up?” as they invariably do, the answer must be: “Not me, at this hour.”

I relish the silence and feel grateful for interior space and reflection. Musing about the week, I cherish the hospitality of former colleagues, two nights before. Also thoughts about faith from Anne Lamott, a quirky author newly discovered, amuse and inspire me. And columnist Tom Friedman’s views of America’s future stir me to wondering where we are heading as a nation.

But thinking takes second place to feeling. Now is a time to swing one’s arms, as I do, and set a brisk pace. Inner peace, punctuated by moments of elation, powers my walk. Sunday is my favorite day of the week, the day when I practice leisure.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel was right in finding the beauty of the Sabbath precious, and Huston Smith in lamenting its loss in the modern world.

I look forward to worship at the end of my walk. Then I will join with others, old and young, in rites familiar to me since childhood. Reciting the ancient texts will bring to my spirit the peace and joy stirred up by sacred words and mystical thoughts.

Even when the liturgy feels perfunctory, as it will today, and the celebrant’s style casual, even slapdash, I will have started the day right. Though this preacher knows no more than I when or how his sermon will end, God will have provided.

This day will bring further welcome events. Another meeting with members of the faith community, this time over coffee and cake; my weekly softball game with its never-failing joy of friendly competition ; a televised slice of the Patriots’ game from Miami; a reception for fellow writers who have published new books this past year; and a delicious dinner with family members.

The walk indeed turns out to have been the start of a fine day. Typical of Sundays spent in my 75th year to heaven, this one may not have had everything but it had a whole lot. The beauty of the world, physical and spiritual exercise, community, family – is it the passage of years that makes these goods feel more precious than ever before?

Richard Griffin

Elder Abuse

In this season’s first episode of NYPD Blue, a television series of which I have been an off-and-on fan, a woman in her 80s is carried out of her apartment building on a stretcher. She has been assaulted by a young man whose brutal crime disgusts even hardened police detectives. The brief sight one gets of her is upsetting: she is covered with bloody bruises and looks comatose.

This scene, with its evidence of a terrible attack on a defenseless old woman, has reminded me how widespread elder abuse has become. I find the subject painful even to contemplate, the reason why I have not written about it before now. But a talk given last month at a week-long seminar for journalists has raised my consciousness of how a great many older Americans suffer abuse at the hands of other people and the need for the public to become aware of it.

The seminar speaker was Robert Blancato, who now serves as president of the National Committee to Prevent Elder Abuse. He knows the way Congress works because, for more than ten years, he staffed the House Select Committee on Aging.

In testimony to the U. S. Senate, Bob Blancato put the number of elder abuse cases nationwide at almost 500 thousand. Of these, 15 thousand were alleged to have taken place in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. But these are only the reported cases; he estimates that the total number could be five million, because eight out of every ten instances go unreported.

Blancato supports the “Elder Justice” legislative proposal introduced by Senator Breaux that would strengthen and reorganize federal efforts to fight abuse. This proposal aims at establishing dual offices of Elder Justice, one at Health and Human Services, the other at the Department of Justice. These offices would coordinate efforts on various governmental levels and also strengthen protective services around the country.

Most elder abuse – physical, sexual, emotional/psychological – comes from family members, many of them caregivers of the person abused. Financial exploitation, neglect, and abandonment are other common forms of offenses against older people.

Women are more likely to be mistreated than men. Those with ailments like Alzheimer’s disease that make them more vulnerable, suffer more abuse than others. Spouses who have had a history of struggling with their partners for domination by violence, threats, or other tactics may turn to other forms of abuse.  Experts describe many such cases in the phrase “domestic violence grown old.”

In Massachusetts we are fortunate to have an effective protective services network with more than two decades’ experience. Among its features is a legal requirement for doctors, nurses, social workers and other professionals in the medical and helping fields to report evidence of elder abuse.

The easiest way for anyone to get help is to contact the state office responsible for elder services at a hotline open 24 hours, seven days a week: 1 800 922-2275. But you can also call your regional home care agency (known as an ASAP – “Aging Service Access Point”) or local council on aging. The social workers who respond to requests for help I have found to be caring and sensitive in emotionally complicated situations.

