“Paperwork, cleaning the house, cooking the meals, dealing with innumerable visitors who come all through the day, answering the phone, keeping patience and acting intelligently, which is to find some meaning in all these encounters – – these things, too, are the works of peace, and often seem like a very little way.”

These words were written by Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement. In them she describes work at what she called a “house of hospitality” for the homeless poor in New York City. She also identifies these daily tasks as a unpretentious way of seeking God. The Catholic Church now calls this great-souled woman a “Servant of God,” the first step on the way toward official recognition as a saint.

This quotation comes from a little red book now given to incoming freshman at Boston College. Its formal title is “What Are We? An Introduction to Boston College and its Jesuit Traditions.” So popular has this pocket-sized volume become that the university has answered requests for it from many alums and interested others.

According to Father Joseph Appleyard, the Jesuit who serves as vice president for university mission and ministry, he and the others at Boston College’s Center for Ignatian Spirituality who conceived the book’s design simply said to themselves, “We want this to be unlike any other book that students will have.” That is how it turned out to have a plain red binding without any words or illustrations on the cover.

Thus the nickname “little red book” was not intended to remind people of the famous book of Chairman Mao referred to by that name. Almost inevitably, however, some readers will make that connection. Published in the 1960s, this collection of sayings by the Chinese Communist leader who revolutionized his country became faddish reading matter for many young people in revolt against the institutions of mainstream American society.

In fewer than 200 small pages, the Boston College “little red book” provides a wide range of passages from the great spiritual leaders of the world. In the first section, the readings come largely from the Jesuit founder St. Ignatius Loyola and other members of the order.

Other selections range from the Buddha to the 13th century Persian poet Rumi, from the Diamond Sutra to the Qu’ran, from the Dalai Lama to Anne Sexton.  Martin Luther King appears here along with Gandhi, St. Francis of Assisi, and the anonymous authors of  “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

These writings and sayings from the spiritual masters are printed on the left-hand pages of the book. The right-hand pages contain, among other valuable information, a running account of the history of Boston College, the educational and spiritual ideals that animated the Jesuits who founded it in 1863 and built it into a university, and guidance on issues that face students in the contemporary world.

Though the book is intended primarily for young people, in fact, Father Appleyard tells me, “all the positive response to the book has come from people over thirty.” That does not mean a lack of response from the undergrads but simply that they have not yet been heard from. The Center is about to begin an evaluation by email designed to discover what students think of the book.

Speaking of email, Father Appleyard expects the little red book to be available on line in the near future. Readers will soon be able to find it at http://www.bc.edu with a link to the Center for Ignatian Spirituality.

Pondering a great variety of what is contained in the little red book, readers may feel better fortified for the struggles of the spiritual life and consoled by the examples of those who have entered into harmony with God.

One of the many passages that speak to me comes from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a favorite guru of mine. “Prayer comes to pass,” he wrote, “ in a complete turning of the heart toward God, toward His goodness and power. It is the momentary disregard of one’s personal concerns, the absence of self-centered thoughts, which constitute the art of prayer. Feeling becomes prayer in the moment when one forgets oneself and becomes aware of God.”

With words like these I feel inspired toward the kind of disinterested turning to God that has long been an ideal for me but too seldom realized.

Richard Griffin

A few weeks before his death, Fred telephoned a friend and talked about the event that he saw coming. His part of the conversation went something like this: “I have had a fulfilled life, I am 76 years old, I have enjoyed a wonderful marriage, I am the father of three fine sons, I am blessed with six grandchildren, and I am glad to have lived in this city for most of my life.”

Hearing about this conversation, as I did at the reception held by Fred’s family in their home a few days after his death, buoyed me up. The spirit with which he finished his life was of a piece with the way he had lived it. He was a man who enjoyed both being where he was and the people with whom he associated.

And yet, his personal style was quite unconventional. For example, for many years I had never seen him dressed up. Instead, he would spend time at City Hall wearing khaki pants, open shirt, and sneakers, instead of the professional clothes worn by others who worked there. In my early days working there, I often wondered who this person without apparent portfolio could be.

But Fred was never a city employee. Rather, he was a citizen who gave his time freely to the city in which he lived. As a person of some wealth, he was free to give professional services to the community without financial recompense. This he did over a period of four decades, serving  on the planning board and in other important positions in which he felt he could make a difference.

