Jerome Groopman tells of two experiences that helped shape him into the kind of doctor he is. The first was the sudden death of his father by heart attack some twenty-five years ago, when Jerry was still a medical student. On that occasion the attending physician told him “Well it’s tough, kid,” a response that he felt entirely inadequate.

About this disheartening event, Dr. Groopman writes “This experience explains in part my powerful commitment to care for patients and their loved ones in a way that my father and my family were not cared for – with genuine compassion and scientific excellence.”

This quotation comes from his fine book, “The Measure of Our Days: A Spiritual Exploration of Illness.” He also talked about his father’s death in a notable television program, “The Healer” shown this past December as part of Dateline NBC. I found this documentary portrait of Dr. Groopman inspiring as he treated two of his patients who had diseases that turned out to be fatal.

The first, Gene Brown, a 39-year-old man with AIDS, is worn down after a thirteen-year struggle with the disease. He now has “the feeling that things are spinning out of control.” At this point Dr. Groopman begins treating him with a new experimental drug. The drug, however, ultimately does not work and Gene decides to call off further treatment.

However, his physician continues to care for him with particular concern for his spiritual well-being. Gene and he have an affectionate relationship, marked by mutual respect and love. At their last meeting, as they hug one another, Gene tells him, “Jerry, I love you” and Jerry replies in kind.

When the television interviewer asks Jerry Groopman if a time comes when he focuses more on the psychological and the spiritual, he says, “Yes, it’s in some ways much more difficult because it requires knowing the person and also knowing yourself and being able to open up to that person.”

The other patient, Elizabeth Sanderson, is a woman in her early sixties who suffers from breast cancer. She, too, goes through a series of ups and downs as various treatments work for a while and then fail to arrest the disease.

Throughout this agonizing cycle, Dr. Groopman  attends to her physical needs and the spiritual concerns of the patient and members of her family. As hopes for recovery fade, he nourishes for Elizabeth and others “a different kind of hope, a hope that their lives will end in a dignified and positive way.”

When I talked last week with Herbert Sanderson, Elizabeth’s bereaved husband, he welcomed my distinction between curing and healing. Speaking of Dr. Groopman, he said, “The healing that he does is the way his patients face death; that’s where it all comes together.”

The other major influence making Jerry Groopman the kind of man he is comes from the history of his family. Many members of his mother’s extended family died in the Holocaust. This agonizing legacy informs Jerry’s faith and spirituality. Referring to this legacy, he told me, “It enables me to be comfortable with people wrestling with doubt and uncertainty,” as so many of his patients must in facing their mortality.

Dr. Groopman also told me of his efforts “to find the sacred core in every-one.” When he succeeds at this, he says, “I’ve seen the soul revealed,” as it was with both Gene Brown and Elizabeth Sanderson. Both of them died in peace. Gene said “I’m a fulfilled man, I’ll tell you.” Elizabeth, surrounded by family members, said “I’m not afraid, I’m more overwhelmed with the goodness of God.”

At the end of the NBC documentary, viewers see Jerry Groopman as he takes part in a prayer service in his synagogue. He is shown reading from the Kaddish, the Jewish prayers for the dead. When you consider his work with dying people and his family’s history, this rite takes on poignant significance.

Asked what was going through his mind while praying, Jerry Groopman replies: “I was thinking what the lives of the people I cared for still mean to me.”

Expanding this thought, he adds: “They live in my heart and my memory. They have shaped parts of my life in very substantial ways and I express genuine and profound gratitude to them through that prayer.”

Richard Griffin

Flash back to a brilliant November day: Five older people sat in a room filled with autumn light that streamed in from the garden. We had prayed silently together for half an hour, until one of us rang a bell marking the end of this meditation. Then we spoke about the experience we had shared.

Hamilton, an African-American aged 76, said he had felt “peace flowing by.” (I have given the real people described here other names to protect their privacy.) Lucy, hostess for the group, spoke of shared spiritual travel: “We’re on a journey toward surrender,” she said with quiet conviction. Of her husband, Ned, she observed, “He’s ahead of us, but we’re all going there.”

Ned has undergone serious loss of memory and takes part each week in group support sessions with others in his situation. He continues to experience the multiple effects of disorientation. Just that day he had lost his eyeglasses and had felt distress until he could find them again. “How difficult it is to lose things,” he remarked, “especially glasses.”

