“Lord, you have not listened to our prayers.
Here, there are skies filled with unmoving fog.
Each day, the weight of our misery lies heavy on us
And we sometimes doubt, Lord, that there is any light.”

The author of these lines, here translated from the original French, was Sylvain Roye, a soldier in the Great War, as it used to be called. Born in 1891, Roye disappeared May 24, 1916, lost on a liaison mission near the town of Donaumont, France, during the eleven months long battle of Verdun.

Visiting the Verdun area last week, I stopped at the fort where the French dug in against the German invaders. A deep underground emplacement, this fort was strategically sited on a hill that seemed impregnable. However, it ultimately took only a relatively few Germans to surprise the defenders, come up from behind the fort, and capture the crucial height.

Looking at the iron turrets that still remain in place, one can almost feel the grinding quality of that war which killed so many hundreds of thousands of Europe’s young men. What misery the French, English, German, and, ultimately, American soldiers endured, even those fortunate enough to escape death or injury!

The contrast between fields now beautiful with green grass and graceful trees, and the ruined environment of the war years strikes a visitor’s eyes. Traces of trenches remind one of how men and machines chewed up everything in their path.

As the prayer indicates, the physical world was turned into a vision of hell. Clouds of dense smoke hung over the fields and blotted out the sun. When it rained, these same fields became seas of mud. Living under such conditions meant, for the soldiers, living like animals.

In addition to the physical suffering of the soldiers, their spiritual agony must have been grievous. After all, most of these young men had marched off to war filled with illusions about easy victory. When hit by the reality of trench warfare, they must have felt terrified and have been shaken in their most fundamental beliefs.

The prayer from which four lines are quoted above indicates one person’s depth of suffering. So agonized is he that he confesses doubt about God’s very existence; he feels abandoned to a world of horror and meaningless killing.

Tasting man’s inhumanity to man on a massive scale, this young Frenchman is plunged into the dark night of the spirit. How can God whom he has been brought up to turn toward as a loving father, allow human beings to be reduced to the level of animals in the wild?

Roye makes bold to accuse the Lord of not having heard his prayers and those of his comrades in arms. Ironically enough, this complaint suggests a deep faith in God, a faith so heartfelt as to allow the believer to find fault with God. It sounds much like the prayers of mystics who sometimes bitterly complained about God’s treatment of His friends.

For a battlefield visitor like me, this terrible war that began almost 100 years ago raises other troubling issues. How could modern nations, boasting great cultures, engage in such massive destruction of human life, civilization, and the environment for reasons so flimsy? Is this all that human life is worth?

These are the questions that make a person wonder about forces controlling the destinies of human beings. If you were born male in the 1890s in England, France, Germany, or perhaps America, your chances were excellent of being thrown into mortal combat. You may have been brought up to trust in God’s love, but that belief would not preserve you from an awful fate.

Presumably, many embittered soldiers would have felt the cynicism expressed by the World War I poet Wilfred Owens who rejected the classical dictum “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”(It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country) and called it “That ancient lie.”

And yet, in the mysterious ways of God’s world, these same young men made what is commonly called “the supreme sacrifice.” For them, the Great War, awful as it was, offered the opportunity to give themselves entirely to God. Deep within their hearts and souls, they were called to surrender to a fate they could never have wished for themselves, but that nonetheless could have become, in some mysterious way, a response to God’s love.

Richard Griffin

A generation ago, a surprising number of college and university students felt the world to be such an evil place that they did want to bring  children into it. It was a time when many young Americans had lost confidence in the future and could not see themselves becoming parents.

I remember being inwardly appalled and saddened when I heard those students share those views with me. Like a good counselor, I tried not to be judgmental and did more listening than talking, but I certainly felt myself in serious disagreement.

Looking back on that time, I see those young people as lacking the spiritual virtue of hope. At least, their hope was insufficient, not strong enough to allow them to imagine a future that could be handed on to children.

Given all the turmoil of the current American and world scene, some young people of today may also face the future with diminished  expectations of themselves and others. And they may be joined in this feeling by people no longer young.

They may share the conviction that the future is bound to be worse than the past. They may well feel that a door has been closed, and that their generation will never be able to bring about radical change in society.

This attitude would mean that the work of building a life is not worth as much as it should be. The discipline involved in setting goals is not clearly justified. Making bread, building love relationships, a marriage, raising children surely count for what is humanly valuable but, in the face of terror, are they still viable?