In fact, he did so by reason of his superb skills as thinker and problem-solver. To the issues faced by municipal government he brought his training as a lawyer, combined with a great store of practical knowledge gained by his work as a builder and inventor. In receiving services from him, our city benefited in a wide variety of ways.

Most citizens knew nothing of this man’s generosity to their community. Though his service on municipal boards brought him before the public, most of his work remained behind the scenes as he dealt with difficult and complicated issues. To my knowledge, Fred never sought to draw attention to himself but instead felt content to help in whatever he could.

I was always impressed by the way he dealt with people of all sorts. He did not let his own emotions stand as a barrier between himself and others. This inner freedom allowed him to negotiate successfully where people with large vested interests would fail. Whenever he offered counsel to me in my capacity then as a city official, I found it imaginative and yet practical.

Of all his public interests, the most important was housing. He championed formulas that would allow poor people to stay in the city in decent and affordable homes. At the same time, he worked on preserving the historical character of the city’s buildings while helping with commercial development as well.

The details behind all these areas of Fred’s activities are known to only a few others and would not be of interest to many readers. The main point is this man’s extraordinary service to other people, sustained over so many years. His seems an unparalleled record of generosity directed toward the community of fellow citizens.

Though I had many conversations with Fred over the years, I never asked him about his motivation. Probably such an initiative on my part would have led nowhere. I suspect that he did not want recognition of his good deeds; he might never have expressed to himself in so many words what drove him to work so hard for others.

But I feel inspired by what he did. A man who had an advanced education at famous schools, who could have gained top positions in the world of work, he decided early in his carrier to walk to a different rhythm. He remained very much his own man and found time to do private projects that interested him too, but his work for the public and the common good remains as his chief legacy, one deserving of deep respect.

Richard Griffin

The film “Chocolat,” currently showing in movie theaters around the country, has turned up on the lists of some critics as one of the year’s ten best. It has even been said to be a potential Academy Award winner. So clearly, this film comes highly rated.

The story it tells is set in a small picturesque village in France. There, people live under the rigid management of both church and state. The mayor and the parish priest show themselves rigidly determined to maintain law and order.

At a crucial point in the story, this strict regimen is threatened by the arrival of a single woman with her young daughter. The woman opens a chocolate store and reveals the power of chocolate to relax people and make them more receptive to the sensual life.

Other details and the twistings of the plot I will not reveal here. The film is not to be taken entirely seriously; strong doses of fantasy are meant to stir the imagination of viewers.

My only reason for mentioning “Chocolat” here is because it strongly contrasts spirituality with religion, much to the disadvantage of the latter. Religion as centered in the parish church appears as rather dehumanizing.

The priest standing in his pulpit high above his parishioners preaches a gospel of social conformity to rigid rules of behavior. The townspeople hear nothing of the liberating power of religion at its best; instead they submit to dour, forbidding precept.

Spirituality, on the other hand, looks a whole lot better. The chocolate shop proprietor knows how to loosen people up and to bring laughter out of even sour looking townspeople. She does not judge people on the basis of their behavior; rather she shows herself open to everybody, ready to help them find some joy and happiness in their lives.

So the contest between religion and spirituality has a clear outcome. Spirituality is going to win, hands down. One is largely negative, lacking the qualities that make human life enjoyable; the other has those assets in abundance, as the conversion of some townspeople shows.

It all makes for entertaining film viewing. But what about the reality of the two approaches?

The kind of religion shown here depends on stereotypes. Not a few people in this country have grown up in churches that were both narrow and rigid. For them, religion became the source of obligation rather than of liberation and joy. The spirituality that is at the heart of true religion was strangled by the unfeeling requirements of institutions.

Nowadays it is fashionable to feel something like what Monica Lewinsky told Barbara Walters: “I’m not very religious; I’m more spiritual.” This implies the superiority of the latter over the former, as if there is something lacking in religion.

The big difference between the two, of course, is that religion is connected with institutions and most people feel mixed about institutions. Institutions have problems; spirituality does not.

But maybe there’s some merit in the way Huston Smith, a scholar of world religions, looks at the issue. In his new book, “Why Religion Matters,” he suggests a more subtle reason for the current bias that many people feel against religion.

