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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Griffin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Griffin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Griffin

Last Sunday the Orthodox Christians celebrated Easter. According to the church calendar of the East, this was the first day of the Easter observance. Traditionally when these Christians meet one another in this season, they exchange the following greeting: “Christ is risen.” To this the other person replies, “He is risen indeed.”

Meanwhile, the Christian churches of the West continue the Easter celebration that they began the previous Sunday. Their prayerful observance of Christ’s resurrection will continue for several more weeks.

This is the liturgical season when Christ’s Resurrection remains uppermost in the hearts of people everywhere who are committed to faith in Jesus.

Against this backdrop I wish to share some inspiration gained from the classroom of Father Stanley Marrow. This New Testament scholar is unique: a Jesuit who was born in Baghdad and grew up there an Iraqi citizen. As a young man he emigrated to this country, studied at Boston College, and became an American citizen.

Father Marrow is also unique in the way he appreciates the Gospels and other parts of the New Testament. By this stage in his career he has taught generations of students at Weston Jesuit School of Theology and elsewhere, imbuing them with knowledge and even wisdom about these sacred writings.

Sitting in on two classes last week, I admired the way this former colleague of mine combines solid knowledge based on New Testament scholarship with a deep spirituality that comes from his own life and his tradition of prayer and other spiritual exercises.  From what I could observe, his students leave the classroom both informed and inspired, an accomplishment most teachers would be proud to achieve.

This dynamic teacher emphasizes that the New Testament is a book of faith, based on proclamation. The Resurrection of Jesus is not provable; if it were, it would not be an object of faith.  This faith is freely given by believers in response to the testimony of credible witnesses. Miracles of any sort are not proofs, Father Marrow says, but instead signs intended to witness to the truth of God’s presence and activity.

In rising from the dead, Jesus saves his people, setting them free from the triple slavery of sin, death, and the Law. In saving humans from death, Jesus does not save anyone from dying, however. Everybody must go through this rending of the physical self as did Jesus himself.

It is a matter of history that Jesus died; that he rose is a matter of faith, an interpretation of what happened to the Lord. The appearances of Jesus to his disciples and others are not proofs of his resurrection but illustrations of the risen life that he now leads. And that others will lead after their deaths.

No matter what the circumstances of a person’s death, New Testament faith says that God creates out of nothing the same person who died. The person with all his or her relationships is brought back to life. Just as Jesus is identifiably the same person, so will the believer be through the saving action of Jesus.

Belief comes through love and, Father Marrow emphasizes, love remains the best sign that we have been made into a new creation. We have been given eternal life so that, in loving you, I need not worry about losing you. The relationship we have will never be lost.

For Christians, the important point about Jesus is that he died for others. This fact, known by faith, takes on palpable reality each time an individual encounters another person in faith and love.

In this faith, life led for the sake of others witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus. The quality of our love is the most important single reality of the Easter faith. Jesus died to save his people from death and this reality becomes manifest in the relationships that people have with one another.

Clearly, Professor Marrow places great emphasis on God’s love for everyone and the New Testament’s call to implement this love in real life. For example, he cites the attentive listening to other people as an important act of love. It emerges in sharp contrast to the way human beings use one another, manipulating the other for our own advantage.

By contrast, accepting others as they are and where they are is putting into practice the Easter message.

Richard Griffin

Over the past two weeks, the Christmas crib in my living room has kept members of my family and me focused on the events at Bethlehem connected with the birth of Jesus.

In the middle of the scene is a wooden stable where the child lies, with Mary, his mother, bending over him, and Joseph, his father, standing nearby. In the same space is a friendly donkey and next to it a large ox. These central  figures make a most appealing tableau, a tribute to the craft of the French contemplative nun who molded these small characters.

Then, on the right, villagers approach the stable with cradling small sheep and other gifts in their arms; on the left, the three kings finish their travels as they near the baby. They have come a long way to see and give their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Some angels keep watch nearby.

This display can be seen as merely one of the decorations that come with the holiday season. You can regard it much as the lights that adorn so many homes. Or, from a more spiritual vantage point you can let it be more: you can make it serve as an inducement to contemplation and prayer.