Today’s situation, marked by the threat of terror, raises questions about the need to live tentatively, rather than to dig in. Can we be free enough to follow where our own truth leads even when that is outside familiar security?

Much of the beauty of religious traditions lies in their invitation to live in expectation of something better. In my own Christian practice, that is the meaning of Lent, the penitential season that is now upon us.

Lent points toward Easter; it gives us something important to look forward to. That future is worth sacrificing for. Certain practices long associated with the Lenten season may help to stir up hope in us.

Harvard University chaplain Rev. Peter Gomes suggests three such practices. The first is silence which he defines as “not simply the absence of sound but .  .  .  also the presence of that which sound ordinarily obscures.” He urges people who come to his church to try 15 minutes of silence at least one day a week.

Secondly, he proposes study, that is, reading the Bible or perhaps a book about prayer. Specifically, he suggests choosing passages from one of the four gospels or going through the Psalms. Again, only 15 minutes, one day a week, can make a difference, he believes.

Finally, this spiritual leader recommends 15 minutes of service, doing a work of kindness to benefit other people. Rev. Gomes admits  “Fifteen minutes may seem a devilishly small amount of time for good works, given the pressing needs of this world,” but he believes that it may establish a habit of doing good that may spread.

This modest program ─silence, study, service─has the virtue of being specific. It nicely answers the question of what I can do to develop spiritually. These three practices can also stir in human hearts the hope for a better future.

This hope can take root because silence, study, and service bring us into contact with another word beginning in S: Spirit. Finding silence within us; studying the word in holy scripture; serving neighbors in need: all these actions lead us to discover deeper realities than we are ordinarily aware of. Ultimately, they can bring us closer to a working partnership with God.

All sensitive people feel the temptation to give up striving for good. At least from time to time, we teeter on the edge of losing hope and we ask ourselves “What’s the use?” Discovering silence, learning from inspired words, and becoming habituated to serving others may not, at first sight, seem directed toward hope.

Putting them into practice, however, quite possibly will surprise us and leave us feeling better about ourselves and our world.

Richard Griffin

“Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty.”

To some Americans, these prayerful words are as familiar as old friends. Many people have been long accustomed to saying them aloud before sitting down to dinnerand perhaps other meals.

For many others of us, however, there is no time for such a ritual. We are too rushed and usually grab food when and where we can. We may even lunch at our desk while continuing to work, and give precious little thought to what we eat.

In the hectic atmosphere of an office or the pressures of family schedules, eating does not allow for leisure, much less prayer. And yet, mealtime can offer precious opportunities for renewing our soul as well as our body.

The traditional words of the grace quoted above suggest some of the rich meaning that lies hidden in eating a meal.

First, it is a time for receiving God’s blessing. The Lord looks lovingly on us and we are showered with divine favor. God loves us and the meal is a sign of that love.

Secondly, the food and drink set before us come as gifts from God. They are products of the earth and human hands, yes, but the creator has made them available to us.

Thirdly, we are recipients of these goods that enable us to continue living. They also bring us pleasure, even joy. What the Psalm says of wine, applies to all nourishment: it makes joyful the human heart.

Fourth, the gifts come from a giver who overflows with goods for us. The old word “bounty” suggests an inexhaustible supply of gifts. God’s generosity toward the human family does not know limits, although our selfishness too often finds ways to deprive brother and sisters of their share.

The beauty of this approach can be summarized as Philip Zaleski and Paul Kaufman do in their book Gifts of the Spirit: “Through table blessings, we remember in our hearts and proclaim with our lips the divine source of all food, all nourishment. Gratitude for food thus becomes gratitude for creation, for life itself.”

To eat and drink with awareness of these ideas makes of mealtime a spiritual exercise of mindfulness. That is what some religious traditions would call it using a term favored in much current spirituality.

Here’s how the authors mentioned above describe mindful eating: “Be attentive to every part of the process: how your fork spears the peas or shovels the carrots, how your muscles stretch and contract as hand and arm join forces to lift the food toward your mouth. Be aware of opening your lips to receive the morsel. Attend to the tastes and smells, the dance of the tongue and teeth as you chew.”

This approach, valuable for some, surely does not suit everybody. To me, it feels extreme. Nonetheless, reading it can suggest something of the spiritual potential in an everyday activity vital to our lives.

Reverently said, the traditional grace with which this column began has enough spiritual power to transform the action of eating and drinking. It is a simpler expression of mindfulness that then frees us to enjoy eating straightforwardly without analyzing each small movement of hand or mouth.

