“It’s Christmas time,” writes an old friend in Kalamazoo. “I think of it as a spark of light at the darkest and coldest time of year, at least here where I live. I think of it as a very ordinary feast, celebrating a most undistinguished birth in a place that was only a distinction to a very small group of people.”

“To most of the world,” my friend continues referring to Bethlehem, “it was a hamlet inhabited by a few tradesmen and the families of a few sheepherders nestled into some not very high hills on the edge of a not very distinguished capital city of a Roman satrap state called Palestine.”

My friend has captured much of the spiritual meaning delivered in the Christmas event. Its material austerity and its ordinariness – the birth of a child into a poor family among people on the lowest rungs of society – this event in these circumstances is something most people of the world find easy to relate to.

It’s all so simple. You don’t need a Ph.D. in biblical studies to grasp its meaning. And yet, this event allows you to enter further and further into it through contemplation and prayer.

The genius of the Christian tradition is best shown in the two basic events at the beginning and end of Jesus’ life – his birth and his death. Since these are the universal experiences of being human, they speak simply but eloquently about the meaning of our existence.

Birth is a call to wonder, to awe, to joy at the coming of a new person into the world. That is how the birth of a neighbor’s child struck me last month. I watched his mother grow larger during the summer and fall and, as a neighbor, also looked forward to the day of her delivery. When it happened, I felt some share in the joy that the infant’s parents experienced.

When my own child was born, twenty-one years ago, I felt the full force of the mystery. Seeing her emerge from her mother’s womb filled me with strong emotions of pity, fear, and unprecedented joy. Though inevitably the full force of the wonder connected with it has receded, still her being and growth give me cause for continued awe.

The birth of Jesus, prayerfully contemplated, stirs in spiritual seekers wonder at the mystery of it all. And yet it carries this mystery in the midst of ordinariness, the same as happens the world over to people who have little by way of possessions, power, or influence.

In the birth of Jesus, one also confronts hope. My friend presumably means something like this when he describes it as a “spark of light.” This light in darkness does not mean the same as optimism, however. Rather, it places confidence in divine power, not human. After all, the human enterprise always remains far from success. In the land where Jesus was born, people are still killing one another at an alarming rate.

For many people, the world is always dark and cold. And for others of us, it is that way at least some of the time. As M. Scott Peck says starkly at the very beginning of “The Road Less Traveled,” his wildly popular spiritual classic: “Life is difficult.” The beginning of Jesus’ life gives a hint of the experiences that will mark much of his life: struggle and oppression..

As always, the nativity scene raises questions about worldly possessions. Those who first encounter Jesus do not have much. Perhaps this frees them to see more deeply into the meaning of the event than those burdened with too much ever can. That is the experience of many spiritual seekers: we find that our hold on possessions and our constant desire for more become obstacles to our growth in spirit.

These sober thoughts, however, should not be allowed to take away the joy of this day. To those who share faith in Jesus, at least, and for many others too, Christmas serves as a happy event indeed. “Joy to the World” says the carol. Seekers can open themselves to let this joy flow in and learn to place a greater value on their own lives and on those whom they love.

Richard Griffin

After taking part in morning prayers with a group of friends last Saturday, I talked with one of them over coffee and cake. Though I do not know this man –  – a retired banker and current philanthropist –  – very well, I found conversation with him remarkably uplifting. In fact, later in the day and on succeeding days, the more I reflected on our exchange, the more I considered it an occasion of grace.

Both of us had been moved by what the speaker at the prayer session had said about peace. In her five-minute commentary on scripture, she had filled us with reflections about spirituality that carried over into the gathering that followed.

First, we talked about our agenda for that Saturday. His would feature a visit by one of his daughters with her 15-year-old son. Spending time with them, especially the grandson whom he does not see very often, was an event that he was eagerly looking forward to. He noted that boys at that age change so much so quickly that it is hard to keep up with their growth.

My friend, whom I will call Jack, went on to tell me how he feels blessed in living into his 70s. He regards it as a gift from God that he has seen the third generation after him and has the prospect of seeing a fourth, since one of his granddaughters is married and in her middle 20s. Jack feels grateful for the good health he enjoys and the opportunities for doing good brought to him in his later decades.

His wife has had some serious physical problems and walks with difficulty. But she has adapted cheerfully to her leg brace, a device that, along with a helping arm from her husband, allows her to get places where she wants to go. Jack agreed with my remarks about her resiliency, a characteristic that he and I also regard as a gift.

