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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Griffin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Griffin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Griffin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Griffin

“Join Jim and Sherry in their Sukkah (in the backyard)” said the flyer delivered to our door by our neighbors. This welcome invitation came adorned with a graphic in green depicting a verdant tree, amid grass and sprouting leaves.

The prospect of joining in our friends' celebration of their autumnal holiday gladdened my heart. My instinct is to thank God for the fruits of the earth and the other gifts that this time of year brings us.

For Jews, the feast of Succoth comes as the third of the high holidays and is observed for a week. After Rosh Hashanah, the commemoration of the New Year, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, this third feast day joyfully celebrates the harvest.

It also reminds Jewish people of their ancestors wandering in the desert for 40 years after the fateful escape from Egypt, when they dwelt in temporary huts for shelter from the sun and wind.  

The Saturday when we were invited turned out to be a beautiful, clear, and seasonably cool afternoon, ideal for sitting in the back yard next to the garden.

Jim and Sherry's Sukkah was made of wood, with a roof decorated with dried corn stalks and other gourds. One end of the structure was wide open, enabling us to look out at the garden and surrounding houses.

This Sukkah had enough space for ten or so friends and neighbors who arrived during our stay. After we chose food and drink, Jim began our session with a traditional prayer from the Jewish liturgy for the day: “Blessed are you, O Lord, Ruler of the Universe, who has commanded us to dwell in the Sukkah.” We all assented to this beautiful prayer with the single word “Amen.”

After that we talked, asking about the couple's children who, when they were still at home, used to be an important part of the observance. This fall, Tamar is visiting India for a few months, and Akiva is away at college.

We also bantered about the neighborhood and local residents, all in a relaxed and joyful spirit. While we talked, new guests came and, gradually, others would leave as the afternoon moved on. (Everyone had gone by the time the Red Sox faced off against the Yankees.)

Our hosts established a spirit of pleasure in one another's company. Though they and the other guests who were Jewish were observing an important liturgical day, they made sure it remained a lighthearted occasion for everyone. We laughed a lot, as we sat in this once-a-year structure and enjoyed the company and the environment.

At the same time, we were conscious of what the day means to people who identify with a great faith. For our host, Jim, “it's a special time when we as a family get together and build our little temporary dwelling. It takes us out of our ordinary routine and puts us in touch with nature.”

He also feels contact with sacred history: “Looking out from the Sukkah in the evening, we see the same full moon that our ancestors saw thousands of years ago. Singing songs in the Sukkah gives me a feeling of great rejoicing.”

I myself, though not Jewish, feel strong appreciation of the faith tradition of the Jewish people and owe much of my own to it. Our whole civilization is indebted to those who have preserved the observance of special days through much travail and tragedy over so many centuries.

The feast of Succot that we were privileged to observe as guests has a deeper meaning than is commonly realized. In fact, David Linghoffer, writing for the online site Beliefnet, calls this feast an “edgy encounter with the apocalyptic strain in Judaism.”

He sees it as the most radical of the Jewish days of celebration because it points to “the final triumph of God over evil” at the end of time. To him, it completes the cycle that begins with Rosh Hashanah and goes on to Yom Kippur. Those two feasts may suggest that a struggle between good and evil “must go on forever, with no hope of an ultimate victory.”

Sukkot, however, offers a “preview of what it will be like to experience the culmination and conclusion of the historical process” when God will be victorious and history will come to a glorious end.”

Richard Griffin

“Now is the time.” “I have a dream.” “Let freedom ring.” “Free at last.”

These words, used as refrains by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his famous “I Have a Deam” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, continue to resound 40 years later. While recently watching a videotape of the event, I was again moved, not only by his eloquence but by the beautiful spirituality that animated his vision.

As we prepare to celebrate King’s birthday tomorrow, it is appropriate to emphasize the spiritual dimensions of this speech.

Only a person steeped in the Bible could have spoken the way Dr. King did to the 150,000 gathered in Washington D. C. on that famous day. And only a person who had absorbed the message of Jesus could have offered his particular vision of freedom, bodily and spiritual.

“Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice” Dr. King tells the huge audience of people assembled before him, eager to hear his every word.

“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” he informs his listeners in Washington and around the country.

“Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi” he proclaims. And he utters the same wish for every other part of America.

“Free at last,” he cries out in ringing final words, “thank God Almighty, we are free at last. Five years later, this quotation from a Negro spiritual would be applied to his terrible assassination.

Throughout, Dr. King saw himself as calling America to be its own best self. That was the new nation whose Declaration of Independence and Constitution promised freedom to every person. The words of those documents Dr. King described as magnificent but their promise was yet to be fulfilled.

It was one hundred years previously that Abraham Lincoln had freed the slaves. But, as the speaker saw clearly, “the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.”