Using scenes from the Bible like this one as a help in prayer has a long history in the Christian tradition and, undoubtedly, in other traditions as well. One master of the spiritual life, St. Ignatius Loyola, made it an important part of his approach to meditation. In his small book, Spiritual Exercises, this Spanish mystic taught his followers and others to use their imagination when they came to pray.

He called this preparation for prayer the Composition of Place. This means putting together the pieces of a biblical scene imaginatively so as to enter into a prayerful mood in mind and heart. One can use scenes other than those that come from the Bible. Any other sacred situation might do, such as an event from the life of a saint.

The Christmas crib or crèche thus serves as an external playing out of what meditators might have within their imagination. Of course, a person can feel free to add new details; in our crèche, the villagers are bringing the child their own gifts: a rooster, a bird’s nest, even a small sweater.

For many people, this approach to prayer through their imagination could prove the simplest and the most enjoyable. There is something profoundly human about using one’s senses to appreciate holy persons and sacred events. This is a way of bringing the Bible to life and finding in its pages inspiration for daily living.

Thus you can imagine the characters talking; you can become part of the scene yourself; you can enter into the conversation. These are typical of the suggestions that St. Ignatius makes about how to pray. Whatever works for you can be the rule of thumb for your style of prayer.

He also suggests using other senses. For example, you could feel the heat given off from the bodies of the animals. You might even conjure up the smell that comes from the sheep. And, in a childlike spirit, you could touch their warm, fluffy wool.

This approach to prayer does not suit everyone, to be sure. And those who do find it sweet could carry it to excess. The important point throughout is, of course, union with God. Whatever helps toward that goal serves us well.

Simple as this method of prayer may seem, it can lead toward mystical depths as well. It would thus respond to what Abbot Thomas Keating calls “an enormous spiritual hunger in the human family.” So many people want a deeper day-to-day existence than what we learn from most television sit-coms.

I am going to feel disappointed this week when the crib comes down. The living room will seem empty of something that added another dimension to the place. Not until next December will the small figures bring their charm and grace to our home.

But in the meantime we will be free to build new cribs or other scenes in our imagination on the way to prayer. We can compose as many places as we wish, with only our mind’s eye limiting our scope.

Richard Griffin

In this season of hope, Frank, an old friend, writes from Kalamazoo about his volunteer job one afternoon a week. The house where he works is called Kairos Dwelling, a place where poor people who are terminally ill come to be cared for free of charge.

Kairos, as my friend explains, is a Greek word used by St. Paul to indicate the fullness of time.  For the people who live their last weeks or months there, this is indeed kairos, the time when they will die.

The house is not like a hospital but more like a hospice. People are given drugs to make them comfortable and relieve pain rather than in the expectation that they will get better. These are people whose families cannot take care of them or afford to place them in an institution.

Contrary to what one might imagine, the atmosphere of the house is cheerful, my friend reports. On his first visit there, he was greeted by a large spaniel-like dog and one of the patients was sitting at the kitchen table eating a beautifully cooked meal with the volunteers and a professional staff member.

At first, Frank wondered what use he could be. After all, he calls himself a retired and sometimes miserable old professor. But he soon learned how to serve dying people in ways that he had never imagined.

Here’s the way he describes his work:

“I have learned to help turn an old one in bed, to help clean the bed and the person if she is incontinent. I have learned to sit quietly by the bedsides of our people, not speaking, just sitting there, perhaps quietly holding a hand. I have learned to give manicures and pedicures.

“I am learning how to massage the feet of our people. I am learning to talk to people who quite possibly may not be able to talk to me. Sometimes I sit in the small ecumenical chapel and pray for my people. Most importantly, I have learned that I can laugh and joke there while doing the dishes or folding laundry. I have learned that our people often want the comfort of a hand in their hand or an arm around their shoulders.”

To his surprise, Frank finds himself rested and peaceful when he returns home after his stints at Kairos. His wife has noticed the difference in him.

During his academic career my friend taught courses on the religions of the world. Not surprisingly, he finds this legacy rich as he reflects on his experiences at Kairos. Drawing on the Christian story of the Three Wise Men, he writes:

“Sometimes I feel like one of the Magi visiting a very old Messiah. I have gifts to bring; I know I am in the presence of people in need of touching and caring. And so I bring my own version of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

“And I know that I am in the presence of the one I have come to call My dear old Lord. This is my Christmas and I feel luck to have found this cave, this stable, and the bewildering array of old Messiahs who come there.”