Jack also shared with me the benefit he is drawing from a course at his church that focuses on Abraham in the book of Genesis. This study is stirring Jack spiritually and he repeated to me “be a blessing,” the phrase spoken by Abraham from which he is deriving spiritual relish.

In my part of the conversation, I shared with Jack my own plans for that Saturday. These included a meeting of members of my church concerned about a crisis. Later in the day I would attend a cocktail party given by a 90-year-old friend in honor of his late wife. Finally, I would be celebrating the birthdays of two of my brothers and be introduced to the fiancé of a niece. All of these events of that day would offer material for reflection and prayer.

As I left the gathering my soul felt buoyed up by the heartfelt exchange with Jack, and I reflected on the traditional role of spiritual conversation in the life of seekers. In my novitiate training long ago, I learned the value of talking with other people about the spiritual life. And this value came home to me often, especially when I talked with close friends who shared my ideals.

I had also learned the value of keeping silence but there was much time for that. When opportunities came for conversation, then I experienced the spiritual benefits from learning how others were faring in living toward God.

The masters of the spiritual life have also taught that idle and superficial conversation can sometimes harm the soul. Living in 21st-century America can make this a hard saying because our culture elevates chatter into a way of life. Like almost everybody else, I enjoy bantering with friends and exchanging clever remarks. However, I also find that such chatter, if carried on too long, can eat away at my soul.

Just the day before Jack and I talked, I had been in a conversation with a group of colleagues, a discussion that left me feeling low. By contrast with the way Jack talked, these other men never said anything of substance. The result for me was a spiritual malaise that acted as a true downer. It has made me appreciate even more my spiritual conversation with Jack.

Richard Griffin

If you are the parent of a college student the way I am, you have become familiar with a special vocabulary used by your daughters or sons and their friends. Even when you overhear only one end of their telephone chats with one another, you become familiar with expressions such as “cool,” what’s up?”,  and “sketchy.”

Another word that comes up frequently is “awesome.”  Our juniors use it in tribute to all sorts of happenings that they consider exciting. Its currency has lost some value, of course, because the word is now used routinely rather than rarely. A young woman’s new hairdo or a fellow going to a lively nightspot can provoke the response “awesome;” it does not need the eruption of a mighty volcano.

Probably not one in a thousand collegians realizes that the word “awesome” classically expresses the beginning of a spiritual way of looking at the world. It contains two basic ideas – – fear and fascination. That is how Rudolf Otto, a German scholar of the early twentieth century, described it; he saw it as the human response to the encounter with what is holy.

The experience of awe finds graphic expression in the lives of mystics of every spiritual tradition. The prophet Isaiah is a good case in point. As described in the Hebrew Bible, he had a vision of the Lord “sitting on a throne, high and lofty” and heard angels calling out “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.”

Isaiah’s response was to recognize himself as “a man of unclean lips,” but an angel came down and touched a hot coal to his lips, purifying him for his mission.  

Centuries later, Jesus at the time of his baptism saw the heavens open and heard a voice saying “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.”  This was an experience that filled him with awe and carried him into his public ministry of proclaiming the Kingdom of God.

Such powerful experiences are not restricted to figures in the Bible. They have been handed down in traditions other than the Judeo-Christian.

In a new book, “Why Religion Matters,” the scholar Huston Smith cites Hindu lore, referring to a vision that one of his students has of the god  Krishna “in his terrifying cosmic form.” Professor Smith alludes to the Buddhist tradition as well and cites “the Buddha finding the universe turning into a bouquet of flowers at the hour of his enlightenment.”

Using the image of a carapace or hard shell that stretches over the world, Huston Smith also gives readers this definition:  “Mystics are people who have a talent for sensing places where life’s carapace is cracked, and through its chinks they catch glimpses of a world beyond.”

Of course, such experiences are not limited to religious people. Those who call themselves “spiritual but not religious,” the way many do nowadays, can find this kind of genuinely awesome experience in the world of nature or in the life of the arts.

There is a story about the great 18th century composer George Frederick Handel telling what it was like to compose the “Hallelujah Chorus.” “I thought I saw the heavens open, and the great Lord Himself,” he was reported to exclaim.