“Because it challenges the prevailing worldview, it has lost some of its respectability,” Professor Smith claims. He means that religion dares to take issue with scientism, the assumption that everything can be explained by science. And that inevitably makes religion look irrelevant to those who believe in science as the last word.

As the title of his book suggests, Huston Smith holds that religion does matter because it addresses the deepest questions of life. These are the questions that Paul Gaugin asked in a famous painting: “Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?” For answers to these simple but most profound questions, people have always turned to religion, over the long history of the human world.  

Spirituality, without institutional underpinnings, does not represent the same threat to vested interests. It tends to float freely the way it does in the movie “Chocolat.”

But allied with religion, with its resources of legacy, community, and wisdom, spirituality can become its best self.

Richard Griffin

Everything in my home has been disrupted. Furniture from the main bedroom has been stuffed into the living room. Books have been taken off the shelves and piled into boxes. The dining room table and its surrounding area have become my wife’s work space. The office upstairs where I work has been transformed into even more chaos then usual. Nothing is where it should be and daily life has become noisy and unpredictable.

Mind you, it’s all in a good cause. The house is under renovation at the moment. Room by room, we are having our living space repaired, renewed, and made beautiful. I believe this project is worth doing. Eventually it will be worth all the grief.

But grief it is, for now and for the duration. To me it has become the Big Dig writ small. This morning I got up at three o’clock, unable to sleep longer. Asked why I could not sleep, I reluctantly replied with one word, “disruption.”

Phileas J. Fogg, our resident cat, is feeling it also. He looks hangdog these days, as if one can cross species. Clearly he, too, chafes at the disruption. Released from his cellar lair each morning, he makes his rounds, disconcerted that so much is no longer in its proper place.

Phil and I, making common cause, both bemoan our fate at having to live amid upheaval of the familiar. We live each day ill at ease, wondering when the house beautiful project will ever reach conclusion. Despite our commitment to the cause, we often wonder – – Is it worth it? We might relapse, given half a chance.

This minor domestic crisis has caught me by surprise. The simple decision to renovate the house has brought with it unforeseen challenges to my priorities. It has thus raised spiritual issues more urgently than I would have thought possible.

How can I have become so attached to my own convenience that a disruption upsets me as much as this house renovation does? And why do I so love my possessions that even short-term separation from them causes me pain? I reach out for my alarm clock and it is not in its accustomed place. I need to check a reference book but it is buried deep in some box or other far from my grasp. Soon my computer will be moved and I feel anxious about ever getting all its wires rightly reconnected.

The disruption may reveal how thin my spirituality really is. That  I cannot accept more gracefully than this the deprivation now underway does not speak well for the state of my soul. The detachment that I had prized now proves mere theory. My own convenience, comfort, and quiet have been embarrassingly revealed as dominant.

It was not always so with me. In the days of my most intense spiritual training I learned detachment from all earthly things. My Jesuit novice master taught us a rule from the Spiritual Exercises that was intended to govern my life. At that time you could have taken any of my meager possessions away from me and that would have been acceptable.

On further analysis, however, what is so wrong about these current reactions of mine? Are they not fully human, typical of the way most people would respond? Perhaps spiritual meaning is to be found in these evidences of a common humanity shared with so many others.

Is not this what the single most important decision of my life really meant? In middle age I chose to return to secular life and give up the austere role of official sacred person in order to plunge back into the world with all of its wild disorder. My wisdom then was that God could be found in the ordinary experiences of life, outside cloistered austerity.

I wanted to try the way of attachment instead of my youthful path of detachment. So if things are now crowding in on me, maybe that’s all right. It need not interfere with the spiritual life to live in a messy setting. The experience of chaos does not put us outside the realm of the spirit. In fact, it may lead to a deeper discovery of what spirit really means.

Richard Griffin

“He was a wonderful husband.” That’s what Freya von Moltke told me about the man who was executed by Hitler’s government in January, 1945.

Helmuth James von Moltke died as a hero of conscience, unjustly found guilty of treason, along with others who opposed the terrible crimes of the Nazis. They took leading roles in the German resistance, a  movement that still shines out from  the spiritual darkness that enveloped their nation at that time.

Now 89 (90 in March)  years old and living in Vermont, his widow remembers him with love and admiration for his courage. He himself was enabled to face suffering and death in large part because of his wife’s loving support.

