A Wall Street broker named Jamie can stand as one emblem for this New Year, 2002. At age 45, he has decided to give up his profession, move out of the city, and find another line of work. For him, it is time to simplify his life and redirect himself away from the money chase.

The motor for such far-reaching change in his life has been the horrific events of September 11. From the windows of his office, Jamie saw the World Trade Center towers collapse with their catastrophic loss of life and witnessed from a distance the chaos in the streets below. These sights had enough power to reorient his values so that he now wants a lifestyle that brings him closer to what counts most in the long run.

Of course, not everybody will draw the same conclusions from the events of that fateful September day. Some people will change their spiritual orientation without stepping away from their jobs or their current residences. And others of us will simply let the events to wear off in time and go on as we were before.

But Jamie and others like him will take the catastrophes of this autumn as a signal for dramatic transformation of their lives. For them, the year 2002 promises to bring new selves as they break with old patterns of work and living.

New Year, as a rite of passage, has long been seen as an opportunity for change. This passage has the power to make people believe they can transform their behavior. That is why some of us still make resolutions designed to improve our conduct. Even if we have a long record of failure in trying to keep past resolutions, our hopes spring up again and we become convinced that the coming year can be different from the past.

Spiritual traditions support the New Year as a time to start over. God, the compassionate and merciful one, invites his creatures to begin again, to become faithful rather than continue to wander away from the right paths. No matter how far we have betrayed ourselves and others, God will take us back.

The notion of metanoia in Greek, of changing one’s mentality, remains basic to the spiritual life of believers. It is never too late to change, to repent, to set out anew.

For some of us, the invitation to change might mean, not making our behavior more moral and generous, but rather allowing ourselves to enjoy the beauty of the world and the beauty of human life more than we have in years past. A model for this change is the 90 year old poet and writer Czeslaw Milosz, a native of Poland and now an American citizen who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980.

In an essay called “Happiness” written in recent years, he describes what it can be like to find intense happiness in the world of nature. After visiting a valley in Lithuania where his grandparents once lived he wrote:

“I was looking at a meadow. Suddenly the realization came that during my years of wandering I had searched in vain for such a combination of leaves and flowers as was here and that I have always been yearning to return. Or, to be precise, I understood this

after a huge wave of emotion had overwhelmed me, and the only name I can give it now would be – bliss.”

Allowing ourselves to be happy could amount to a breakthrough worth much. Opening ourselves up to the experience of bliss, as the poet did, can be precious. Czeslaw Milosz does so even though in his lifetime he witnessed the horrors that were done to the people of his native Poland. From those fearsome years he has developed a proper pessimism about human beings left to themselves.

But he believes in God as the one who can rescue us from ourselves. Author and critic John Updike calls him “a believer full of reasonable doubts” and admires Milosz’s affirmation of the whole person, heart and soul.

Perhaps, therefore, the Polish poet and the Wall Street stockbroker can serve as inspiration for New Year 2002. They both are acquainted with horror and the coldly irrational instinct to murder one’s fellow human beings on a mass scale. But they are also seekers seizing the new opportunities to find their bliss.

Richard Griffin

Four years ago, when my daughter was a freshman in college, she helped set one of her instructors straight about Christmas. The teacher, a skilled writer who also knew how to improve the writing of her students, had asserted that Christmas was the most important day of the Christian year. My daughter and some of her classmates tactfully informed the instructor otherwise: they remembered that the Church regards Easter as the more important of the two feasts.

The students, of course, were right. In Christian tradition, Easter, as the feast of the Resurrection, has always loomed largest in the Church year and the most basic of the church’s teachings about Jesus. Without the rising of Jesus from the tomb, Christianity loses its meaning.

However, a case can be made for the instructor’s point of view. That is because the Church has trumped itself. It has collaborated in allowing Christmas to become much more popular than Easter. At least in Western nations, December 25 is a time of exuberant celebration far outdoing the paschal observance in the spring of each year. Only a relatively few people get excited about the approach of Easter, whereas Christmas produces a frenzy of preparation among large populations.

Christmas displays the genius of Christianity as a faith tradition. Ultimately the brilliance of the Bethlehem event comes from everyone loving an infant. Hardly anyone of us can resist the charm and promise of a newborn baby. You do not need a complex theology to feel attraction to the scene of the Nativity: all you need do is look at a Christmas crib with its cast of characters: the infant, his parents, the shepherds, the angels, and, ultimately, the three kings.

