A woman close to me (I will call her Nancy) felt an unfamiliar range of emotions on the day after Labor Day this month. It was the first such date in almost forty years that she was not reporting to a classroom ready to teach the latest group of first-graders. This summer Nancy had retired, completing a long and satisfying career as a public school teacher of young children.

To her it felt strange, almost eerie, to have no fixed agenda for this September day that had for so many years meant the demanding work of introducing her students to their new classroom and her expectations for them. This just-retired teacher tasted a freedom never previously known in her adult life. Now she was at liberty to do what she wanted with her time.

Of course, since Nancy had loved teaching it was inevitable that her relish for the new freedom be mixed with some nostalgia for the many rich experiences that were hers through the years. Only a stoic, walled off from tender human emotions, would not miss the children whom she taught and many of the colleagues with whom she worked.

So, like other major human transitions, this one carried with it bright expectations for the future along with memories of much value from the past. I will always remember my own feelings of elation when I retired from a job in city government for a new career as writer and consultant. For the next few days my feet seemed not to touch the ground. Sudden freedom from an imposed daily schedule and the move to an agenda I could shape by myself buoyed me up with pleasure. And I carried with me many cherished memories of the people I had served and those with whom I had worked.

Of course, with the passage of weeks I felt challenged by the need to set my own course instead of being directed by others. The day can seem long when there is nothing you absolutely must do. You have the opportunity to do what you wish but it can be difficult to know what you wish.

After an initial adjustment, most Americans who retire slip easily into a daily regime that brings them that brings them satisfaction. Surveys show that only a relative few fail to make the transition successfully. The horror stories you hear about people taking to drink for failure to adjust may be true, but they apply to a relative few.

Nancy has already set for herself an informal agenda of activities for which she formerly did not have sufficient time. Like many other retired people, she wants to travel and already has plans for a trip to France and Italy this fall. In addition she plans to audit some courses and wants to extend her already wide knowledge of music, especially opera. Given this woman’s varied talents and enthusiasm for living, she can be expected to develop new interests as time goes on.

Perhaps the most important of her current interests, however, is spirituality. For the last several years she has sought out ways of deepening her spiritual life. That includes finding a spiritual director with whom she can confer for guidance in prayer and other spiritual exercises. Some of the courses she plans to audit are focused on theology and can be expected to feed her spiritual life. Being enrolled in these courses will also introduce her into a new community of people interested in things of the spirit.

The leisure that Nancy has now gained can also allow her time for meditation and other forms of prayer and reflection. Freed to pursue work of her own choosing along with leisure, she can perhaps position herself to practice what my friend Bob Atchley calls “everyday mysticism.”

By that he means “direct, nonsensory, nonverbal experience of the transcendent, the ultimate reality, or God.” Professor Atchley says that people gradually become aware of “a new presence in their consciousness, a presence that gives them newfound wisdom and confidence in the face of questions about life’s meaning.”

Many ordinary Americans have tasted this kind of contact with the spirit and it has made their lives immeasurably richer. The transition to retirement can serve as a propelling force for shifting attention to what is most meaningful in human life.

Richard Griffin

Mine was a situation faced by virtually all parents, sooner or later. This story is probably as old as the human family itself. My daughter, aged 21, and a college graduate since this past June, was about to leave home and begin her first job.

To her mother and me, as apparently to our daughter herself, this end-of-the-summer event was highly desirable and one for which she was well prepared. After all, she had spent considerable time away from home previously. The summer of 2000 saw her in Switzerland working for a student travel publication. And in August of the previous year, she had studied French in the city of Angers. So we were used to her going away for lengthy stays.

But, admittedly, this occasion was different because it seemed definitive. Our only child, now grown up, was leaving the country to serve as a teacher abroad. She would probably never return home again as a resident rather than a visitor. Though her room would always be ready to receive her, from now on she could be only an occasional occupant.

I saw this leaving of home as a dramatic rite of passage in our daughter’s life and in the life of our family and I had remained focused on the opportunities she would enjoy as a result of the move. To me, it was an exciting opportunity for her to taste new experiences and meet the challenges of young adulthood. The transition felt exciting to me and I welcomed its approach.