A record of their relationship, as well as of this terrible period of history, is found in the English-language volume called “Letters to Freya: 1939 – 1945”  published by Knopf in 1990. These letters were hidden by Freya in her beehives, for fear the police would find them; some of them were published soon after the war.

The letters reveal the qualities of soul required of anyone who dared oppose Hitler’s ruthless regime. Helmuth James, as he was called, drew upon his own  religious faith especially as expressed in the New Testament. Though his parents were Christian Scientists, he grew up as a Lutheran Christian, a faith that deepened as he faced the end.

A paragraph from the last of his letters shows how he saw the meaning of his life: “Dear heart, my life is finished and I can say of myself: He died in the fullness of years and of life’s experience.  This doesn’t alter the fact that I would gladly go on living and I would gladly accompany you a bit further on this earth. But then I would need a new task from God. The task for which God has made me is done.”

At this time Helmuth James was only thirty-seven years old. Though he would have wanted to live longer, united with his wife and their two young sons, he dared to recognize in faith that the purpose of his life was fulfilled. He was ready to die as a witness to the truth.

The story of the Moltkes is not well known to Americans, unfortunately. The two generals of the same name – one who led German troops in the Franco-Prussian War, the other the chief general at the beginning of World War I – stand out prominently in the historical record. However, when you look at what really counts, the life and death of Helmuth deserves to be remembered.

Dartmouth College, to its credit, gave an honorary degree to Freya von Moltke at its graduation ceremony last spring. She was honored in recognition of her own stature as a person and of the history of her family.

When I spoke to her recently, Freya said of the era, “It was a very high period in my life.” She also said: “Germans are lucky there were a few  who died in all conscience against Hitler.” In talking with her, I felt myself to be encountering some of their history and thus sharing in some small way in their spiritual legacy.

Freya does not romanticize her husband’s heroism but retains a realistic sense of his values. She told me, for instance, that Helmuth James was not opposed to violence in every circumstance. “He was against silly wars,” she said, “but he was not a pacifist.” He did not share, it seems, the view that Hitler should be assassinated because he feared that action might make it harder to reconstruct Germany on principles of law and universal justice. So he did not take part in the famous attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944.

Helmuth James was a leader in what came to be called the Kreisau Circle, a group of Germans who were planning for the time when their country could be restored as a law- abiding member of the international community. The group took its name from the town where the Moltke family estate was located. The place is now located in Poland and has become a center where Poles, Germans, and people from other nations can come to strengthen bonds across national boundaries.

Freya sees this center as a sign of hope. “That’s very beautiful. They will make is a success.”

Richard Griffin

“By 2000, machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy. With Government benefits, even nonworking families will have an annual income of $30,000 to $40,000 (in 1966 dollars). How to use leisure meaningfully will be a major problem, and one expert foresees a pleasure-oriented society full of ‘wholesome degeneracy.’”

This quotation from the February 25, 1966 issue of Time Magazine looks into the future and sees what has not come close to happening. Unless you, unlike me, have become independently wealthy and are overwhelmed with leisure, this prediction has proven spectacularly wrong-headed. Time’s crystal ball thirty-five years ago must have had a few cracks in it.

As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr once wryly observed, “ prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” Throughout history, those who have tried to foresee the next decades or centuries have most often failed to guess right.  I myself used to predict that by this time in history international air travelers would be shot in rockets from continent to continent and arrive in minutes rather than hours.

Still, our arrival at the year 2001 – a new year and, by some reckoning, a new century and a new millennium – almost inevitably stirs thinking about change and renewal. For some of us it is a time for resolutions, for setting right things in our life that need fixing. It is also a time for new hope and starting over.

If we have any spirit at all,  the new year is going to be a time for renewal. Have not people always felt it to be so? There seems to be something built into us human beings that takes the swing of years as an inducement for new beginnings.

In the spiritual life, past failures do not mean we cannot start again. The beauty of living as a searcher is that each day presents new opportunities for  growth and inspiration. If we stay open to being surprised, then moving into a new era can indeed fool us in many welcome ways.

There was a time in my life when I thought I knew exactly what the future held for me. All the years lay ahead in my imagination along a time line that seemed to me perfectly predictable. The initial religious training given me in a Jesuit novitiate amounted to a plan for living the rest of my life; I considered it foolproof. At age 21 I naively wrote in my journal: “I am going to make progress in proportion as I follow the route I have planned for myself.”