Frank’s story has inspired me as I look for the at the approach of the New Year, 2003. War and rumors of war fill the air; human calculation makes the coming year look ominous indeed. But hope is not based on human calculation.

A friend not thinking he could be of any use but finding otherwise; taking on  disagreeable tasks such as cleaning someone incontinent; discovering the power of human touch –  –  all of these breakthroughs I find enspiriting.

My friend has also come to appreciate the power or simply being there, not saying anything but sitting by a dying person in silence. He carries that silence to the chapel where he prays for those to whom he ministers.

These approaches to people in need take courage and express the highest human values. My friend does not give mere lip service to the spirituality that he has taught in his long career as an academic. Rather,  he shows this spirituality to be more than skin deep. It has penetrated to his depths and pours out in service to people in their kairos time.

Richard Griffin

“I almost visualized each of you being surrounded by love. It was weaving the circle of the four of us, weaving us together in love.”

This is how Olivia, one of my prayer group members, speaks of what she did during our half-hour meditation one afternoon last week. Sitting in her living room we closed our eyes and entered into this spiritual exercise for a half hour, as we have been doing regularly for the last three years.

After the bell rang for an end to last week’s session, I asked the other members –  – Olivia, Donna, and Emerson –  – to say what they do during the meditation. It was the first time I had posed this question, though I had long wondered.

On this occasion, Olivia was mourning the death, the day before, of a dear friend.  She began by  “dropping of my awareness into my heart center.”  There she turned to “wishing her friend into the light.”

Then Olivia turned her attention toward her breathing. This helps her awareness to drop from her mind into her body. She established a rhythm for her breathing: in/out/; deep/slow.  You discover an “inner smile” that says everything is OK,  no matter what your mind is doing. The present moment, she comes to realize, is the only moment. She discovers within herself a sacred silence.

Olivia suddenly thinks about what she has to do but she recovers from this distraction by coming back and anchoring herself in the present.  

Sometimes the meditation becomes boring and hard, she says. “But you deepen with insight and compassion. This is the grace. Out of the stillness spontaneously arises my love for other people and connection with them.”

For her,  meditation is not self oriented or narcissistic. On the contrary,  the “ego self vanishes and you connect with compassion for all people. It was very tender.”

Donna, for her part, recalls the way Hob, a member who died a year ago, used to lead us into meditation. “He had the capacity for leading us in such a natural way that we automatically went into a peaceful state,” she says.

She likes to use two phrases as mantras: “Come Holy Spirit” and “Come Lamb of God.” Repeating these words in her heart, Donna appreciates them as a gift. Through them and other spiritual exercises, she finds peace and joy.

And, yet, she sometimes finds it a relief when the appointed time of meditation ends. Serving as the ringer of the small bell to mark the end, she finds herself sometimes distracted by this task. “The last 10  minutes felt like 20,” she confesses.

Emerson describes his approach like this: “First I quiet myself and I feel the quietness going all over me. I do a prayer for everyone in the group. I come back to me and I wish myself happiness and good health.

“I then just sit and ward off those thoughts that I should be doing other things and what you are going to do when you leave. But I think of being content where I am.

“I think about family and other good things around me. I go through the names of my 11 grandchildren for two purposes: to be mindful of them and to remember their names when I see them.

“I never open my eyes during that time, it keeps me connected to the meditation. For me it’s being silent and feeling the energy from the group. It starts when we all sit down together. We’ve been doing it for a long time now and it feels like family.

“But I don’t stop thinking about everyday things. I call it mind chatter.”

Finally, I shared with the others some of my own experiences during the period of silence. “I can answer in one word what I do: nothing.”  That is, I try to keep my mind free of thoughts while becoming present to the sacred and the holy that envelop us.

Like everyone else, I suffer distractions and often find the time of silence weighing on me, making me wish for the bell to ring. But I keep returning to the stillness of the interior heart in keeping with what others around me are doing.

Richard Griffin