You may have had something like these precious experiences. Many people, very few of whom are monks or consider themselves mystics, have. According to one poll, an astonishing 32% of Americans report having mystical prayer experiences.

Spiritual writer Elizabeth Lesser urges everyone to place great value on these inner events: “We should cherish those moments when we have an awareness of our life being something more than it appears to be.”

Are we allowing ourselves to cultivate moments that are truly awesome? When they come into our life, do we let them change our daily feelings about ourselves and our world?

A walk in a cemetery led to such an experience for me long ago. It was a beautiful place with abundant foliage and sculptured mountains off in the distance. There, suddenly, a realization sunk into me that I cannot express fully. At the risk of my insight sounding banal, let me here provide an inadequate summary of what I then received: “God is real and you will always remember this truth.”

Richard Griffin

The 1935 Christmas that we see in old magazines and films can seem merely a Norman Rockwell never-never-land, an idealistic presentation of a world that was, in fact, far from ideal. But even in those Depression years, Christmas for a family like mine could be abundant, both materially and spiritually.  

What I remember most about my earliest Christmases is the profusion of gifts and the transformation of time.

The day felt different from any other time. At an early morning hour, my father went downstairs first to turn on the lights and to take one last look around to see if Santa Claus had really arrived. As we followed down the staircase, we children felt a delightful anticipation that was almost better than the gifts themselves.

But the gifts could be memorable as well. One year I got a Lionel train and worked with my father to get it going. The locomotive, turned on by the transformer, would navigate the tracks, up and down hills, and around curves.

My brother and sister and I set to empty our stockings pinned up on the mantle piece. Out would come small objects, knickknacks for our pleasure. Despite advance word about finding lumps of coal for bad behavior, it never happened.

All of this happened in a room where the Christmas tree, with its lights and angels, took pride of place. There also the Christmas crib drew attention, with the small figures dramatizing holy people and events.

The time soon came when we would have to defer play and get ready for church. In those days Catholics like us did not eat or drink anything before Mass, so we did not wait until late in the morning before going off to our parish church, where the sober austerity of Advent had given way to festivity.

There joyous music resounded, red poinsettias decorated the altar, and people somehow looked different from the way they usually did.  The priest now wore white or gold vestments, a sign of liturgical rejoicing.

I knew us all to be in no ordinary time, and I felt myself transported into a new sphere of being. In fact so focused was I on the events of the day that I was able to lose consciousness of time altogether.

Home from church we would have a more hearty breakfast than usual and then return to our gifts. Later in the day, my grandmother and aunt would come, the latter bringing frozen pudding ice cream, a flavor all of us kids detested. My maternal grandmother was our favorite relative, a woman whose love for us was unconditional, like God’s.

My father cut the roast when we settled down at the dining room table in the mid afternoon and we ate our Christmas dinner. I tended to eat too much on such occasions but afterward would go outside and throw a football around with neighboring boys. Or, if there was snow on the ground, I might try out a new sled.

After a simple supper at day’s end, I would be sent to bed early, assured by parents that I would have time to play with my things on other days. Though I would not admit it, I felt agreeably tired, ready for sleep after the festivity of the day.

Looking back over the decades, I still feel affection for this kind of Christmas. Granted how middle-class it was, full of the rituals that others of our time, place, and economic station followed, our form of celebration had its own power.

We knew other children were not so blessed with material goods as we, but that did not stop us from being thankful for what we had been given.

From this celebration I received a palpable sense of God and God’s goodness. Because our Christmas celebrated events centered on Bethlehem so many centuries before, I learned feelings of awe, reverence, and love, qualities that mark all true religion. God was the source of abundance. He overflowed in love for us and in other gifts.

And the time felt holy. Christmas day made me and other family members feel ourselves to be in the presence of someone and some things different. This was more than human time.

Richard Griffin

“Oh, I will miss the world,” says the 76-year-old Protestant minister John Ames, the narrator and central figure in the celebrated new novel Gilead. Reverend Ames has  spent almost all his life in Gilead, Iowa; he now has an acute sense that he will die soon. At the behest of his much younger wife, Lila, he writes the story of his life for his son, six years old.

He feels an enhanced appreciation for the things of this world, along with a sense of impending loss. Something as simple as the memory of playing catch with his brother in his youth is enough to stir that love of life. He speaks of “that wonderful certainty and amazement when you know the glove is just where it should be.”