On the evening before her departure, I went to bed early expecting to get a good night’s sleep. However, I soon found myself unable to stay asleep because of emotions suddenly stirring in me. Unlike my feelings previously, now in the night I felt sad about the event scheduled to happen on the following day.

Of course on the rational level I still wanted my daughter to follow through on plans to leave on the great adventure. Deciding not to go would not have been thinkable in this situation. But feelings of sadness now prevented me from getting to sleep. Over and over, strong feelings of regret swept through my psyche and roiled my brain.

Despite what reason told me, I felt myself to be losing a daughter. My life would never be the same. Our household would be deprived of a youthful presence that enlarged our living. Without her, things would surely be more quiet and orderly but at a great price.

Inevitably, words of the Beatles’ song “She’s Leaving Home” came to mind. In that ditty, however, the daughter is leaving under a cloud. The key line of the song goes “She’s leaving home where she lived for so many years alone.” She cannot get along with her parents and is departing under some duress, not at all my daughter’s situation. Still, I could identify with the sadness of it all, strongly suggested by the music.

Next morning, the day of departure, I analyzed the situation without the distortions of late night. And I continue to reflect on its significance. To me it is an event filled with spiritual meaning. Both for our daughter and for us, her parents, it requires spiritual reflection to be understood.

The pattern is at least as old as Abraham, the Hebrew patriarch. Thousands of years ago, he left his home in Ur of the Chaldees and set out on a journey to a new land. He did so with incomplete information and, of course, in the conditions of his day, without the comforts of modern travel. But he heard God’s call to leave the familiar setting of home and he listened to that call.

Growing up into adulthood usually involves leaving home. All that is comfortable and familiar must be left behind. The old security must give way to the daring of new challenges. Young people must discover that they can indeed cope with the world.

We parents also must be willing to let our children go. This letting go is a form of self-denial that can prove painful indeed. But it must be faced if we are to fulfill our call as parents. Whatever our feelings, we must release our children with our blessing for them to have the same opportunities for finding themselves as adults that we have had.

Richard Griffin

The first time I whipped myself it seemed bizarre. But over the months doing so became routine, a ritual performed three times a week by all the novice candidates for admission to the religious order we had chosen.

Before going to bed, we would assemble in our dormitory, take off our shirts and, when the bell rang, beat ourselves with a small whip for a minute or two. No one drew blood but it did hurt as it was supposed to. It was our way of disciplining the body so that it would become more obedient to the soul.

Looking back on this practice from the vantage point of many years, I still feel amazement about its easy acceptance. Everyone did it, no one questioned its value, some zealots presumably looked forward to the nights when this flagellation was scheduled

On the two other days of the week, we wore small chains around the upper part of one leg for three hours in the early morning until after breakfast. The flage and the chain, as they were familiarly called, were the most bodily forms of the asceticism that was standard in the life of novices.

These practices, however, were only two among many intended to purify the soul. We also learned to acknowledge our faults while kneeling before our brothers assembled for dinner. Occasionally, our fellow novices would gather under the novice master’s guidance to take turns pointing out our faults.

If all of this now sounds cultish, extreme, and even inhuman, it must be understood as part of a long monastic tradition. This way of life was seen a way of approaching perfection, an asceticism that had been hallowed by centuries of holy people both in the Christian tradition and in others as well.

And this asceticism, or spiritual discipline, aimed at the growth of love both of God and of neighbor. At its best, this kind of rigorous putting down of self was adopted, not for its own sake, but rather to make us better human beings. If the body was to be beaten down, it was for the soul to rise.

In time I came to reject this approach to the spiritual life. To its credit, so did the religious order to which I belonged. Starting in the 1960s, most people came to see that the concepts of being human that lay underneath this kind of asceticism were deeply flawed. We discovered that soul and body were not stand- alone parts of ourselves but rather one being, an enfleshed spirit or spirited flesh.

However, despite this rejection of the old asceticism, discipline in my view remains an integral part of any true spirituality. To me this holds true in the face of what one scholar calls “a widely held cultural bias against, even contempt for, the ascetic.” Consumerist American culture, in particular, exalts self-indulgence and the gratification of the senses.