But the child Jesus retains the central position. His arrival is the reason for all of these characters, and all who share the Christian faith with them. In that faith, he is not merely a helpless child but also a divine person who has become a human being. And, most important to faith, in doing so Jesus has enabled human beings to take on some of God’s own life.

In making these statements about Christmas, I am aware, of course, of two important facts that must qualify what has been said. First, other faith traditions have compelling events and colorful experiences that stir millions of people who are not Christian. Stories about Moses, Mohammed, the Buddha, and others excite them to admiration and provide inspiration. One of the important religious developments of our time is the growing interest many Christians have taken in spiritual traditions not their own.

And, secondly, the commercialization of Christmas remains deeply troubling to many Christians. That American culture invests so much economic hope in this festival strikes many of us as a perversion of a spiritual event. Ironically, Christmas provokes such a mad rush of shopping that its very purpose, to bring peace of soul and universal love, is too often frustrated.

To appreciate the spiritual value of Christmas requires some break with feverish rounds of activity. If we cannot find time for at least some moments of contemplation, it is doubtful that the meaning of this season will penetrate to our hearts.

That message of “peace on earth, goodwill to women and men” certainly comes to a world in need of it this year. What a contrast that message makes with the hatred contained in Osama Bin Laden’s videotape revealed to the world last week! In that scene he spewed forth feelings of delight in evil that shocked even people hardened to the abundant atrocities of our time.

One can perhaps hope that this Christmas will be different. The signs are all around us that values are changing. A Wall Street stockbroker named Jamie is going to retire at age 45 because he wants to do other things with his life. At a party last week he told of looking out the window of his office and seeing the towers come down. Now he wants work that will give him access to values that are not merely economic.

Thomas, a young German computer specialist who lived next door to me, decided this fall to move back home. The events of September gave him a new appreciation of home, family, and friends.

These and other signs of change have spiritual meaning that can find support in what Christmas celebrates. They come together to support our continuing hope for better times to come.

Richard Griffin

“God, You who know all that is hidden,
You who speak with compassion,
don’t hide from us the errors of our wrong pursuits—
nor reveal to us the lack within the good we try to do,
lest we become disgusted and lose the heart
to journey on this Path.”

This prayer comes from the hand of the poet Jalal Ud-din Rumi, who lived in the 13th century. He founded an order in the Sufi tradition of Islam and wrote poetry that is much prized today. In fact, Rumi is known to be one of the most popular poets in contemporary America.

Two days from this date, Rumi enthusiasts will mark the 728th anniversary of his death. Ever since the year 1273, members of his order have kept the day of his death as a festival to celebrate his life and work.

This great Muslim mystic wrote in Persian, a language not accessible to most Americans. But even in translation his words have the power to move readers along in their search for God. In reading the poem quoted above, I felt spiritually uplifted by what the writer chose to pray for.

Two sentiments expressed here strike me with special force. The first is the request for God not to hide from us “the errors of our wrong pursuits.” It is so easy for human beings to be carried headlong by strong desires and by illusions about what is good for us. We should not want to be shielded from our own foolishness but rather to become aware of it and face it.

A second prayerful request is for God not to reveal to us “the lack in the good that we try to do.” This petition impresses me as especially wise since it shows the poet’s desire to be spared knowing how imperfect his efforts to do good really remain.

Rumi clearly knows what Jesus also taught, namely that only one is good and that one is God. All other things, including our attempts to put into practice God’s will, remain flawed and imperfect.

The trouble with becoming aware of the defects in even our best actions, Rumi recognizes, is that this awareness of imperfection can easily ruin our morale. Hardly anyone of us has the inner strength to endure knowing how imperfect our actions really are.

For God to shield us from this realization with regard to our actions is compassionate. It frees us to continue on the spiritual path without being overcome by discouragement. Were we to sense that everything we do, even the best of our actions, are riddled with imperfection, that might make the spiritual life odious to us and incline us to drop out of the spiritual struggle.

This truth applies to our efforts to pray. Placing too much importance on the deficiencies in our prayer – – the distractions and restlessness – – could easily lead us to give it up altogether. What counts most in prayer is our desire to be in contact with God rather than our actually succeeding in staying focused on God.

Similarly, imagining that whenever we reach out to others in need our intentions should be entirely pure is also unrealistic. It is only human to have mixed motives, helping another person sometimes because we see some advantage for ourselves. Good works, after all, often bring us rewards and that is no reason for avoiding them.