Marilynne Robinson, the author of Gilead, probably does not consider herself a spiritual writer. Nonetheless, this fine book comes filled with deep insight into the human soul and can be valued as a beautiful expression of spirituality.

In the novel, John Ames tells of his family, especially his grandfather and father, both ministers. He looks back over his own relationship to God and to the church that he has served for decades. His abiding friendship with a fellow minister named Boughton also enriches his life.

Of the child born to him when he was almost 70, John says: “The children of old age are unspeakably precious.”  Of course, as he would agree, all children are precious and should be cherished by their parents and others. But the joy of being gifted by God in this way goes beyond his power to express in words.

Yet he also remains aware that “any father, particularly an old father, must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God.” He takes as a model of trust the patriarch Abraham who had to be prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac, and actually sent his other son Ishmael off into the wilderness.

Another trait that characterizes John is his lively sense of the sacred. For objects to be seen as holy, as he envisions it, they must be set apart. That is why God set the Sabbath apart from other days so we can appreciate the holiness of every day and time itself.

That is also what God did with Adam and Eve in the garden: they are set apart as models of our father and mother whom we are commanded to honor. Honoring our parents, as Ames interprets it, is meant to teach us to honor every human being.

John envisions that his son in future years will be especially attentive to his mother and that, because of this, something marvelous will happen. “When you love someone to the degree that you love her,” John explains, “you see her as God sees her, and that is an instruction in the nature of God and humankind and of Being itself.”

This venerable minister speaks of feeling the sacred almost every time he baptizes a child. On those occasions, he senses a special presence in his hand. He refers to this mysterious contact, “that sacredness under my hand that I always do feel, that sense that the infant is blessing me.”

This aging man also has a deep sense of the church building as an altogether special environment. This space creates for John a silence and a sense of peace in which he finds spiritual satisfaction. He tells of going into his church during the night hours and simply sitting there, praying, watching for the dawn to come, but sometimes falling asleep.

Of this sacred space he writes: “It is though there were a hoard of silence in that room, as if any silence that ever entered that room stayed in it.” Of course, it helps that John is devoted to prayer, and finds it a powerful help for sustaining his inner life. Like every other human being, he knows times of loneliness, but prayer keeps those times from overcoming his spirit.

This devoted man considers God’s grace a dynamic force in the world. He envisions it “as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials.” For him, this free gift of divine love marks his whole life, making of it something precious and sacred.

Richard Griffin

When Elbert Cole’s wife, Virginia, was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, she hinted at suicide. But she and her husband quickly agreed that such an action would violate the values by which they had always lived.

Instead, Elbert made a deal with her. “Let’s split things up,” he said. “Your task is to enjoy life, mine to manage life. Let’s see who can do the best job with our part of the contract.” For almost two decades until her death in 1993, this is the way they cooperated.

Elbert Cole is a Methodist minister who lives in Kansas City, Missouri. In many parts of the country he is well known for his work in aging and spirituality. Among his major achievements, in 1972 he founded the Shepherd’s Centers of America, a network of nonprofit organizations that provide spiritually motivated services to older people.

Rev. Cole also deserves to be widely known for the creative way, over her last seventeen years, he provided care for the woman he married in 1939. His accounts of this experience show how valuable spiritual ideals are for the difficult challenge of attending to the needs of a person with this crippling illness.

Incidentally, Elbert does not stand against sending a person with Alzheimer’s into an institution. However, he saw it would be possible for him to integrate caregiving into the normal routine of life. Not everyone could do it this way but he shows the advantages of such an approach.

Elbert’s concept of caregiving is altogether special. “Caregiving is a partnership,” he writes. “The person receiving care is as much a part of that partnership as the caregiver, with each having a duty in the transaction.”

My friend Elbert was convinced that people with Alzheimer’s need to know they are loved and respected. To the extent possible they also need to be stimulated in body, mind and spirit. They should be included in the activities of daily life and even feel needed.

Elbert also believed that “stimulation was essential for the human spirit.”  He was convinced that this need remains even when a person suffers the cognitive damage that is characteristic of Alzheimer’s. He came to believe that this approach actually made caregiving easier than it would have been otherwise.

These challenging goals demand that the person receive much attention. That is what Elbert provided his wife each day, taking her on his round of professional duties and making sure that she was a part of everything as much as could be.