No single meal stands alone. When eating, we can be reminded of other times when we have sat down at the table with family members and friends. Many of those gatherings were marked by laughter, celebration, commemoration, or simply quiet exchange with one other person.

Eating thus brings back events in our lives that have made them memorable. If we come from the Christian tradition, meals will remind us of the Eucharist, the sacred rite of thanksgiving to God for divine deliverance from evil.

In this setting we may also become mindful of those who do not have enough good food and drink. How the world allows any of God’s children to go hungry remains part of the mystery of evil. Including them in our own gift-giving and in our prayers has to be part of any authentic spiritual life.

Many people of faith, taught by the Bible, see in earthly meals a preparation for the great feast of heaven, when they will sit down with the angels and saints in the loving presence of God.

Richard Griffin

Attending the wake of a friend is always a spiritual experience for me. Seeing, dead, a person whom I have known alive stirs in me an awe that never fails to raise the question of what it means to be human. When something so stupendous as death happens, how can it not provoke wonder at the fact of our existence?

The first time I ever saw a dead body was at the wake of an aunt. As a 13-year-old seeing her lifeless, I felt stunned. How could the person I knew and loved have come to this fate?  Something of these feelings have remained with me ever since.

Two weeks ago, I went to the wake of my friend, Dick. Kneeling at his casket, I wondered at the meaning of it all. Before me were the mortal remains of someone who had been in the second grade with me. We had also received First Holy Communion on the same day in the same church.

By what strange providence had this age peer preceded me in death? And how were things with him now?

It struck me, as it always does, how strange it is that a human being who was once full of life and moved in innumerable ways was now immobile forever. How could it ever end, that life with all its complicated and familiar habits of action and thinking?

In this instance, so much were we alike, in name, age, religion, social class, that my friend’s wake seemed like an apt preparation for mine. Though I was not dead yet, that certain fate awaited me, no matter how well my doctors and I took care of my health. The day would surely come when people would stand around my bier and converse about all sorts of things and, at least from time to time, about me.

In a prayer made next to my friend’s body, I reflected on the last time we had seen one another. On that occasion, we were about to board a boat where we would celebrate the birthday of a lifelong friend of us both. That festive cruise now felt far removed from the body lying before me.

Thomas Lynch, in addition to being a fine poet and essayist, knows a great deal about dead bodies. By profession, he is an undertaker who, as he says, buries some 200 of his fellow townsmen each year in Milford, Michigan. He is also a man of faith who recognizes the body as a temple of the Holy Spirit.

At the end of a recent essay, Lynch extols the ministers and priests who preside over funerals and burials, reverently giving honor to the bodies they commend to God. “They stand─these local heroes, these saints and sinners, these men and women of God─in that difficult space between the living and the dead, between faith and fear, between humanity and Christianity and say out loud, ‘Behold, I show you a mystery.’”

They recognize the mystery of death and the wonder of what happens to the human body. So do I now, as I have done ever since going to my first wake at age 13. Each succeeding time when I have seen the bodies of family members and friends, the sight stirs in me the same awe. How can any one of us ever get used to the death of people we have known alive?

But at wakes, I have noticed, not everybody seems to be feeling awe at death. Some people chat as they would at a party and look to be untouched by their encounter with mortality.

It would be a mistake, however, to judge these cheerful-looking people as detached. Beneath the surface, they too may feel some of the awe that the sight of death always stirs up in me.

My faith tradition has accustomed me to thinking of death as a mystery. That term here does not so much mean a puzzle as a reality too deep for words. Death has a meaning that is so profound that we can never entirely grasp it.

I have never been able to believe that human existence ends with death. Our lives are altogether too rich for me to accept such a negative fate. In my faith, the mystery of death leads to something unimaginably wonderful. Death looks, for all the world, like the end of everything, but I continue to believe it is the transition to fuller life.

Richard Griffin

The ringing tones of the cantor crying out the Jewish prayer for the dead carried across the bleak snow-covered grounds. Around him in stark relief were the grim reminders of industrialized murder: barbed-wire fences, huge ovens, railroad tracks. Above the main gate were the words “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes Free), surely an ironic motto for a death camp. Nothing there made free.

There were tears in the voice of this bearded cantor as he commemorated the dead of Auschwitz. It was testimony to the murder of an estimated one million Jews, along with gypsies, homosexuals, and other branded by the Nazis as deviant. Listening to the prayer sung so eloquently, one could call up in imagination whole families of people put to death, ignominiously, without a shred of mercy.