For myself, I feel uplifted by Ned’s courage. He knows what is happening to him as his memory falters but he moves ahead. Identifying with his struggle, his wife offers him loving support. So do the rest of us prayer group members in whatever ways we can – in silence and by word and gesture.

Ned’s ordeal gives an edge to our group’s spiritual experience. Knowing the likely outcome of his illness, we grieve for the confusion imposed on him in his everyday life. At the same time we admire, perhaps even envy, his fortitude and see it as a precious spiritual gift. The many adult years he has spent in the spiritual search have clearly prepared him for this time of trial.

Watching our friend Ned, we learn to face our own future with all its possibilities for something just as hard to bear. I look upon this prospect with foreboding but also, in faith, see it as freeing the human heart for possession by God in a life that continues forever.

Lucy brought our prayer session to an appropriate end, one that teased our imaginations and stirred our spiritual aspirations. She quoted a thirteenth century Persian poet named Rumi: “Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom / How do they learn it? / They fall, and falling / They’re given wings.”

This scene, marked by spiritual striving against a backdrop of trial and suffering, inspires me with new appreciation of meditation and its benefits for soul and body. Like the others, I come away from the experience refreshed and better prepared for the difficulties of daily life.

Flash forward to another meditation just this week. On this occasion the sky outside threatens to rain; partway through, the drops start to fall gently and I hear them in my silent prayer,

When afterward we talk about the experience of prayer, Hamilton tells how he keeps his hands open because he feels a spiritual energy that he wants to share with the rest of us. His feeling for us all is evident and moves me to admiration of this loving man.

He shares with us a poem that was used in his church on Sunday. It was written by Howard Thurman who, at Boston University, was Martin Luther King’s teacher and mentor.

“When the song of angels is stilled, / When the star in the sky is gone, / When the kings and princes are home, / When the shepherds are back with their flock / The work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among the brothers, to make music in the heart.”

We all receive this as an inspiration for our prayer in this beginning of the post-Christmas season. Its agenda intimidates the realist in us, but we take heart from the power of the spirit.

When Lucy gently rings the bell in signal that our allotted time for prayer is over, she lights small candles for us to take home. The flame, she explains, derives from a candle lit by the Dalai Lama in the name of peace.

Richard Griffin

News has come, suddenly and without my expecting it, that Frank has died. I knew that he had an illness serious in its long-range possibilities, but I never thought it would lead to death so soon. When I talked with him two weeks ago, he seemed on his way to recovery.

Frank and I had been friends for 57 years, ever since we first met as classmates in our small high school. We shared much in values and outlook on the world. We had also shared in many of the weddings, baptisms and other events that marked the life of our families through the years.

Frank’s death marks only the second time in my lifetime that I have lost a close friend. It still comes as a new experience, upsetting because I feel unpre-pared for a world without him. In recent weeks we had talked about the activities we would share together as he moved more fully into retirement. Now that will not happen and I feel deprived.

He was a fine person who spent his life in public education because he believed it the most important work he could do. In his early years, he had given up a career that could have been much more lucrative in favor of teaching and school administration. After retirement five years ago, he devoted himself in large part to caring for his wife who had been afflicted with a crippling disease.

Spirituality always took a central role in Frank’s life. The religious values imparted to him growing up in a large family remained vital for him. When I talked with him during his recent hospital stay, I sensed that he was prepared for whatever might happen to him. With communication born of long friendship, I could tell that he had been thinking about death and the issues it posed.

Though I feel shaken by his departure, Frank’s death does not upset my own convictions about what dying means. Rather, it has strengthened them.

Ever since my own boyhood I have held a deep faith that dying leads to new life. Even aside from the teachings of religion, I have always judged it in-credible to think that death brings an end to everything. Given all the complexity and built-in value of each human life, I could never believe that this life does not continue.

Frederick Buechner, one of my favorite spiritual writers, expresses this faith in a way that accords with my viewpoint. In his most recent book” The Eyes of the Heart,” he explains his conviction that dying brings new life. I identify strongly with the reasons he gives to support his faith.

“If I were God,” Buechner writes, “and loved the people I created and wanted them to become at last the best they had it in them to be, I couldn’t imagine consigning them to oblivion when their time came with the job under the best of circumstances only a fraction done.”