Still, anyone wishing to grow in spiritual life must resist this bias and contempt. Inevitably, there are times when we must go against ourselves if we are serious about spirit. To her credit Elizabeth Lesser, in her focal book “The New American Spirituality,” has a great deal to say about self-discipline, despite the word’s absence from the index. Often in its pages she criticizes supposed spiritual leaders who offer the easy way without requiring any managing of the self.

Lesser writes: “Inviting spirituality into your life is like packing for a long journey.” When you pick and choose the things to put in your suitcase, you discover that you must discipline yourself and not take too much. And yet you have to choose the right objects; otherwise you arrive at your destination and find that you are bereft.

The best spiritual discipline, I believe, is the patient, courageous, and gracious acceptance of the suffering built into our lives, afflictions that we can do nothing about. This kind of asceticism is best seen perhaps in those older people whose lives are marked by serious loss – of people dear to them, of abilities that came easily to them when younger, of important roles in the world of work. Accepting difficult changes like these requires qualities of soul that put us to the ultimate test.

Richard Griffin

During the last several years of his long life, a man widely regarded as the most influential philosopher in the world became one of my frequent associates. That does not mean that we were intimate friends but we did talk frequently, usually over lunch with other people. I came to feel much affection for him, even though we agreed on very few of the most important questions of life.

In particular, this eminent philosopher whom I called Van made clear to me that he did not at all share my faith in a personal God who created the world and cares for human beings. In fact, he did not even think that the question of God’s existence has any meaning.

At first, it came as something of a shock to discover that a person with whom I had a fine relationship held an outlook on reality so radically different from mine. In time, however, this contact has helped me appreciate my own faith anew.

Though I recognized that Van was incomparably more brilliant and intellectually accomplished than I, his views did not seriously tempt me to undervalue my own. After all, my faith has been carefully nurtured over a lifetime and has become part of my personal identity.

In any event, faith, as understood in the Judeo-Christian tradition in which I am steeped and confirmed by long experience, does not depend on the power of intellect but rather is received as a gift. Besides, this faith is not so much an assent of the mind to a set of statements but comes much closer to a loving trust in God.

That is the kind of faith that impelled Blaise Pascal, the great French thinker of the seventeenth century, to write these words, found hidden in the lining of his coat after his death: “Fire: God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and thinkers. Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.”

So Van and I remained friends who could talk about all sorts of subjects with an unspoken agreement not to discuss those vital matters on which we differed. Incidentally, the topics outside discussion included politics in which his surprisingly conservative views were in sharp contrast to my own.

For many reasons this personal contact with unbelief was valuable for me. My friend’s view of the world allowed me to see what it might be like not to believe in God. In the United States it’s not easy to meet atheists or agnostics. National polls consistently show that Americans who profess belief in God or a universal spirit has consistently remained in the mid-ninety percent range over the last six decades.

Entering into my friend’s mentality, I imagined what would be for me a terrible void. If you do not see God as the supreme reality, then you are left with a world that, to my mind, lacks explanation. And your own life can easily seem meaningless, especially after you suffer the loss of people important to you.

When my friend’s wife died, he himself was ninety years old. Her loss left him obviously bereft and, it seemed, disoriented. This event made me fantasize about what it would be like to undergo such a trial without faith in God. In writing my friend a note of condolence, I found it difficult to know what to say.

The one temptation I did not experience was superiority or smugness. I was aware of the truth in what Carlo Martini, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Milan has written: “There is in each of us – whatever our religion, even in a bishop – a believer and a non-believer.” These words suggest that atheism is often not far removed from people of faith. The line between faith and unbelief can be thin indeed.

Personal contact with someone for whom belief in God had no meaning has served to remind me that God goes beyond mere human ideas. God can never be captured by our concepts. Whatever can be said of God has to be qualified to make sure that we do not make of him a mere superhuman being.

Part of the Christian tradition reminds believers that God cannot be defined. As the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco observes, that tradition has a concept of God who “cannot be named because he cannot be described with any of the categories we use to designate the things that are.”

Richard Griffin

—

Many people whose faith has been lifelong enter into crises of belief. They can experience times of severe trial when their certainties are shaken. When this kind of dark night envelops them, they can feel a kind of atheism that may show them how faith in God may become different from what they have known previously.

This experience can also purify their faith, free it from some of the merely human factors that sometimes masquerade as true faith in God. A person can emerge from this kind of crisis spiritually renewed and enriched in mind and heart.