This ceremony marked the 60th anniversary of the date when advancing Russian troops freed the surviving prisoners from captivity in Auschwitz. For the occasion, many survivors had come there, those who had long ago managed to escape death at the hands of their military murderers.

World leaders were there too, as was Elie Wiesel, himself a survivor of this death camp and later Buchenwald. In his speech, Professor Wiesel appealed to his listeners, especially younger people, never to forget the event being commemorated.

“My good friends,” he said in fractured English, “if you after this day will be the same, then we have lost. An encounter with this memory, which now you are the custodians of, must do something to you and through the whole world.”

He was right to say this because the holocaust has a spiritual significance that should never be forgotten. This mass murder, carried out with all the machinery of an efficient modern state, reminds us of the evil that so often lurks within the human heart.

This is how revelations about the Nazi death camps first struck me. As a teenager during World War II, I had no idea that Jews were being persecuted for their religious and ethic identity. Like most other Americans, I lived unaware of the mass murders organized and carried out by the National Socialist machine in Germany.

When the atrocities became known, I felt shock that has stayed with me over the intervening decades. In fact, this knowledge became part of my spiritual life then and now. Among other things, this evil showed me how much we need God.  Left to ourselves, I believe, we human beings can prove thoroughly unreliable.  

Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps make easy optimism about our human condition unrealistic. There is at work in the world a power that, if we do not combat it, can readily turn us into wielders of violence against our fellow human beings. From being our brothers and sisters, they become objects of our hatred and brutality.

Despite the graphic lesson of Auschwitz, events suggest that, as a world community, we have not learned that lesson. The mass slaughter of innocent people in Rwanda and Darfur, to mention only two places among many, shows how little we have backed off from killing those who get in our way.

We can be grateful for educators such as those associated with “Facing History and Ourselves,” the Brookline-based agency that teaches young people and others the lessons of the Holocaust. For the last 25 years this organization has not let us forget the awful facts about one of the world’s most horrific crimes.

There is something dreadfully askew in human life, a fact demonstrated over and over. To me, this points toward a spirituality that is not based on pessimism about the human prospect, but one that takes such evil into account. It also points to the central position in this spiritual outlook of hope in God.

The faith traditions that speak to me hold that God is the only one deserving of complete and utter trust. God is the one who will absolutely not falter in love. One of the sayings of Jesus that I often ponder is: “Why do you call me good? No one is good, but God alone.”

Of course, Jesus does not mean that humans lack goodness completely; rather, he contrasts us with the transcendent God in whom goodness is complete. The liberation that happened 60 years ago should be seen as a call to deepen our horror of evil and to direct hope toward the one who is all good.

Richard Griffin

What were the most important stories concerned with religion in the year 2004? That’s a matter of opinion, of course.

In their annual survey, members of the Religion Newswriters Association have made their choices. To them, the most significant was not a single story but two. They are the faith issues connected with the election of George W. Bush to a second term, and the discussion of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of Christ.

Had the survey been taken at the end of December rather than part way through that month, I suspect the results would have been different. Then these writers might well have chosen the worldwide response to the dreadful tsunami that shattered so many lives along the coasts of the Indian Ocean.

Surely, the response of nations, private relief agencies, and people throughout the world would have justly been chosen the most important story of the year. On an unprecedented scale, governments, relief agencies, and individuals reached out with money and other forms of aid to people reeling from the storm’s impact.

Among the reasons why the relief effort has proven so important, at least two  spiritually significant ones stand out. First, those who have responded with help have done so regardless of the religion professed by those in need. That the greater number of them has been Muslim has not proven a barrier to generous giving.

Nor has the United States─or any other country, it seems─acted merely for political advantage. Instead, people the world over have responded spontaneously out of compassion for fellow humans who have suffered so much.

Secondly, very few religious figures appear to have interpreted the disaster as a sign of God’s displeasure with human beings. Fortunately, the great majority of leaders have seen this massive death and destruction as a natural disaster that does not at all express the judgment of God on the actions of people. In fact, most seem to have respected the mystery of evil rather than attribute vengeful motivation to the deity.

The generous actions of citizens and nations give reason for hope that such sharing of resources will continue in this new year. Perhaps the biggest story of this 2005 will prove to be wealthy countries doing more on an annual basis to help nations that are saddled with dire poverty.

