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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Griffin

The story of the Buddha and the way he discovered enlightenment is an ancient one, told countless times over many centuries. But when David Chernikoff narrates it, the story takes on new life.

I heard this deeply spiritual teacher speak in Denver at a conference devoted to the subject of aging. He is a psychotherapist based in Boulder, Colorado where he is connected with an organization called the Spiritual Eldering Institute.

Of medium height physically, this man has stature psychically, as his moving presentation proved. I found myself gently drawn to this person who clearly lives out his own teaching.

The workshop in which I took part aimed at transforming growing older into an experience filled with meaning. Too often older people are tempted to think of their own progress in years as a time without much positive significance. David Chernikoff is convinced that growing older can be a journey leading to enlightenment instead of a path to darkness and despair.

According to tradition, the prince Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha, was brought up in great wealth and comfort. The boy had servants waiting on him hand and foot, ready to do whatever he wished. Forty thousand dancing girls entertained him, his legend says, a sign of the opulence in which he lived.

His father, the king, was determined to protect his son from anything that would upset him. The evils of the world were banished from the boy’s sight; all he knew was upbeat, with nothing negative allowed to come to his attention.

The time came, however, when the young man wanted to see something of the world outside. His father reluctantly allowed him to go for a ride into the countryside but first sent servants out to prepare the way. They strewed flower petals along the paths the boy would follow and tried to make sure that his chariot would not come near any disturbing sights.

Despite these careful precautions, however, the young prince encountered four sights that were completely new to him and deeply unsettling. The first messenger was an old man, stooped over with age and moving with difficulty.

Next, Gautama saw another man, this one not old but afflicted with disease. This, too, came as a shock to the prince because no one like this had ever been admitted to the palace precincts.

Third, the young man came upon a corpse being carried to cremation, a new sight to a person never before acquainted with death.

Finally, the chariot carrying the prince encountered a monk who was begging his way across the landscape. That anyone would walk around with only the bare necessities was yet another new sight, another step in the prince’s education.

After this, Gautama’s life could never be the same. He soon left the palace and sat beneath a tree meditating upon the great truths that he had seen embodied. Never again could he live ignorant of old age, sickness, death, and poverty.

He went on to achieve enlightenment or what the Buddhists call nirvana, contact with the deepest reality. By contemplating the four messengers he learned who he himself was, and established contact with his own soul. In time, many people would become his disciples, these others also in search of their true identity.

In telling the classic story of the Buddha, David Chernikoff was suggesting that contemplation of these themes can “radically transform our experience of growing older.” At the same time, he helped us “to explore the nature of that which grows old and the nature of that which is timeless.”

This teacher spoke simply and, it seemed, directly from the heart. Basically serious, he nevertheless brought to his presentation a lively sense of the comic and sometimes evoked laughter from us in attendance.

At the same time, he urged us to apply the truths about the messengers to our own lives. “There is a time in our lives when we are visited by these heavenly messengers,” he asserted. Then he led us in an exercise by which we reflected on those crucial occasions.

He suggested that we ask two questions: “How did your experience of yourself change? “What did you learn about yourself and the world?”

Confronting openly the various messengers that come into our life, he suggested, is the best way to approach enlightenment,.

Richard Griffin

Among the films nominated for this year’s Academy Award for Best Picture, my choice would have been “In the Bedroom.” It ultimately lost out to “A Beautiful Mind” but I still prefer this film. Incidentally, the title refers, not to human sleeping quarters, but rather to the compartment on a fishing boat in which lobsters are placed before being sold.

My reason for favoring “In the Bedroom” was not only the memorable performances of Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson as parents of the young man who is murdered, nor the film’s engrossing plot with its suspense and surprising conclusion. Nor did I favor it because of its New England setting – – a small coastal town in Maine. To me it was the spiritual themes raised by this movie that made it altogether special.

Such themes would not surprise anyone familiar with the stories of the late Andre Dubus. This Haverhill-based writer often dealt with the spiritual implications of human predicaments, memorably so because he was such a skilled artist. As the Atlantic Monthly once said of him, “Dubus is the sort of writer who instructs the heart.”

One of his stories, called “Killings,” provided the inspiration of this fine film. This story does not rank as one of Dubus’s major narratives, but it contains the seed of good art transferable to another medium.

For identifying and analyzing two of the spiritual themes I am indebted to the film critic of Commonweal, Rand Richards Cooper. His excellent review of “In the Bedroom” appeared in January and stimulated me to reflect on the film’s meaning.

The first theme that Cooper helped me appreciate is related to the comfortable atmosphere in which the parents live. They are good people who live a life marked by “the comfortable harmonies of happy middle age.” Their work – – he is a doctor, she is a school choir director – – satisfies them and makes them revered in their small-town Maine community.