One such protective services social worker to whom I talked for this column is Gavin Malcolm of Somerville-Cambridge Elder Services. In responding to instances of abuse by family members, he and his colleagues exercise prudence. “We try to utilize the least restrictive intervention possible,” he says. Each scenario is different and requires sensitivity.

Often, the pressures leading to abuse can be much relieved by providing additional support to the family caregiver, Malcolm explains. Often the latter does not know about adult day care centers, for example, or assisted living alternatives. Helping a spouse or other family member connect with outside assistance can improve the situation greatly.

It is rare, Malcolm reports, to find the abuser sadistic. Much more likely  are cases like those in which the adult son or daughter of an elderly father with Alzheimer’s punches the elder, pushes him down, or threatens him with nursing home placement. Obviously, in a situation like that, the caregiver may be suffering an overload of stress and need help rather than condemnation.

Adam Kramer, a spokesman for the Executive Office of Elder Affairs, agrees with national experts in saying “clearly elder abuse is an underreported crime.” He shared with me two of his agency’s new programs designed to detect financial exploitation, a form of abuse that the protective service network has become more aware of lately.

The first program is a bank reporting project whereby tellers are trained to recognize efforts to take advantage of an elder’s money. Suspicious signs include unusually large withdrawals or special nervousness on the part of a companion.

The other is a money management program that can help forestall chaos in elders’ finances making them an easy target for chicanery.

If how we treat our elders is one gauge of a healthy society, then protecting them against abuse surely deserves high priority.

Richard Griffin

The Rescued Alaskan

In her book “Traveling Mercies: Thoughts on Faith,” the writer Anne Lamott repeats a story that she calls old but is new to me. It centers on a rugged individualist who gets drunk at a bar someplace in Alaska.

“He’s telling the bartender how he recently lost whatever faith he’d had after his twin-engine place crashed in the tundra.

“‘Yeah, he says bitterly. I lay there in the wreckage, hour after hour, nearly frozen to death, crying out for God to save me, praying for help with every ounce of my being, but he didn’t raise a finger to help.’ .  .  .

‘But,’ said the bartender, squinting an eye at him, ‘you’re here. You were saved.’

‘Yeah, that’s right said the man. ‘Because finally some goddamn Eskimo came along.’”

The punch in this story, as I reflect on it, comes in the way the fellow misses the point altogether. His ugly expletive about the person who rescued him, betraying racial prejudice as it does, gives further emphasis to the man’s obtuseness.

The point, of course, is that God did answer his prayers for help. The God to whom he turned for rescue from the ruins of his plane responded appropriately. But the injured man was spiritually so dumb as to miss the hand of God in his release from a life-threatening predicament.

In some ways the story evokes the parable of the Good Samaritan in the New Testament. There St. Luke tells of a man lying wounded on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. The similarity comes in that the rescuer of this man, too, was of a racial identity normally unacceptable to the man saved. In the Gospel story, however, there is no indication the man lying in the road fails to recognize the hand of God in his rescue.

The other chief point in the Alaskan story goes beyond the fact of God’s response. It lies in how God answered the pilot of the crashed plane. God responded to the man’s pleas for help, not by anything heavenly, but by the arrival on the scene of another human being.

What kind of answer the man expected is not clear; he seems to have wanted some kind of divine apparition. He apparently imagined God would somehow physically lift him out of the plane wreck and take him away from the open tundra to a safe place.

Many spiritually sensitive people are accustomed to recognize the actions of God in the way other people  reach out to them. Especially in their times of need, when grief and distress threaten to overwhelm them and they need help, they find in the concern of others something of God’s own compassion.

Those who write letters of condolence to us when someone dear has died, for instance, may be offering us help in which we can find God. When I receive such notes from friends, I discover in them human emotion that can be taken to express something of God’s own sympathy.

Similarly, when other people hug and kiss us at times of such loss, we can feel a divine embrace. Even though we may not do so explicitly, we may still experience something that goes beyond the merely human.