In his prayer, Rumi indicates the importance of not becoming disgusted and of not losing heart. The Path and the journey hold most importance, as he sees it. The difficulty of this challenge, what a modern poet, Anne Sexton, has called “the awful rowing toward God,” should not be allowed to turn us aside.

At this time of world tension connected with the perverted use of some religious traditions, it comes as a consolation to find Rumi. He was born in Afghanistan and his mysticism came from the religious lore in which he was steeped from his earliest years. He drew inspiration from the Qur’an and the other sacred traditions of Islam.

As one writer has said of him, “If there is any general idea underlying Rumi’s poetry, it is the absolute love of God.” That love emerges forcibly from the poem discussed here and can inspire spiritual seekers everywhere.

Richard Griffin

How can God allow evil to flourish in the world he has created good? Why do awful things happen to fine people? Is there any way of explaining such monstrous evil as the Holocaust and the other murderous atrocities of our time?

Questions like these assail people of faith now as they have for thousands of years. The issues they raise find classic expression in the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible and reappear whenever evil strikes again.

Last week Boston College and the Atlantic Monthly assembled a panel of writers to discuss the subject “Evil: the Artist’s Response.” Christopher Lydon served as moderator, while three writers – – Kathleen Norris, Joyce Carol Oates, and Nathan Englander –  – shared their thoughts with a large audience in Boston.

I found the symposium disappointing because only one of the writers spoke to the subject with recognizable wisdom, though she, too, did not do so consistently. Even in response to questions, the three failed to meet my expectations of spiritual insight.

On reflection, I consider the subject ill advised. Evil is too abstract a notion for most people to talk about. Successful authors can presumably devise fictional characters who embody evil but that does not mean they can talk about the subject intelligently. And surely the panel needed a philosopher and a theologian to speak to this admittedly difficult topic.

Kathleen Norris, author of The Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace, among other books, brought to the discussion an element that I consider indispensable –  – reliance on a spiritual tradition. She has had long association with the Benedictine monks whose monastery is near her home in South Dakota. Extended stays and shorter visits with these men have given her access to a Benedictine spirituality that dates from the sixth century and has proved valuable for her own inner life.

From this tradition, she has learned to value the wisdom in the monks’ daily life and in the Psalms that they recite in common. Each day, the Benedictines also say the “Our Father” together because they are aware of their own need for forgiveness.

Living with other people, each individual monk knows that, almost despite himself, he gives offense to his brothers. As one monk told her, “I have to attend to the evil in my own heart.”

Norris quoted approvingly a dictum that brought the laughter of recognition from audience members: “Living with others is the only asceticism that most people need.”

As to the Psalms, they show human beings as we really are. For example, they often express the desire for revenge, a human emotion laden with evil. These realistic prayers enable us to get away from what Norris calls “the litany of self-justification that pervades our culture.”

Norris also noted with approval a theme in one of Joyce Carol Oates’s novels: “any creative encounter with evil demands that we not distance ourselves from evil.” To anyone who thinks of evil as apart from human beings, Norris recommends Psalm 36, a prayer that does not, however, stay fixed on evil. The theme of the last two verses is expressed in the line: “How precious is your steadfast love, O God.”

Summing up the message of the Psalms, Norris gets to the heart of the matter. “The main thing they offer is that God is still a mystery.” This comes close to the response to evil given by many spiritual seekers. We do not understand but we trust in the God of love.

In my view, evil is too profound to be answered by a single individual. A spiritual tradition must be invoked for help in wrestling with this fact of life. Though many people regard it as excessively negative in its view of human beings, I myself have always found light in the traditional teaching about original sin. No matter how we try to get away from it, there is something terribly askew in human life.

The central Christian tradition sees Christ as freely accepting the evil of an agonizing death on the cross. In this faith, God in the person of his son, is willing to take upon himself the human condition with all of its suffering and the ultimate sacrifice of earthly life.

This, of course, does not explain why evil is at work in the world but it says that even God has been willing to undergo evil for the redemption of the human family.

Richard Griffin

My friend’s body lay on a simple bed, with two chairs beside it for visitors. His body was dressed in a brown robe given him, years ago in France, by the Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh when this monastic leader ordained him an elder spiritual teacher.

Eyes closed, mouth slightly ajar, grayish-white beard and hair abundant, hands folded, my friend was there in the living room of his home where he and other members of our prayer group had gathered so many times for meditation. He faced out toward the back yard and garden which had formed the beautiful backdrop to our sessions together. Now Hob, as we called him, had left us behind, dying peacefully in his own home at age 78 as Thanksgiving Day began.  

