A hospital near Chicago is the site of unusual, if not unique, activity intended to enhance the spirituality of its employees. Under the direction of two chaplains, Rod Accardi and Karen Pugliese, staff members of Central DuPage Health in the city of Winfield, Illinois, are engaged in an ongoing quest for deeper meaning in their lives. That this is happening in their workplace, rather than in church or at home, offers reason for surprise and deserves inquiry.

The two chaplains recently spoke about their ministry, known as the “Silent Lamp Program.” This title derives from Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk whose writings have inspired countless seekers. Of this spiritual leader the program directors say: “Silence was the ‘place’ where he achieved or received his own enlightenment. There he discovered the darkness of his own mystery and, struggling with that darkness, experienced his own mystery merging into the luminous mystery of God.”

The Silent Lamp program does not aim directly at the hospital’s patients but rather at those who serve them, either directly or indirectly. If staff members can become spiritual resources at work, the reasoning goes, then they may have an indirect healing influence on patients. In any event, staff members who have discovered a deeper spiritual life will change the atmosphere in the institution, making it a more effective healing community.

At least, this expectation gives shape to the central idea behind the program. As the formal vision statement says: “With spiritual care centered around you, all who encounter Central DuPage Health experience spiritual nourishment and strength for the ongoing journey to optimal health and well-being.”

Mind you, this is not a hospital run by a religious organization. The institution is secular and yet, it appreciates the value of spirituality enough to endorse these activities on company time, five hours each month for six months. Thus one finds nurses, secretaries, physical therapists and others, involved in prayer and spiritual reading in group and individual sessions that take place during the workday.

The program directors understand spirituality as “the search for and expression of connection with a higher power that resides both far beyond and deep within each one of us.” They also have adopted a simpler notion of this term: “Spirituality is about meaning, direction, and purpose to life.”

Another aim of this program is to help people develop skills enabling them to become a “spiritual resource for others.” Staff members are reminded from the beginning that spirituality is not just for themselves but serves the needs of other members of the community as well.

To prepare themselves as resources for others, staff members learn how to accomplish the following four purposes:

1. Understand oneself as a spiritual person.
2. Accompany and listen to others on their spiritual journey.
3. Discern the spiritual significance of shared stories.
4. Link others to spiritual resources.

Program directors set for themselves the goal of increasing in staff members the capacity for compassion and hope. To accomplish this, the chaplains use an ancient monastic approach to spiritual life, namely lectio divina, or sacred reading. This practice relies on a text from the Bible or another revered source which people listen to with reverence. The word becomes a base for contemplation for oneself and for insights that can be shared with others.

The program also includes music conducive to developing a meditative mood. Some of the songs have been composed by Chaplain Accardi and others chosen from other sources. The music also helps to unify the experience of learning that has occurred.

Sharing meals is another important ingredient to the process of spiritual formation. By sitting down with one another at the table, participants can better exchange spiritual issues and insights. This common meal also builds community and tends to draw forth stories of spiritual significance.

In addition, participants receive individual supervisory sessions at which they can discuss their experience with a trusted and skilled advisor.

With this kind of spiritual care, some experience of “spiritual nourishment and strength for the ongoing journey to optimal health and well-being” can rub off on the whole hospital community.

Asked to evaluate the program, one staff member said, “It helped me listen to others and offer direction by holding out a lamp to light their way.”

Another responded to the question of what he or she liked best: “The opportunity to reflect, learn, have the organization in effect grant us permission to be a awake and aware in the workplace.”

Richard Griffin

“We are children who must wrestle with the divine,” says Benjamin Isaac Rapoport, a young man from New York City who is about to graduate from college. He is speaking of people who share his Jewish tradition of faith in the God of Jacob, the Jacob who was a contestant in what Ben calls “the most famous wrestling match in history.”

That match finds vivid description in the 32nd chapter of Genesis. Jacob wrestled all through the night until daybreak with a mysterious man who “did not prevail against Jacob.” But the man did manage to put Jacob’s hip out of its socket, making him walk with a limp thereafter.

Jacob would not let go until the man gave him a blessing. In doing so, his adversary changed Jacob’s name to Israel, a word meaning “the one who strives with God.”

Benjamin Rapoport takes the intellectual life seriously and, in an effort to establish a rational foundation for his faith in God, he read the great French philosopher Descartes. The latter’s proof for the existence of God felt empty to this young scholar: the philosopher’s perfect being was not what Ben meant when he thought of God.