The violence that soon breaks out destroys this idyllic harmony and  shatters an illusion. That illusion, in the words of the critic, is “that we can indeed earn happiness.” Instead of counting happiness a gift, the parents, Matt and Ruth Fowler, think it the product of their own efforts.

Who does not welcome the idea that we deserve the happiness we work to achieve? This is an illusion that comforts everyone who experiences it. But spirituality would suggest otherwise, that happiness is surprisingly rare and, again, arrived at by gift rather than by personal achievement.

In time, things fall apart, much to the anguish of Ruth and Matt. In superbly acted scenes, they bitterly accuse one another of negligence in the death of their son. It is painful to watch a couple, formerly so close, become vindictive against each other, making their horrendous loss even worse.

Analyzing this sequence, the critic Cooper points out how grief such as the parents’ over the loss of their son can distort everything. The ordinary ways in which they have related to one another over many years of marriage are suddenly painfully twisted out of shape. We learn how destructively people can act toward one another, what terrible accusations they can make against loved ones when they are overwhelmed by grief.

Part of the power in this section of the film comes from the realization of us viewers that grief in those circumstances could do the same thing to us. As Cooper says: “‘In the Bedroom’ does what good art always does with awful predicaments: You feel the dread of knowing not only that this could be you, but that it would be.”

Without giving away the ending of the film, I can identify yet another powerful spiritual theme. Violence does not solve anything. Revenge leaves the avenger where he was before except that it makes things worse. Whatever the provocation, one cannot bring back victims of violence by murdering murderers. Vengeance cannot restore things to what they once were.

This film is surely not for everyone; most of us have to be in a special mood to confront such hard truths. But marvelous acting and skilled direction have made this a movie you can feel passionate about and at the same time prize for what it says about human life.

Richard Griffin

Sometimes the world seems to have gone mad. Terrorists threaten the lives of innocent people; fanatics with explosives strapped to their waists blow themselves to pieces, killing as many bystanders as possible; Muslims and Hindus are at one another’s throats in India and each side fears mortal mayhem; 150 thousand residents of Swaziland may starve to death; children all over the earth face abuse from adults, even those they trust most.

These are only a few items from a catalogue of evils menacing members of the human family. Newspapers, radio, and television each day report yet more violence unleashed against people in every nation of the world. For altogether too many of us, the world is a place dangerous to body and soul.

In the face of such evils, realistically minded people have little reason for optimism. It is hard to believe that things are going to get better; instead, evidence suggests they may well get worse. Fearful weapons, if let loose, could destroy civilization; the fabric of the earth could be mortally wounded if the environment suffers further damage. If there ever was a good time to be an optimist it surely is not now.

However, despite this grim recital, there is reason for hope. By contrast with optimism, hope goes beyond the evidence and expects good things to happen. Hope springs eternal, the old saying goes, because it comes from something deep inside the human heart. We keep wanting things to turn out well, even when it looks as if they cannot.

Passover and Easter, the most important Jewish and Christian feasts, are all about hope. These celebrations confirm our human instinct to want things to turn out well. They are built on hope and summon people in the community of faith to deepen hope and to live by it. Their central theme is that God can do what human beings cannot.

Passover focuses on the Hebrew people’s rescue from slavery in Egypt and deliverance into the Promised Land. Moses is the leader who pushes his people through the desert and tries to keep up their spirits despite disappointments and frustrations. He does not allow the complaints of the people he leads to turn him away from his God-given mission.

Through the centuries the Jewish people continue to celebrate this great deliverance and arrival. Through the Seder meal, they recognize ritually the great love that God has for them, love that sets them free. Each year the great events are recalled and made present with all their spiritual challenges.

Though not myself a member of that faith community, I will have the privilege of talking part in the Seder again this year, thanks to an invitation from a much valued friend. I will sit down with members of his family and other friends as our host leads us in the prayers and ritual meal that calls us all to stir up our hope in God.

Similarly, when I gather with members of my own family and other friends this Easter day, we will be celebrating hope.  All seemed lost for us, too; Jesus suffered the worst kind of death; the disciples were scattered and depressed. But the Lord’s rising from the dead brought hope alive and gave believers in him cause for rejoicing.

Both Passover and Easter celebrate a passage from death to life. Each of them calls community members themselves to pass from slavery into freedom so as to live hopefully as the children of God.

These two feasts are much more subtle than Christmas and Hanukkah. These rites of spring are summons to maturity, to living as adults seizing the liberties belonging to those who have grown in faith. Entering into each passing over, that from the desert to the promised Land and that from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, calls for spiritual transformation. Fully accepted, these invitations can transform us into people who live by hope.

The world does not look at all promising. But two great faith traditions assure us that God is greater than the world. The data suggest that the world will continue to experience disaster as human beings prey on one another. But when believers pray to the God of hope, we can go far beyond mere human calculation.