I came and sat beside the bed for a few minutes of silent prayer, gazing at Hob’s body and the quiet scene. On a small stand behind his head was a photo of the ordination ceremony; flowers graced the same stand, as did a statue of the Buddha and incense. Often in our prayer group we had employed similar props for their part in creating an atmosphere of peace.

Hob was among the most peaceful men I have ever known. He brought to daily life an inner spirit that made him rewarding to be with. Even when he was troubled by the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, Hob inspired in his friends a awareness of our depths.

Fortunately, he died early enough in the progress of this disease to have escaped its worst effects. When it damaged his capacity for short-term memory, he relied on family and friends to supplement his efforts to remember. “She is my memory,” he used to say, turning toward his beloved wife of many years.

Hob was the first person who ever indicated to me himself that he had Alzheimer’s. Years ago, he approached me and asked if I could recommend a support group for a person with this disease. I could and did, as I suddenly became aware that he was asking for himself.

Characteristic of this man’s spirituality was its breadth and openness to all traditions. Just as he looked to Thich Nhat Hanh for guidance, he also found great  inspiration in a Catholic monk living in India. Father Bede Griffiths, an English Benedictine, had established an ashram in his adopted country and lived there like a Hindu holy man.

Hob visited him in India several times, spent many days with him, and learned much for his spiritual life. His interest in spirituality, however, could never be satisfied with just one teacher. He also had an audience with the Dalai Lama and, read widely in the doctrine of other traditions, and experimented with many different forms of prayer.

Seeing Hob’s body stirred in me thoughts too deep for adequate expression. I thought of the verses from Psalm 104: “When you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.” But as a person with hope I also focused on the following verse: “When you send forth your spirit, they are created and you renew the face of the ground.”

Lines from Shakespeare also came to mind. Hamlet speaks of death as “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” I think of Hob’s departure as a journey and believe it a trip toward a fuller life. But that is an area filled with mystery, that many spiritual people are content simply to contemplate with wonder.

Without the power to express it so profoundly, I have never been able since my teenage years to contemplate death without awe. Nor have I ever been able to think that death is the end of our existence. To me, it has always seemed that there is no way in which the richness of a human being could be ultimately lost.

That is my instinct, confirmed by faith. Surely Hob will also live on, not merely in the hearts of his wife and other family members; we too, his friends, will continue to cherish him. We will remember the graceful ways by which he shared his life with us and especially the courage he showed when faced with a terrible disease and in his ultimate decline.

How can we forget his gentle presence and the subtle power of his life lived in the search for light, for meaning, for God?

Richard Griffin

At a national conference in which I took part last week in Chicago, two of my colleagues, professionals in the field of aging, failed to arrive. They had registered and planned to make presentations but, according to report, decided not to risk air travel. Presumably the crash of the airbus in Queens two weeks ago had stirred in them enough fear of flying to make them cancel their travel plans.

I report this news, not in any spirit of superiority or blame, but rather because the feelings of these two people are so widely shared. My own emotions were upset by the latest airline disaster and I felt tempted to stay in the safety of my home rather than trust to what felt like unfriendly skies.

In this Thanksgiving season, perhaps fear itself is our greatest spiritual enemy. If this sentiment echoes the words spoken by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the depth of the Depression, then it shows how important his warning was then and remains now.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” said the president with awareness of how debilitating that fear could be to a whole nation. For the individual also, fear can paralyze the will to act and damage one’s psyche.

Spiritual tradition teaches that fear wars against the soul. It is best resisted by cultivating love. “Perfect love casts out fear,” writes John the Evangelist, giving classical expression to this Christian doctrine. Part of loving God is trusting that we will find ultimate shelter in divine protection.

The love that casts out fear finds confirmation in all the gifts for which we give thanks each Thanksgiving. The crisis atmosphere of this tragic autumn makes recognition of these gifts all the more important. As a friend who is a religious sister writes in an email: “I know we appreciate this family time more than ever in these post 9/11 days.”

I feel blessed in having two Thanksgiving celebrations, one in the midst of my family, the other based in my neighborhood. In both of them, I feel strongly motivated to recognize the gifts we have received and for giving thanks for them.

When my family members gather, we will recognize the long life given to some of us, the good health most of us have enjoyed, and, especially, the warm personal relationships among us all. I count it perhaps the greatest blessing that we all are on the best of terms with one another and enjoy each other’s company.