Then, turning to the British philosopher David Hume, Ben discovered causality as the key concept for the seeker of God. “No one believes that we live in a causeless universe,” Ben explains. “Everyone goes to bed believing that the rules of the universe will be the same the next morning.”

This college senior believes that “the orderliness of the universe is close to God Himself. God is the source of all the rules and thus of all the answers.”

So asking the questions becomes the way of engaging God. It may make dealing with God a struggle but, when you discover answers you know that you have received something precious. “To know an answer,” Ben announces, “is to acquire a piece of God.”

He compares human beings to blind spiders spinning webs in a forest. When you walk in the woods early in the morning, you see the forest sparkle and webs shine with light. “If we run into a new leaf or branch,” he explains, “we can extend the web of what we know. But the web itself is almost invisible and is certainly insignificant compared with the rest of the forest.”

Ben goes on to talk about what it means to be young. Youth is the time when “what is known sparkles.” It is the season of life for finding out “what no one else has seen.” And, finally, this idealistic seeker adds: “Being young also means that ordinary is not part of your vocabulary.”

Returning to an earlier theme, Ben proclaims that “part of the divine struggle is to resist ordinariness.”

For this young man so committed to the struggle, faith means “that my questions have answers.” And it makes intellectual inquiry a holy activity. The word “shalem” means “whole” or “complete” or “a healed person.” Jacob, by daring to struggle with the divine became whole, healed, strengthened.

This is some of what Benjamin Rapoport said in explaining his faith to a group of adults gathered before a Sunday church service. In response, members of the audience asked questions and offered comments.

Karen Armstrong, whose books about religion have found attracted many readers, commented about the power of the Jewish faith. “One of the things that attracted me,” she said, “were the endless questions.” To her, the lack of final answers remains part of Judaism’s genius.

Diana Eck, a scholar of world religions, observed that “the messiness of faith comes in interpersonal issues.” She sees the world as fractured, needing repair. “Something is broken, it’s our job to fix it,” she said.

If I had any quarrel with this brilliant presentation, it came as Ben talked about youth. Would that in reality the “ordinary” forms no part of young people’s thinking! I am acquainted with too many of them ever to imagine this is true.

I also insist that people who have advanced to mature years and old age can also carry on the search for reality. They, too, can break out of the ordinary, ask questions, and discover answers. In fact, I like to think of searching for God as an activity shared by young and old that can bring us closer together.

Richard Griffin

“I honestly believe I’m being led by faith,” says Ruby Bridges Hall of her current work. As an adult she travels around the country teaching children and others about the evils of racial prejudice.

She discovered her vocation through prayer. “I went into my prayer closet and asked the Lord, ‘Show me,’ and then things started to fall in place,” she explained to a large crowd of adults, college students, and children gathered one evening last week in the Harvard University Church.

This is the same person who, as a child only six years old, became famous across America when she entered the William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, the first African American child to attend that school.  On that day, November 14, 1960, Ruby Bridges and her mother were escorted by four federal marshals past a crowd of white people shouting angry threats at Ruby, spewing hatred and promising violent death for the child.

Of that experience almost half a century ago, she now says, “No one talked about it,” in the years when she was growing up. Only when she was 19 did she start to realize what her own history meant. After looking at the famous painting of Norman Rockwell that showed her walking toward school she grasped the significance of the events that she had lived through as a child.

Now a woman approaching 50 years of age, she knows herself to be on the right path. “I believe I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing,” she affirms confidently. But it was not easy discovering what to do. “I went through a hard time, trying to figure it out,” she confesses.

A charming woman, her head adorned with a stylish turban, she smiles often as she interacts with the audience. She speaks with simple eloquence, holding listeners rapt in attention as she shares her vision of what the human community should be.

“I never judge anyone by the color of their skin,” this current day prophet proclaims. Despite her childhood experience of hatred, she also received love from a woman crucially important to her. This person was Mrs. Henry, a white woman from Boston, who became her teacher when Ruby was six and received her warmly. Of this formative person in her life, Ruby says: “Mrs. Henry took me into her heart, not just her classroom.”

Ruby Bridges Hall now has four sons, three of them old enough for military service, and she hopes they will be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by their character. “I believe it’s time to get past our individual differences, for our children,” she states. In her view, it is extremely dangerous to teach children to trust only people like them.

Racism is her number one enemy. She calls it a form of hate, a disease. “Let’s stop using our children to spread it,” she pleads.