Richard Griffin

Why have so few people discovered genuine happiness? How can we change our lives so as to find more satisfaction?

These are questions of prime concern to Father Basil Pennington, Cistercian priest and abbot of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit monastery in Conyers, Georgia.

Members of my family and I talked with this spiritual leader recently at Harvard University. He had come there as this year’s Lenten preacher, talking about prayer and other approaches to the life of faith.  

Tall and imposing, Father Basil has a face expressive of the peace and joy by which he lives. The white beard that frames his face gives him the look of a prophet, one with spiritual authority. He has written 70 books, at least one of them selling over one million copies.

From his vantage point at the monastery, Father Pennington sees many visitors who are looking for something more than life has yet given them. Many of them have achieved success in business or the other professions but, still, they are unsatisfied. They have a sense that what is happening in their life does not go far enough; there has to be something more.

“Happiness consists in knowing what you want and then knowing you have it or you’re on the way to getting it,” the abbot believes. Speaking of himself and fellow Christians he says, “If we want to be effective ministers of the good news, we have to have found it ourselves.”

Asked about those who have found the religious training of their youth more of a hindrance than a help, the abbot judges this unfortunately true of most people. Religion is taken to be a duty rather than a joy and God is portrayed as a stern taskmaster handing down loads of do’s and don’ts.

False images of God harm the spiritual life of too many Christians. These images run counter to the way Jesus speaks of God. Jesus emphasizes friendship with himself, and the Christian tradition at its best places this kind of intimacy with the Lord close to the heart of its message.

Father Basil relishes the stories by which Jesus tells about God’s love. These narratives are filled with poetry and myth that lead beyond themselves. The parable of the Prodigal Son, along with many such other stories, shows forth the personal love that God feels for his sons and daughters.

To hear such stories deeply, people must let go of what Father Basil calls “the narrow perimeter of their listening,” and it helps to listen to them the way children do when they keep enjoying the same story. He mentioned a child who has seen “The Lion King” 22 times without its wonder having worn off.

The best way to begin praying, the abbot advises, is to take up the ancient practice of Lectio Divina or Holy Reading. That means opening the Bible or other sacred text and reading it slowly and reflectively. In time this practice can become a source of light and peace.

As for people who fear getting old, Father Pennington has words of consolation. Since becoming abbot, he has grown familiar with old age: six of his monks are in their nineties and are not yet ready to give up. “All my guys want to live to be 100,” he reports with a laugh.

Using a traditional image, he compares life on earth to living in our mother’s womb. No one should want to keep on living in the womb; we need to break out into eternal life. Death can be a terrible experience but, if we have a deep confidence in the Lord, we understand death as a passage to a fuller life.

When we suffer the losses of old age, the great challenge is to “sanctify our diminishments.” This we can do by uniting ourselves with Christ in his passion. You have to discern what is being asked of you now. “God gives you not only the wisdom but the grace to handle it,” says the abbot.

He tells of suffering a minor stroke a few years ago that left him with only a fragile balance. This weakness serves him as a reminder of his dependence on God. While visiting Harvard, he fell in his apartment and, for a time, lay helplessly on the floor. Within his soul he turned to God and said, “Lord, I get the message.”

Richard Griffin

To meet with Richard John Neuhaus is to be in the presence of a man who has come back from the dead. In his latest book, “As I Lay Dying,” Father Neuhaus tells of lying in a coma and being ready to depart this world, when he heard a familiar voice calling his name.

“Richard, wiggle your nose,” was the message coming from his friend, Cardinal John O’Connor, the late archbishop of New York. Breaking out of his utter immobility, the patient managed to obey and eventually, against all odds, to recover.

This near-death experience has transformed the life of Father Neuhaus. He now lives “against the horizon of death,” a way of life that may not sound attractive to the average person. However, to this man of the spirit it comes as liberating.

Thanks to his faith in God, Father Neuhaus has found peace through confronting death. He considers living without illusions as the best way to live and he values death as “the last encounter when you have no illusions.”

For him, death also brings believers like himself to share the experience of  Jesus on the cross. Through faith, a person enters into the same dark night of suffering in order to pass over into new life. “Letting all that happen,” he says, “if you don’t enter in you’re always going to have the suspicion that you’re kidding yourself.”

Though he considers death a humiliation when “all the things that you thought were your projects of consequence are brought low,” facing it can give a person enormous freedom. Those who have accepted it and yet, like him, have returned from the brink, “have a much more electric and heightened sense of the mystery of existence.”

If what this priest says about death suggests a dour personality, it is misleading. This is a man who laughs and enjoys life in other ways.

He readily admits sometimes losing the intense focus connected with his experience of death. “There are days and moments when I am not living on the cutting edge of spiritual and psychic consciousness,” he says lightheartedly. “I want to relax, have a drink before dinner, and enjoy idle chatter with friends.”