Thus, for example, when he would give a workshop he would place a chair next to him for Virginia or he would have her sit in the front row. She also would accompany her husband on his frequent travels around the country and be present at the events in which he took part. Determined not to allow their loving partnership to suffer, Elbert continued to involve Virginia in his regular schedule and the same lifestyle.

The couple’s two adult children also had a role. Their daughter, who lived in California, agreed to take responsibility for keeping her mother well groomed and instructed her father in how to manage dressing and hygiene. Their son, for his part, agreed to use his scientific know-how to research the latest findings on Alzheimer’s disease to recommend what treatment break-throughs might be discovered.

Albert has described in detail the ways in which he managed daily tasks for his wife. He worked out methods of dressing her, making her comfortable in bed each night, bathing, and toileting. The intimacy of their lives together took on a new intensity as her needs became more pressing.

When he put her to bed each night, Elbert would alternate saying the Twenty-Third Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer. This would help prepare her for a good night’s sleep and offered her the reassurance of a familiar ritual.

As he looks back on the seventeen-year experience, Elbert Cole does not regard himself as outstanding, much less heroic. Instead, he summarizes what most people would think a trial by fire as “no big deal, no burn out, no unbearable burden.”  To him it was all part of his human vocation, the contract of love between marriage partners that moved him to insure the personal dignity of his beloved wife right up to the end.

Richard Griffin

My friend Olivia has told me two stories in which she finds spiritual meaning. She shares them with enthusiasm because they continue to speak to her of a dimension of life that goes beyond the surface and touches mystery.

The first was told her by a woman named Carol who was feeling bereft at the death of her friend Priscilla. The latter had died ten days before and Carol was still gripped by a deep sense of loss. She had traveled to New Hampshire in the fall when the foliage was beautiful, with trees all around filled with varied colors.

As she was driving along the highway back toward Massachusetts, Carol experienced a strange sense of being called or pulled off the main route. In response to this summons, she turned aside and headed down a country road.

At a certain point, she got out of the car and walked through a meadow. Soon she came to a hill, climbed up and over it, and there before her was a pond. On the surface of the pond she saw swimming before her a single white swan.

Sitting down by the shore, she remained there for a long time, thinking about Priscilla, the person she loved. She felt a great closeness to this woman friend and, after a while, became convinced that the beautiful white swan was the spirit of Priscilla.

The second story has a similar theme. My friend Olivia was walking around a reservoir with a woman named Natalie, the daughter of a famous therapist. Natalie had just taken part in a meeting of professionals in her father’s field. That meeting was dedicated to his memory with people paying tribute to him for his pioneering accomplishments.

As they walked along, Natalie and Olivia noticed several woodpeckers in the trees above them. Seeing these birds continue to stay near, Natalie understood that their presence was connected with her father. Later, as they continued the walk, they noticed yet another woodpecker near them. Just then, the two friends burst out laughing.

Speaking about the two stories, Olivia says: “I just think there’s something there. These evidences of the spirit come through nature.”

The two experiences share certain features. Both bring a sense of connection with a loved one who has departed in death. They relieve the pain of loss felt by survivors and make the dead person’s memory sweet.

These experiences also have in common the bringing of the gift of peace. They induce a sense of reassurance, something like what the 14th century mystic Blessed Juliana of Norwich described when she wrote: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”  

In the second story, one special feature jumps out at you: the way the two women laughed. When the lone woodpecker appeared, it struck them as too much for a mere coincidence. Someone was trying to tell them something, they felt. And this was a hilarious, joy-inducing realization.

It would be a mistake to take these events too seriously. They are not revelations, strictly speaking, not God speaking directly to human beings. In order to preserve sanity, one must be wary of jumping to easy conclusions about the world of spirit.

On the other hand, they should not be taken too lightly either. Surveys have shown that large numbers of Americans have had mystical experiences. Events which give a sense of something beyond surface reality are important in the lives of many people and deserve serious attention.

Obviously, these stories can be interpreted in various ways. To find spiritual meaning in them, you almost surely need to be interested in spirituality and to have an orientation toward finding it in the world’s creatures. Without this sensitivity a person would simply see a swan and some woodpeckers without attaching any special significance to them.

To those of us who take a hardheaded view of the world, such human experiences will remain devoid of meaning beyond what appears to one’s eyes. A swan stays a swan, and woodpeckers keep on being birds. But, for spiritual seekers, nature can speak of a world where things point beyond themselves.

Richard Griffin