In such instances, I guess you can say I allow another person to be an Eskimo for me. At least, that is the way Anne Lamott might express it as she applies the point of the story to everyday life.

Rather than looking for God in heaven, it perhaps makes more sense to detect God’s presence on earth. And instead of expecting the divine to appear in revelations or miracles, maybe we can find the divine in the actions of the people who fill our days.

“Finding God in all things” is a motto dear to Ignatius of Loyola, the saint who founded the Jesuit society in the Catholic Church. I continue to cherish this spiritual ideal of my tradition, even though it’s impossible to fulfill.

I’m sure Ignatius would allow me to amend his spiritual slogan to say finding God “in all people.” He must have intended that already but making it explicit helps clarify the point about other persons as contacts with the divine. It can be spiritually uplifting to let them be Eskimos to us.

Richard Griffin

Thou Shalt Honor

“We have to respect him – he’s our grandfather,” says a teenage boy named Nick. And Brittany, his younger sister, fighting back tears, adds: “I’m just happy he’s alive.”

The grandfather, Arthur Block, is fortunate to receive care from his daughter, Ethelinn, and other members of his extended family. That makes it possible for him stay at home despite the dementia from which he suffers.

Ethelinn talks gently with her father, explaining to him how he forgets. When he asks for an example, she says: “Sometimes you forget mom died.” His reply must have astonished her: “Maybe I want to.”

These people are among many caregivers and their loved ones featured in “And Thou Shalt Honor,” a documentary to be shown next week on public television. Channel 2 in Boston plans to run it first on Wednesday, October 9, at 9 p.m., with several repeats on Channel 44. The program’s portrayal of older and younger people and their caregivers struck me for its human beauty and often brought me close to tears.

Joe Mantegna, the middle aged actor, serves as the program’s host. He introduces himself as a caregiver, like every one in four of Americans. He adds: “Our generation is the first that has more parents to care for than children.”

But parents are not the only ones in need of care. I will not soon forget William and Marisol Deutsch, a relatively young couple who, with exuberant feeling, celebrated their marriage on a yacht off the island of Jamaica only one-and-a-half years before. When we see them, he, a physician, has been discovered to have early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Of her dear husband, Marisol says: “It’s hard to see the person you love not functioning the way they should.”

It is affecting to see Gerry Cohen, age 83, of Los Angeles taking care of his incapacitated wife. Of her he says, “I love her more now” and adds, “I want her at home, giving her the best of care at home.” And, in response, speaking haltingly, she says, “I think he’s the greatest thing on earth.”

Professional caregivers also appear in this program, fortunately because the public needs to know how shockingly low are the wages they receive for often extremely difficult work. Many of them are women of color, scraping by in the effort to survive financially.

Mary Ann Wadley, a nurse’s aide, has worked in a nursing home for 28 years for pay that she calls “terrible.” She says about her work: “We do things that nobody else is going to want to do.”

A home health worker in New York, Gail Sims, reports of the people she visits: “There are a lot of them that will abuse you.” But that does not stop her from cherishing them. Nor does it stop Mary Ann Wadley from caring for her patients: “Sometimes you love the bad ones,” says this heroic black woman, “because you can’t help it.”

Ms. Wadley also has been the only person present when patients die. Of one woman, she says: “I held her hand for two hours, tears running down my face.” And she repeats as if it were a mantra: “I’m a care giver.”

Mary Ann Nation of Franklin, Ohio, is another family caregiver. Her husband, when well, used to be rather unresponsive to her and their marriage was cold. But, through helping him survive each day in his disability, she says: “I have learned more about him in the past two years than in the previous 33.”

Mary Ann recognizes that she cannot prevent her husband from dying but, she affirms, “I can make the days of his life better.” Like many others she says of institutional care: “Putting him in a nursing home is not an option.”

To Dr. William Thomas, creator of the “Eden Alternative,” nursing homes are the enemy. “My whole passion is pulling the plug on nursing homes,” he says. About the long term care system in general, he uses graphic imagery: “It makes me want to throw up.”