As it has turned out, however, my life has become quite different from anything that I imagined. With decade succeeding decade, I entered upon new experiences which surprised all my expectations. New people, new opportunities, new skills – all came tumbling toward me as time moved on. Very little of it could I ever have predicted, nor could anyone else.

I feel glad that life has turned out so differently from expectation. Mind you, there has been a lot of trial and error connected with these changes. More often than is comfortable to think about, I have made mistakes that hurt me and other people. There were times in my life, as in just about everyone’s, when I did not know where I was headed.

And, even now in this new age of 2001, I have no guarantee of safe passage toward the future. Inevitably, things will go wrong for me and I will be entangled in sometimes desperate struggle to find my way.

But is it not good for us that we cannot predict the future, either our own or the world’s? That counts as one of life’s treasures, our being unable to see clearly ahead. Just as utopian visions of the world’s future fail to discern what is really going to happen, so visions of our own future cannot ever be assured of coming true.

The vital need is not to sell ourselves short. As people with spirit inside us, we have a future, whether long or short. That future being unknown is what makes our life an adventure, a high-wire act that can prove worth sticking around for.

Richard Griffin

A middle-aged woman whom I will call Mary is trying to get her life together. (Besides the name, I have changed other significant details in this true story to preserve confidentiality.)

Many things have gone wrong for her over the years; now she hopes that this long era of misfortune has come to an end. Mary has determined to keep to the straight path that she has finally found.

As she talked with me last week, my heart went out to this woman who has known so much trouble and loss. It is not had to imagine myself in her situation, confronted with the mistakes and afflictions that makes of human life a constant struggle.

A drinking habit has led to much of Mary’s grief. It was a large factor in the break-up of her first marriage. This addiction caused much harm to Mary herself and to the people closest to her.

The worst part of it came when, after her divorce, a judge ruled that Mary’s children could not be entrusted to her custody, because of her drinking. Since her husband was also found to be too unreliable for taking care of the children, they were given over to foster parents.

Another factor in Mary’s troubles had nothing to do with her conduct. In a tragic accident last year, her twenty-year-old son was killed. The loss that Mary and her family suffered then and continues to suffer is too painful for words.

As a mother, she thinks of her son constantly. Not a day goes by without Mary thinking of him, his beauty and the love that they shared. Since his gravesite is far from where she lives, Mary has set up in her own house a memorial to him where she can stop and offer prayers in his memory.

But the most important memorial to her son is the resolution Mary has made not to take another drink. Thus far, she has kept this promise made to herself and her son. She knows that there is no better way in which she can honor her son and the love she feels for him than to preserve her own sobriety.

She knows that the struggle will not be easy. Another addiction shows how vulnerable she is to the grip of destructive habits. Every time she takes a break from her work as a home health aide, she steps outside and lights up a cigarette. But this smoking addiction can only ruin her health and shorten her life; it cannot bring down everything else in her life the way drinking can.

The struggle with the awful urge to drink has become the spiritual center of Mary’s life, as it has with so many other people. If she can cope with this challenge, then she will have passed the supreme test in her life. You can say that, if this happens, her life will have become successful, no matter what her other failures have been.

Let’s hope that she is not carrying on the struggle by herself. Any- one who has known the fearful demon of alcohol addiction needs the help of other people to break its grip. Mary may already belong to an A.A. group made up of other women and men who have learned to cope with the pressures of addiction.

Mary probably does not think of herself as having a spiritual life. She has become so used to failure in her personal and family experience that language about the spirit may seem quite foreign to her. Quite likely, she does not belong to a church or other formal religious community.

But her struggle is basically spiritual and, if indeed she gets her life together again, her triumph will be spiritual. The writer Thomas Lynch describes what happened to change him: “What I’ve learned from my sobriety, from the men and women who keep me sober, is how to pray. Blind drunks who get sober get a kind of blind faith – – not so much a vision of who God is, but who God isn’t, namely me.”

Coming to believe more strongly in her own worth as a person and in the love that supports her life will give Mary the motive force for change. If she pulls it off after so much failure, what a triumph of the human spirit that will be!

Richard Griffin