We have not escaped sorrowful events. Our nephew Gregory died some two years ago in an accident that still saddens us all. Only the memory of his life and the gifts that he brought to us by his presence for nineteen years bring us consolation. Holding our Thanksgiving dinner in his New Hampshire home, we will be moved to give thanks for that time when he lived among us and to feel intense gratitude for Greg’s personality.

We remember others who helped build our family: the parents and grandparents, the aunts and uncles and cousins of us who are now ourselves adults in our middle and later years. It has become a joyful ritual to recall their lives with all the gifts of personality they brought to our clan.

When members of our urban neighborhood assemble to share a turkey dinner at the local public school, relationships of a different kind will move us to celebration. Here we do not have the same intimacy as members of the same family but we do take pleasure in one another’s company. Just as each family group or individual brings food, or prepares turkeys provided by our neighborhood association, we recognize the share that each person makes to our civic community.

Here we find reason to be thankful for our city, for our nation, for the blessings that we enjoy as Americans together. In this gathering, we too will be minus one. A local resident named John was a passenger on the first of the planes to crash into one of the World Trade Center towers.

I like to think that these two gatherings, marked by familial and, to some degree, community love, will help cast out the fear so widespread at this time in history. To the extent that we care about one another, to that extent we will strike a blow against the fear that can damage the soul.

Richard Griffin

Assemble a group of distinguished American artists, most of them based in New York City, and ask them to reflect on the disaster of September eleventh. That is what Harvard University did last week with results that ranged from the insightful all the way down to the banal.

The session went to prove that artists, like the rest of us, find it difficult to understand the spiritual meaning of the terrorist attack. They may be excellent in their own specialty but laying hold of wisdom is hard for them, too.

Playwright John Guare found the most important lesson was to continue his work. “All we can do,” he said, “is to keep doing what we are doing.” So Guare returned to completing a play that he had left unfinished, but now has readied for an opening in the spring. “The fact that I was writing I found sacred.”

Novelist and short-story writer Jamaica Kincaid, born in the island nation of Antigua but now an American citizen, asked herself if she should renounce that citizenship. This was her reaction to the United States’ bombing of Afghanistan. “Lots of people in Afghanistan are as innocent as those in New York City,” she proclaimed.

Singer James Taylor cautioned against drawing conclusions too soon, before we have a chance to develop perspective. “The rush for a consensus reality,” he warned, “ is inappropriate. It takes a while to find out what it is.”

Elizabeth Murray, a visual artist considered one of the most important painters in this country, vividly described the feeling of death in the neighborhood where she lives close to Ground Zero. All the lights were out, the television was not working. The atmosphere produced in this woman a loss of purpose. According to her, “most artists are normally on the edge of feeling that what they do is meaningless,” and this event pushed them further toward out along that edge.

The dire events of that September day also created another realization in Elizabeth Murray. “It took my breath away to realize how privileged we have been,” she told the audience. “In New York City, we have been spoiled,” Murray added.

A star of the musical stage, Mandy Patinkin, said that the catastrophe has made him consider what he does as an entertainer more deeply. And it has raised the question, “What is there in the American lifestyle worth defending?”

Patinkin does not think art in itself will be any different but that it will be seen and heard differently. He finished his remarks by sharing with listeners his new practice of leaving four different boxes in the back of theaters where he performs and ends by asking for donations for his favorite charities that promote world peace.

Trisha Brown, dancer and choreographer, at first felt stunned by the destruction and loss of life but was later vitalized by contact with her students. “An integration came into my life that was very hopeful,” she reported.

Some of the panelists showed themselves very critical of American values. “How shallow American culture has become,” complained Elizabeth Murray. She cited in particular the worship of celebrity and the pervasive use of spin control.

Jamaica Kincaid returned to her earlier themes saying that what has happened is “bigger than us, than our feelings.” She even corrected what others had said about the importance of compassion: “I like compassion but I like justice first.” And that should concern us Americans, she indicated, in our situation whereby ten percent of the world’s people control ninety percent of its resources.

This same outspoken writer also criticized the singing of “God Bless America.” In contrast with the title of the song, she asked the question: “God, can you give some blessings of people in other parts of the world?”

These artists also voice concern about censorship by government and self-censorship by organizations such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra which recently changed a concert program because of concerns about “sensitivity.” Playwright John Guare proposed as a reason for opposing censorship that the role of art may be to oppose what others say.

Like a biblical prophet, that same author moralized thus: “How flimsy our lives are, the things we have to have.” 

Richard Griffin