So if there is a thin line separating faith and atheism, that is a tribute to the quality of faith. It may be experienced as frightening and this entering into fear and trembling may shake us to our roots. But this is spiritual experience at its deepest and most valuable. Doubt can live with a lively faith and can even make that faith more dynamic.  

Of course, the dominant role of science and technology in modern times has put traditional faith on the defensive because the scientific viewpoint can sometimes seem the only valid way of looking at life. The other kind of atheism that looms large in modern life is Marxism, Fascisim, and other ideologies that have done so much damage to the world.

It remains a striking fact that some of the world’s great religions do not believe in God. In fact, Hindus and Buddhists, if they are orthodox, should not be believers in the God that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam profess.

What I have discovered, among other findings, is that the arguments for their position make some sense, if you accept their ideas about human life and the world.

However, considerably fewer (eight in 10) believe in a personal God, that is, a God who watches over humankind and answers prayers. And even fewer of these believers, six in 10, express complete trust in God.
 
Faith, however, does not come from intellectual argument. Rather, at least three of the great spiritual traditions of the world see faith as a gift from God that goes beyond human thinking. Faith is God revealing himself to us, a self-disclosure that enables us to grasp a reality that goes far beyond anything we can achieve on our own.

Many people in these three traditions remain comfortable with a belief in God acquired in childhood and retained at each succeeding stage of life. Of course, that faith changes and develops as the person grows in years and adapts to different circumstances. But some retain a simple almost childlike faith that continues to serve them well.

Since going through a test of this sort can be so difficult for a spiritual seeker, it seems best to have a guide for the time of trial at least. A spiritual director can provide assurance when everything seems threatening. A wise and understanding counselor can help stir us through these perilous passages.

Richard Griffin

Two encounters buoyed up my spirit last week. Both of them were with people who seemed to me gifted with grace that goes beyond the merely human. Or, perhaps, they showed the merely human at its best. In any event, I detected in each of them an action that strikes me as deeply spiritual.

The first conversation happened in a chance meeting with a man in his forties. The occasion for the second was a visit I made to a nursing home to a 92-year-old woman who had asked me to come by.

Tom, the friend whom I ran into unexpectedly, told me about the death of his mother a few weeks ago. She died after having been in a nursing home for several months. He and I had talked last fall about her impending move from her own home because of her growing inability to care for herself.

What impressed me most in Tom’s account of his mother’s nursing home experience was how devoted Tom and his three brothers remained. They came to visit her each day! He himself made it a routine to arrive early every morning with coffee and doughnuts and stay a while with his mother before going to his office.

Later in the day his brothers would come by to see their mother, talk with her and attend to unmet needs. As a veteran of nursing home visits myself, during the years when my mother, mother-in-law, and another family member were residents, I feel great admiration for Tom and his brothers.

For most people, visiting a nursing home is not easy; it puts most of us to the test of patience and resourcefulness, among other virtues. Males, especially, find it difficult to sit with nursing home residents whose mental world has of necessity shrunk to a narrower scope. I used to fidget throughout and had to fight the urge to leave after only a few minutes. To my shame, I admit almost always feeling a sense of relief when the visit came to an end.

But Tom and his brothers were motivated to make their visits a part of their daily lives. To them it became a family ritual invented in response to their mother’s time of special need. They were giving back to her something of the love and devotion that she had given them all their lives.

Perhaps they felt something that writer Mary Pipher sees in such relationships. She quotes a woman who provided care for her parents under trying circumstances: “I know this sounds strange, but that last year was the best year of my parents’ lives. I was my best. They were their best. Our relationships were the closest and strongest ever.”

My second encounter was with Carmella, an elderly woman who only recently became a nursing home resident. She and I became acquainted three years ago when I interviewed her for another column. At that time I focused on her achievements as a painter, a late-life activity that she had converted into a new profession.

After a series of falls and some other serious health problems, she now must use a wheelchair and cannot manage any longer on her own. As of yet, she has not taken up painting again, though she hopes that will be possible soon.

What struck me most was a recent decision she has made not to return home but rather to remain permanently a resident of the nursing home. With considerable help, Carmella could perhaps have coped in her own home. To her credit, however, she has made the brave decision to remain where she is now.