The difference is that he has gone through an experience that has transformed everything. In fact it has made life more precious than it had been before. In “As I Lay Dying,” Father Neuhaus details what it was like to undergo several surgeries for cancer and to come so close to dying.

Two days after he was moved out of intensive care, he had a startling experience that still carries great meaning for him. During the night he saw blue and purple drapery and near it two “presences.” Whoever these presences were (possibly angels, he thinks), they then delivered a message to him: “Everything is ready now.” Since that time this sober and thoughtful man continues to reflect on this mysterious experience, sifting it for meaning.

What anchors him in his new life is his confidence in God. “We are loved unqualifiedly,” he says of the Creator’s regard for him and every other human being.

As to the rest of his life, he feels that God has not yet finished with him. “There are all kinds of things I think I want to do,” he explains. For the problem of not having enough time, he takes as guide what William Temple, an archbishop of Canterbury, heard from his father: “William, you have all the time there is.”

Father Neuhaus believes in taking each of his days as they come, finding God’s love for him at each step. He loves a saying of Pope John XXIII: “Every day is a good day to be born and a good day to die.”

The prayers that Father Neuhaus offers at the end of each day are two in particular. The first, “Now I lay me down to sleep,” expresses a childlike confidence in God. The second, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,” suggests an abandonment of self such as Jesus made on the cross.

The theology of abandonment, neglected by the Christian churches in recent times, can prove a rich source of spiritual blessing, this priest believes. Instead of denying death, the person praying recognizes its inevitability and finds this fact the entrance point into truth and new life.

Richard Griffin

The times in prayer most satisfying to me are those moments when I forget that I am praying. These are the intervals when I feel caught up in God and am enabled to disregard myself. So precious do these happenings seem to me that I regard them as pure gift.

Unfortunately these blissful times occur in my prayer life too rarely. Too often, most of the period I set aside for prayer is marked by struggle to stay focused. Sometimes that means trying to keep distractions from taking over my psyche; at other times it means fighting to stay awake. As a result, getting lost in prayer is by no means a common experience in my spiritual life.

In recent years, I have identified a remedy for these problems. The remedy, however, is easier to understand than it is to put into practice. Incorporating it into my daily prayer may require greater spiritual maturity than I currently have. But that will not stop me from trying.

This remedy is to cultivate intention rather than placing so much importance on attention. Increasingly I am convinced that what counts in prayer is wanting to be in touch with God. That desire is pleasing to God, I believe, and has been implanted in us by God.

Seen in this light, distractions become irrelevant. It makes no difference that unwelcome thoughts flit across the screen of our minds. The intention to raise our hearts and minds to the divine being can remain steadfast throughout the periods when we have lost focus. The bother of ideas, memories, imaginings that come unbidden does not hurt our prayer; we can even fall asleep without ruining our good intentions.

To check my ideas about prayer with someone better informed, I consulted Sister Kay Hannigan, member of a Catholic religious congregation. Sister Kay expressed general agreement with my approach saying “One of the key things in people’s relationship with God is the question of what they really want.” And , if they really want to be in touch with God in prayer, that goes far to make prayer effective.

This view of prayer, I realize, can seem to go against a spiritual value that many people greatly esteem nowadays. Buddhists, especially, give the practice of mindfulness a central place in their spiritual practice. Other people do also and mindfulness is often urged as a method for breakthroughs to a deeper life for the soul.

Sharon Salzberg, a writer found on the Internet website called Beliefnet, says “Mindfulness is the quality of fullness of attention, immediacy, non-distraction.” And in many areas of life I much value this approach because it makes living so much richer. It can make of ordinary actions such as eating a pear or tying a shoelace a vibrant experience.

But I still do not regard mindfulness as central to prayer. For me, prayer’s most important quality is what you intend, not your concentration of mind. I am willing to admit, however, that I may have given to mindfulness less than its due.

Sister Kay suggests that intention and mindfulness are more closely related than I would have thought. “Mindfulness can play into desire,” she explains. The desire for a conscious relationship with God, she feels, brings the two qualities together.

“Time spent in getting to know God is important,” according to Sister Kay, “and everyone does this in a different way.”

In this brief discussion about prayer, I have probably put too much emphasis on human activity. By contrast, many spiritual traditions, including my own, give priority to God’s initiative in prayer. God is the one who stirs up in us the desire to be in contact with Him/Her. Our praying should be seen as a response to the activity of God’s spirit within us.

In this column, I have been talking primarily about meditative or contemplative prayer. Spoken prayer, either in the liturgy or in private, has some different characteristics.

However, even in prayer that relies on words, intention is the most important consideration. The many distractions I experience during the Eucharistic liturgy on Sundays, for instance, do not ultimately make much difference. The reason I have come to church is my desire to be in contact with God and that hope continues to carry me all during the Mass.

Richard Griffin