For his institutional reform, he has four principles: 1. Treat the staff the way you want them to treat the elders; 2. Bring back decision-making to the elders; 3. Bring children and animals into these residences and grow gardens; 4. Develop a commitment to the ongoing growth of the people.

Thus far, he claims, 237 nursing homes have adopted his Eden Alternative.

Many other people in this television documentary display beautiful tenderness toward the people they care for. Everyone admits it’s difficult and sometimes they feel close to the breaking point. But it’s heartwarming to see so much caring and love in action across this country.

Most caregivers would not use the religious language of Rev.Lois Knutson, a Lutheran pastor in Minnesota, but hers words capture some of the spirit behind their loving actions. “I feel honored to be invited on to the holy ground of people’s lives,” she says of her ministry to elders.

“And Thou Shalt Honor” itself does honor to caregivers.

Richard Griffin

Epiphanies

A fellow journalist who lives on the West Coast (I will call him Joe) has shared with me his spiritual experience of the most recent Yom Kippur holiday. Though he does not consider himself an entirely observant Jew, this particular observance means much to him and each September he embarks on what he calls a “Yom Kippur trek.”

The trek is a journey he takes on foot, often in mountainous country of California. There, freed from the constraints of ordinary life, he can be more open to extraordinary feelings and insights. Close contact with nature endows him with experiences of beauty and unspoiled splendor that can stir within him awe and reverence.

Joe especially values what he terms the “epiphany” that emerges from these treks. He gropes for a definition of this word, calling it a “sudden manifestation, a connection with the divine, a physical tingling, a sense of oneness with the universe, and eyes welling with tears.”

With an earthy comparison, he sums it up by saying of this experience: “It’s a feeling even better than good sex.”

The first time he remembers experiencing this epiphany was after he climbed a mountain and came to a place known to locals as Paradise Valley. He had stopped there to rest after coming down from the 2500-foot peak. Soon he was overwhelmed with feelings about the beauty of the place and something beyond. Fasting all that day (and drinking only water) may have disposed him to a special sensitivity.

Here’s how he describes what he sensed: “I felt connected and part of the world, the universe and whatever mystical experience exists. The goose bumps and electricity up my spine were more intense than even the most moving operatic arias produced.”

These sensations lasted only a minute, he says, but adds: “I don’t know if I could have taken any more, it was that intense.”

Joe recognizes something similar in what his religious friends tell him about experiencing epiphanies in church. But he fears the fanaticism that persuades some believers that they have found the only way to what he calls “this kind of connection with the prime life force.” To him, there are many ways and he acknowledges his own as only one of them. He hope that the church people will say the same.

With disarming frankness, my friend acknowledges not getting epiphanies every time he goes on his Yom Kippur treks. Rather, he sees these manifestations of spirit as something extra and undeserved. “It’s a wonderful bonus when it happens,” he says.

Joe’s experiences sound much like those of other people who take the life of the spirit seriously. Ordinary women and men have epiphanies from time to time but they usually keep them secret; the great mystics of the various spiritual traditions, of course, have become famous for them. It is a mistake to judge such manifestations of something beyond as out of bounds for you personally. To be human is to be eligible to experience hints of the divine.

Those who have written about mystical experience vary greatly in the way they describe it. A woman named Florida Scott-Maxwell, for instance, writing in her old age says this: “Some of it must go beyond good and bad, for at times – -though this comes rarely, unexpectedly – – it is a swelling clarity as though all was resolved. It has no content, it seems to expand us, it does not derive from the body, and then it is gone. It may be a degree of consciousness which lies outside activity, and which when young we are too busy to experience.”

If this sounds vague it is not because the woman is writing about something unreal.  Rather, she is trying to describe the indescribable, something bursting with reality for which words are always going to prove inadequate.

Her experience is of a piece with my friend Joe’s. His epiphanies occur in the mountains amidst the awesome beauty of nature; hers take place in the room where she lives. His rise from a holy day observance in the great Judaic tradition; hers come from daily experience of her later years.

Both sets of epiphanies witness to the presence of spirit in the world and in the lives of human beings.

Richard Griffin