Dr. King’s appreciation of the brotherhood of all people is another factor that gives spiritual power to his vision. He envisions the day when people of every sort can sit down at the same table as brothers and sisters. This is the banquet spoken of in the great biblical tradition in which he grew up.

He speaks like the prophets in the Hebrew Bible who nourished his soul. “We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” he says, using the words of Isaiah to express his people’s thirst for their rights, human and civil.

Then, in describing his own dream, he alludes to John the Baptist, himself echoing Isaiah:  “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

Dr. King’s commitment to nonviolence forms another precious part of his spirituality. Witnesses who attended the huge rally 40 years ago recall the fear that gripped many people in Washington that day.. “The atmosphere was very tense,” says black leader, Roger Wilkins. Some white people fled the city because of the violence they expected.

They need not have worried, however, because Dr. King insisted that the struggle he led was one based in spiritual power, not violent action. Here is the way he put it: “Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”

Of course, that would involve suffering. But Dr. King’s faith had room for that. “Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive,” he told his people as he drew upon the spiritual legacy of Jesus. The speaker believed that good would eventually come from the trials that his people had to endure unjustly.

Dr. King gave profound expression to the spiritual gifts that occupied a central place in his own life. Faith, hope, and charity were to hold decisive importance in the great struggle that he led for his people and for the whole nation.

Richard Griffin

Most adults will remember the childhood experience of turning around in place until becoming so dizzy it was necessary to stop. Frequently grown-ups would intervene so we would not faint or fall.

Most probably, there was nothing spiritual about that experience. However, it is just possible that, as children, we wanted obscurely to get some sense of a heightened consciousness. Without knowing what we were doing, we may have been trying to trans-port ourselves into a different world.

That’s what happens with the whirling dervishes, members of an ancient order of Sufis who dance ritually as an act of worship. For the first time in my life, I saw a group do this dance before a hushed and respectful audience. Beforehand, we were instructed not to applaud at the end because this was not a performance but rather a sacred event.

The ritual may go back to the beginning of Islam in the seventh century. However, the whirling dervishes are associated with the great Muslim poet and mystic Rumi who lived from 1207 to 1273. He is closely identified with one of the Sufi orders, the name being derived from either the Arabic word for wool or the Greek word for wisdom.

Before the ceremony, some twenty-five figures emerged on stage, all of them robed in black, wearing tall cone-shaped grain-colored felt hats, and some of them carry-ing musical instruments. After taking their places, a dozen or so came forward and shed their black robes, revealing long white skirts and blouses of the same color and material.

As the plaintive music began, the dancers started to whirl. They turned in place, over and over for what seemed to me a half-hour. To the dervishes it probably seemed timeless, thanks to their altered state of consciousness. The very name “dervish,” a Persian word meaning “threshold” suggests what the experience means.

Ideally, the whirling brings the dancers to the very edge of enlightenment. They enter into a kind of trance in which spirit is revealed as the deepest reality. They may have been repeating all the while the basic words of the Islamic faith, “There is no God but God” further defining the dance as an act of worship.  

To be frank, I found myself as a mere spectator brought close to sleep. The inten-sity of watching men repeat the same motions over and over was too much for me to bear. Were I more familiar with the Sufi tradition, presumably it would have been easier to enter into the inner experience of the dervishes.

Nonetheless, the spectacle had great style and beauty. Especially notable was the doffing of the outer garments revealing the white ones beneath. The change was symbol-ic: the dark clothes represents the world and its evils, while the white shows the blessed condition of people united to God.

I talked about the dervishes with a scholar, Nur Yalman , Professor of Social Anthropology at Harvard who was also in attendance. Thoroughly familiar with the rite and its history, Prof. Yalman described the experience as “beautiful.” To him, the dance represents “the rising up of the human spirit to a space between man and God.”

He sees special meaning in the hand gestures made by the dancers. “When they open up their right hand, they receive blessings from God; when they open their left, they pass on the blessings to people on earth.”

The total effect on people who witness the dance is precious. “The emphasis on love is valuable,” says Prof. Yalman, “and brings people together.”

Incidentally, the whirling dervishes were present in connection with an unusual exhibit in Harvard’s Sackler Museum. Called “Letters in Gold,” this exhibition displays calligraphy from the Ottoman empire. Calligraphy (beautiful writing) holds a vital place in Islamic art and worship and has been called “music for the eyes.”

Among the connections between the calligraphy and the dance is the following fact. The reed from which comes the flute-like instrument used in the dance is the same reed from which the “Kalem” or reed pen used in calligraphy.

Much of the writing reproduces chapters from the Qur’an, the holy book of the Is-lamic faith. It is revered as the word of God received by the prophet Mohammed in the seventh century.

Though I myself brought precious little previous knowledge to this display, the artistry behind the beautiful writing and the depth of spiritual feeling stirred my soul.

Richard Griffin