In his recently published memoir, “Lost In America: A Journey With My Father,” Sherwin Nuland contrasts his father’s religious feeling with that of his maternal grandmother. This grandmother, whom he called “Bubbeh,” lived as part of the family in their crowded South Bronx apartment when the boy Sherwin was growing up.

“Bubbeh’s Jewishness,” her grandson  writes, “unlike Daddy’s, was of a deeply spiritual sort, though she had no formal schooling. Hers was a homogeneous blending of religion, old-world superstition, and folklore, and its elements were inseparable.

Her relationship with God was so personal that she often addressed him in the diminutive, as did other shtetl women of her generation, He was Gotenyu, ‘my adored Goddy,’ as though she were speaking directly to one of her beloved grandchildren, but one with all the direction of the universe contained in His powerful goodness. She believed with an intensity that guided her life and enabled her to endure in face of tragedy after tragedy.”

Of his father, by contrast, the author writes: “My father, on the other hand, believed because he was a Jew, and Jews are expected to believe, at least on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when fate and destiny are determined. For this reason, he rattled out the prayer without thought–unless it was of the magnitude of Untaneh Tokef–and admonished his sons to do the same, lest some awfulness befall them.”

Bubbeh had emigrated from Russia in 1903 to New York, there to join her husband and two sons. She brought her four daughters with her, but the oldest of them died, as did the three male members of her immediate family. This woman stood four feet, ten inches tall, and never did learn to speak English. Yet, her Yiddish was the dominant language of the home where she came to live with her extended family.

The portrait of the grandmother’s spirituality is beautiful in its old-world simplicity rooted in a culture that sharply contrasted with that of New York City in the 1940s and 1950s. The promise of better days in America  never came through for her; instead she experienced the death of those closest to her. So God was her refuge and she prayed to Him for support.

That she had such a familiar relationship with God is a sign of her deep spirituality. It did not make any difference that she had hardly ever been to school because her Jewish tradition had taught her a trust that personal tragedies could not ultimately upset. Though her religion was not “pure,” mixed as it was with superstition and elements of folklore, it gave her a vivid sense of the beyond and moved her to find inspiration for her difficult life.

The prayer life of the author’s father, Meyer Nudelman, differed from that of his mother-in-law in many ways. Perhaps the most important was that it lacked the heartfelt intimacy with God that she experienced. At the weekly Sabbath and during other holy days, Meyer would perform the ritual in what seemed automatic fashion, racing through the prayers without any sign of the wonder and awe that they stir in deeply religious people.

However, one can make mistakes in judging other people’s practice of religion. The memories of his son may fail to recognize in his father’s prayer important elements of true religion that underlay his practice. Who ultimately knows how much spiritual sustenance Meyer received from his carrying out of the rituals?

His son says that Meyer believed “because he was a Jew.” That is not a bad reason for belief. It may not express the highest ideal held up by the religions of the world but this approach does maintain contact with a spiritually rich tradition. Even if his own faith remained weak, he had the advantage of being part of a community of faith. In a sense, his own spiritual shortcomings could find support in the faith of others.

The Nudelman household was often a cauldron of conflicting emotions as its members struggled with the pressures of poverty, disease, and cultural confusion. But religion, although realized so differently in the lives of Bubbeh and Meyer, served as a source of strength as the family faced these great challenges.

Richard Griffin

When traveling by airplane, I always request a window seat. To my surprise, seats next to a window are almost always available. I relish the opportunity to look out on the world from high in the sky.

Much about air travel has, of course, become routine. If you fly often, you are accustomed to check-in procedures (though security measures now make them more burdensome), boarding announcements, and reviews of safety measures. These preparations for flight, about the same at every airport and on every plane, stir boredom in many frequent flyer who simply want to get to their destination.

But flight itself should not be boring. I never tire of looking down, usually from a vantage point of several miles, at the earth, the sea, or the clouds. This scenery, laid out on a grand scale, allows me a renewed appreciation of the beauty of creation.

A recent flight home from Paris displayed the wonders of the French landscape. Far below me I could see the Seine as it wound its way north of the city into Normandy. Constantly turning in its path to the English Channel, this river, so resonant with history, led us out toward the Atlantic Ocean and, ultimately, Boston.