“Every little baby born in the hospital arrives with a clean heart,” she observes, and a fresh start. But they begin to think they are better than someone else.”

To watch Ruby Bridges Hall answer questions from small children after her talk was affecting indeed. Some of these kids first learned about her from Dr. Robert Coles’ book “The Story of Ruby Bridges” which explains to young readers the heroism of the child and her parents.

Her gentle manner and respectful attention to each questioner commended her message further. She is clearly a person who has developed spiritual depth after being tried in the fire of hatred at a young age.

It remains important for her not to hate those who have hated her; instead she reaches out to them with forgiveness. In response to a question, she told of feeling enmity, in recent years, toward one person. Ruby’s husband noticed the problem and told her: “You really need to pray.” She did so and, finally, she was able to extend her hand in friendship to that person: “I knew then that I was set free.”

That action speaks eloquently about the kind of person Ruby Bridges Hall is. One can only hope that her message of peace and love takes firmer hold in the hearts of her listeners. “It has to come from the inside,” she says of the change necessary to overcome the barriers built up by human prejudice

Richard Griffin

What events in your life point beyond themselves? Which happenings, perhaps trivial in appearance, have carried you upward toward higher meaning?

These are questions that remain important for seekers after spirit and light. I met such a seeker last week at a conference in Denver, a woman named Priscilla Ebersole, who is two days older than I and lives in San Bruno, California. There she edits a magazine for nurses and also helps people sift their life experience for meaning.

From her own life, Dr. Ebersole (she has a Ph.D.) recounted two experiences that she called “transcendent.” The first came on a walk that she and her aged mother took some ten years ago through a forest in Oregon. They were looking for her mother’s favorite flower, the extremely rare lady slipper, hoping to find a blossom hardly ever seen.

To their initial disappointment, they never did come upon their precious prize. However, to the delight of Priscilla, they did discover a calypso orchid. This flower itself was of surpassing beauty and she was rapt by its splendor. To her, this discovery became an experience that drew her upward to contemplation of the highest beauty –  – the spirit, supreme reality, God.

The second such event in Priscilla’s life was the discovery, in the basement of her home, of a trunk containing a bundle of letters. These were letters composed between 1929 and 1935 by Priscilla’s grandmother who wrote each week to her daughter, a missionary serving in India. “It was as if I had stepped back in time,” says Priscilla about reading the letters long lost to anyone’s view.

Reading them, Priscilla learned things about her grandmother and other family members that she had ever known before and felt stirred by this new knowledge. She expanded her view of life across the generations and was moved to contemplation of what it means to be human.

These two incidents have in common the element of surprise. Priscilla did not know in advance what she would come upon. They were eureka experiences, events that drew “ahas” from the woman. They brought with them a rush of welcome emotion that swept her up into a higher universe.

The experiences have also proven to have lasting power in one woman’s life. They are events that at first looked unimportant but have had astonishing legs, to use a word favored by some show biz types. Priscilla has remembered them for years now and they continue to feed her soul. They serve her as fulcrums on which her interpretation of her whole life is balanced.

Priscilla Ebersole also believes that “transcendence teaches us compassion.” For me, this connection remains mysterious but I regard it as worth thinking about. I also hold to the connection between things. Dr. Ebersole quotes approvingly a woman 102 years old who, not long before her death, said, “I just have the feeling that I’m connected to everything.”

Every human being must have had experiences that reveal extra dimensions of reality, at least potentially. But we can blunt their edge by not being attentive to them. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, but often we remain indifferent to grandeur. Hopkins also wrote “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” but most of us cannot appreciate that much reality very often.

Another poet, William Blake, suggested seeing “a world in a grain of sand/ And a heaven in a wild flower.” Doing so, however, requires a disposition of soul that holds us ready to see beyond surface reality. We must, at least occasionally, be poised to grasp the precious opportunities for seeing beyond.

At the funeral of a man of letters recently, his son stood up to read one of his father’s poems. Before doing so, however, he made a few remarks about growing up in his father’s household. He spoke movingly about his father’s love and kindness for him and his two sisters.

The only occasions in which his father became impatient with his children, the son recounted, came when they showed themselves lacking in a sense of wonder. His father called this defect “sloth” and warned his children to resist it steadfastly. He wanted them to remain alive to the wonders of the world, the way he was himself, and not to yield to the temptation of staying on the surface of things.

Richard Griffin