This decision surely ranks among the hardest that Carmella has ever made. She knows how much she is giving up. Never again will she enjoy the independence that goes with being in her own home with the leeway to decide things for herself.

Carmella dares recognize that it makes sense for her to stick with the nursing home. It makes things much easier for her daughter Joan who is Carmella’s only child. Joan can now have confidence that her mother is safe and being taken care of instead of exposed to the hazards of home.

I came away from the nursing home with yet greater respect for this gracious woman and admired the courage she has shown in her nineties.

Richard Griffin

Until recent years, I held fixed ideas about animals. In my worldview they simply belonged to a lower species of being and existed to serve the needs of humans, not their own. Unlike us, they were destined for extinction when they died and investing any human emotion in them was merely sentimental.

I also considered animals to be entirely programmed by nature so that they could not act with any spontaneity. They had been wound up like clocks to run at someone else’s behest and they had no freedom to vary the pattern. The main thing they did all day was to look for food.

Of course, it was not ethical to harm animals or subject them to pain for one’s entertainment. But the immorality of this action came, not because of the hurt that animals suffered but rather because such actions did harm to us human beings. It was beneath our own dignity to act like that.

In themselves, animals had no rights because their purpose was to submit to humans. Thus I regarded scruples about eating animal meat as unrealistic. That does not mean I wanted to be there when animals were slaughtered but I considered them to be at the disposal of hungry people.

More positively, animals in my view displayed God’s creative powers. Their beauty meant much to me and I cringed at the prospect of some species becoming extinct. I loved to see the great beasts and as a child welcomed the arrival of the Ringling Brothers circus when it came to Boston. My favorite wild animal was the tiger with its fearful speed and power.

At this point in history, however, much in my way of looking at animals has become old-fashioned and passé. Modern thought rejects the idea of them being merely our possessions. More and more people now see animals as belonging to themselves. The animal rights movement tries to assure that in law they will have prerogatives that cannot be infringed on by humans.

No doubt I have been influenced in my change of views by a decade’s experience living with a cat. Phileas J. Fogg, our house pet, has taught me to look upon his kind with different eyes. Like millions of other Americans, I have come to feel a kinship with an animal that has proven instructive. We have a relationship that is personal on my side and that has a certain undefined other quality on his.

New questions have risen in my mind, and previously unrecognized issues that need thoughtful response. Does my Christian tradition, as I used to understand it, give enough respect to animals? Are there approaches different from the ones I inherited that can help shape a spirituality based on reverence for non-human creatures?

By and large, the mainline Christian tradition has neglected animals. The classic theologians have held what the Oxford University scholar Andrew Linzey calls a “dismissive” attitude on the subject.

But the same scholar has identified secondary Christian traditions that provide a foundation for appreciating animals spiritually.

Following the lead given by the New Testament, from the early centuries many Christians believed that the saving work of Jesus extended beyond human beings to all of creation. That means animals, too, are touched by Christ’s redemption.

Christian writings not accepted as part of the Bible recommend two qualities that might shape a Christian’s attitude toward animals: kinship and peaceableness. These spiritual virtues stand out in the lives of some saints.

St. Francis of Assisi, of course, became the most famous, if only for his habit of calling other beings brother and sister in recognition of their status as fellow creatures of God.

The modern theology of animals says that “the value and worth of other creatures cannot be determined solely by their utility to us.” This radical statement overturns what I used to think.

Some thinkers are now trying to reinterpret human power over creation. Granted, God’s command in Genesis, “have dominion over every living thing that moves upon the earth,” seems to give humans complete sway. But if you accept the Christian view that lordship equals service, those same words can be urging us to act as servants to all creatures, especially animals.

Perhaps, as Andrew Linzey suggests, our best approach to animals could be through “moral generosity.” That would be a way of bringing together some Christian traditions with the modern mentality that regards animals as deserving protection and love.

Richard Griffin

As author David Brooks tells it, when he went to a guest ranch in Montana in the 1980s, before going off on horseback he would be given a ten-minute safety lecture on how not to get killed riding a horse.  Now when he goes to the same place, he might receive a seventy- minute talk about the spirituality of horses and the Zen of the riding experience.

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