The beaches on France’s north coast stirred memories of having seen some of them at ground level only a few days previously. The beach at Etretat, especially, framed by giant cliffs with hollows eroded by centuries of wind, is a sight not to be forgotten any time soon. And the charm of the fishing and yachting port of Honfleur stays in memory long after leaving that picturesque place.

The clouds, when they appear, are drawn into marvelous shapes. Some wispy, others full bodied, these phantasms shifts into continually new formations and, when we ultimately descend to lower levels, at times cover us with darkness. The shapes in their myriad designs have the power to fascinate the observer who continues to contemplate them.

While flying, we are sitting in a huge machine, hundreds of us, with little if any awareness of the dynamics that hold us atop the world. The seat costs money; the view is free of charge, to me a bonus of splendor as we speed by at over 500 miles per hour. Though not an adventurer like Charles Lindbergh nor a poet like the dashing French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery, I am mindful of the challenge and romance they found piloting across the ocean some 80 years ago.

To me it is literally awesome to be carried thousands of miles across huge land masses and a vast ocean toward home. Covering distances that took our ancestors weeks to traverse, we get there in hours. Yes, the passage can sometimes drag but that comes from human inability to sustain the sense of wonder for very long and to keep in mind how fortunate we are in modes of travel compared to our forbears who lived before the 20th century.

In December of 1968, three American astronauts, after orbiting the  earth, set course toward the moon. As they traveled further, they focused a television camera on Earth and sent back images to the planet’s inhabitants. In the words of NASA, “for the first time humanity saw its home from afar, a tiny lovely, and fragile ‘blue marble’ hanging in the blackness of space.”

The astronauts arrived at the Moon on Christmas eve, at which time the crew continued sending pictures while reading these dramatic words from Genesis: “God created the heavens and the Earth, and the Earth was without form and void.”

Though not at the moon’s distance from earth, 250,000 miles, I felt some of the same emotion from my airplane seat. Seen against the backdrop of history, our modern air travel, however routine it has become, amounts to a continuing giant leap for mankind around the globe. We have gained access to a exalted vantage point  for admiring God’s handiwork in the air, the seas, and the land..

Thus I find in airplane travel the basis for a spirituality that starts with awe. You gain a new perspective on the world in which you live, you are presented the opportunity to see it anew and to value it for beauty and grandeur. The flight eventually comes to an end, but the vision can last and shape a deeper appreciation of the gifts that belong to us all.

Richard Griffin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Griffin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Griffin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Griffin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Griffin

From the early centuries of Christianity comes a spiritually provocative story connected with the Fathers of the Desert. The version told here can be found in a 1992 book written by a friend, Ernest Kurtz, and Katherine Ketcham, and called The Spirituality of Imperfection: Modern Wisdom from Classic Stories.

Abbot Anastasius had a book of very fine parchment, which was worth 20 shekels. It contained both the Old and the New Testaments in full, and Anastasius read from it daily as he meditated.

After that the monk dwelt with Anastasius for the rest of his life.”

The beauties of this story are many, most of them connected with the spiritual stature of Anastasius. Aware of the theft of his most valuable possession, this saintly man resists the human impulse to anger, indignation, and self-pity. He does not consider himself a victim, but instead looks to the good of the person who has wronged him.

With rare spiritual discernment, the abbot feels concern about the spiritual state of the thief. Instead of pursuing him and accusing him of the misdeed, Anastasius shrinks from putting the monk in a situation where he would almost surely have to lie. That would have the effect of adding another sin on top of the first.

The story turns on the potential book buyer’s decision to consult Anastasius, a quite understandable move, given the abbot’s authority. The reason the latter shows restraint is that he sizes up the situation spiritually, rather than emotionally as most people would.

Anastasius is also a model of detachment. He hangs loose even from his dearest possession, since he values the spiritual welfare of another person as more important than any mere thing. And he loves God enough not to allow the love of material possessions, however holy, to take him away from God. Even though the abbot treasured the book for inspiration and prayer, he is willing to let the monk keep it.

Notice also how the abbot preserves his peace of soul throughout. The average person would be upset by the betrayal of a friend or associate. Not Anastasius, however. He keeps his focus on what is most important – the love of God and his neighbor.

The effect of the abbot’s compassion is to bring about the permanent repentance of the monk. Turning away from his sin, the monk wants to spend the rest of his life with this great-souled person who has taught him so much.

We never do learn explicitly what happens to the book. But do we have to be told, after learning about the compassion of the abbot and the conversion of the monk?

Richard Griffin