Already underway, the Millennium Project is an effort by the United Nations to cut in half the extreme poverty of the world, and to do so by the year 2015. The United States and all the other rich countries have already agreed on this plan but have not yet put up the money.

To provide enough money for improving health and education for the world’s poor, these nations will be expected to increase development aid to about 50 cents of every 100 dollars of their national income.

Currently, our federal government gives only 15 cents, an amount far lower than most Americans think. When asked, most of us estimate an amount twenty or thirty times greater than the reality.

Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at Columbia University, has been leading the Millennium Project. He stands convinced that, spent wisely, the money could make an immediate difference in the countries where people are suffering extreme deprivation.

Professor Sachs proposes concrete examples:  “We could save more than one million children per year that are dying of malaria by helping to distribute on a mass basis, like we do with immunizations, bed nets to protect the children against malaria.”

This project is no shallow “do-goodism,” but an effort that would help overcome the instability that threatens the whole world, including us. For Sachs, the ultimate goal is to see poor nations stand on their own rather than continuing their dependence on others.

You may wonder why a column on spirituality deals with economic aid to other countries. The answer, on my part, comes from the heart. Long ago, I discovered how the inner life must include active compassion for all other people.

Not only that, but political and economic concerns became part of my spiritual vision. Reading the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, the words of Jesus in the Gospels, the writings of Gandhi and Thomas Merton among others, helped me realize that it was wrong for me to craft a spirituality detached from the needs of our brothers and sisters around the world.

Richard Griffin

An Indonesian man who survived the tsunami was pictured last week on the front page the morning newspaper, a look of horror on his face as he was told by an Australian doctor that it would be necessary to amputate his leg. The wound he suffered had become deeply infected, and only by this drastic action could his life be saved. Even then, it was by no means sure he would come through alive.

If he did manage to survive the surgery, he would find it extremely difficult to live in a society where no prostheses are available and not even crutches could be obtained for him.

He is but one of tens of thousands of the wounded who survived, at least for a time, shattered by catastrophe. As Secretary of State Colin Powell was reported to say of the devastation, human and material: “I have never seen anything like this.”

What are people who believe in God to make of such dire human suffering? Should we say with a character in Shakespeare’s King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport?”

Or might we echo certain religious leaders who proclaim that havoc is God’s just punishment for the sins of His people?

Either approach strikes me as monstrous. The first, in various forms, is basically pagan. The second is a distortion of theology whereby God is made into one who hates humankind.

There is no doubt, however, that a catastrophe that kills more than 150 thousand people and inflicts almost unimaginable suffering on so many others does put faith in God to the test. It is hard enough for believers when our fellow human beings maliciously cause us harm. When it happens because the very earth and its waters rise up against us, such evil is even harder to understand.

The mystery of evil must be as old as the origins of the human family. And we have no more answered the question in modern times than the ancients were able to do. However, the faith traditions of the world do provide some approaches to the unsolvable questions about why we suffer, both at the hands of evil people and from the good earth that is our home.

My spiritual tradition suggests that, far from endorsing human suffering, God is distressed by it. In this view, God does not take any pleasure in our pain but rather feels compassion at what we must endure.

In Christian teaching, the focal point of suffering is the passion and death of Jesus. God the Father does not punish His Son but does accept the suffering of Jesus for the world’s redemption.

So God has tasted human grief personally, so to speak. If Jesus submits to the crucifixion, then horrible suffering has touched God Himself. In this faith, God is no mere onlooker but takes on the worst fate of humankind.

This approach, of course, leaves unexplained the nature of evil, its origins and its power in a world supposedly controlled by God. But it does present a God filled with compassion and love, for whom the evil that hurts human beings is thoroughly distressing.

So in looking at the ongoing effects of the oceans rising up against so many people, we do best to weep, mourn, and regret what has happened to so many of our brothers and sisters. It is only right to feel deeply distressed by their fate.

In making this response, we can emulate the compassion of God and turn it toward those who have lost their loved ones and have sustained bodily and psychic ruin. We can do so by our prayers and by contributions of money and other forms of material assistance.

If our faith in God’s goodness is shaken, that is a tribute to the gift of sensitivity that is ours. When even the stones weep, as the narrator in a new novel I have been reading says, it is not irreligious to be upset; rather it may be deeply religious.

Science can explain what causes the tectonic plates under the ocean to move so as to create earthquakes and tidal waves. Only spirituality can begin to fathom some of the meaning of why it all happens in such a way as to destroy the lives of so many precious children and adults.

Richard Griffin