Secondly, “life doesn’t feel like a black comedy. It feels like a mystery. It feels as though, at the innermost heart of it, there is Holiness, and that we expe-rience all the horrors that go on both around us and within us as horrors rather than just as the way the cookie crumbles because, in our own innermost hearts, we belong to Holiness, which they are a tragic departure from.”

Amen to this faith that human life does continue in splendor transformed by our loving God. At least, this has been my conviction since childhood, a con-viction that I regard as a divine gift. In that confidence I join Frank’s family and friends in committing him to God.

Only a few weeks ago, I wrote another column in which Frank played a part. My article dealt with long-lasting friendships and I included him among those closest to me. In the light of his death, a quotation he gave me for that piece has taken on new meaning.

When I asked him what our friendship meant to him, he told me this: “One of the things that we have been able to do is know one another well enough to wish it would go on forever.”

I remain convinced that Frank’s wish for it to go on forever has a solid basis in reality.

Richard Griffin

“Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”  This statement, made by the famously witty and acid-tongued writer Gore Vidal, gives expression to the vice called envy, classically listed among the seven deadly sins.

Vidal’s unlovely sentiment would not draw our attention if it did not carry with it at least some little truth. When we examine our hearts, we can all feel some temptation to begrudge other people their success. That temptation is something that I have felt many times and, frankly, given in to more often than I like to admit.

I remember once feeling very nervous about approaching a colleague, several years younger than I, who had already established a reputation for his writing. His published poems and short stories had won him an acclaim that made me envious. Talking with him made me feel ill at ease because I recognized in him a talent much  superior to my own.

The passage of years has worn away my tendency to feel envious of those who have scored notable successes. Though I still feel the temptation on occasion, by and large I now embrace the achievements of other people and even enjoy sharing in their good fortune.

This change of attitude, I like to think, has happened because of growing appreciation of a spiritual reality. That reality is the vital connection that each of us has with one another. As I grow older, I have turned my back on individualistic achievement and come to treasure the bonds that tie us all together as brothers and sisters, children of the same God.

I feel this way most of all during Sunday worship. There, other members of the community and I are joined together in recognition of God. “We give you thanks for your great glory,” we pray in unison. And we pay attention to our oneness as we exchange the embrace or handshake and say to your neighbor, “Peace be with you.”

So, instead of envying the fellow near me whom I recognize as the author of an article on spirituality that has just appeared in a national magazine, I congratulate him on his success. No matter that I would like to have written that article myself. That he has done so I recognize as an achievement that I share in too because the author is part of my spiritual community.

Each one of us is a gifted person. We have received talents that enable us to make our way in the world. However, those gifts, as I  have come to see more clearly than when I was younger, are also intended by God for us to serve one another. That other people have so much to offer is not a threat to me, but rather an advantage.

With this changed outlook, I can survey the people in my worshipping community and rejoice in their spiritual gifts. I recognize fellow parishioners who have dedicated their lives to serving the poor. Others who spend their time educating disadvantaged children come into my line of vision. And I spot yet other men and women whose artistic creativity brings much value to the larger community.

I also recognize and appreciate the physical beauty and graceful personality of others, younger and older. Some people among us clearly have the gift of making us feel accepted and valued as persons. I admire the resilience of my companions who have shown patience and courage in putting up with the physical insults connected with  old age and the unexpected  illnesses that surprise the young.

All of these gifts have a spiritual dimension and go to make the community a force for good. The diversity of the gifts attests to the prodigal impulse of the creator who has given them for the benefit of all.

As a person prone to relapse, I may well slip back into my old habits of envying the achievements of others. After all, there is something typically American about seeing ourselves as in competition with everyone else. But I now realize more clearly than before how false this approach to life truly is. Instead, we can allow spirituality to teach us how the talents of others in our community do not diminish us but widen our lives.

Richard Griffin

“Millennium, Schmillennium.” So says a bumper sticker in my neighborhood. The car’s owner apparently does not attach much value to thousand-year periods. Or, perhaps, my neighbor has gone public just to resist all the hoopla that comes with the turn of the ages.

Aside from hoopla, however, one can find important implications for spirituality in the passage from the 1900s to the 2000s. Some of those values can be expressed in the image of doors. Doors open and we enter into another place, a place that may surprise us and offer us new inspiration that could change our lives.

That was the idea behind Pope John Paul II opening the holy doors to St. Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Eve. He knelt at the threshold of the great church and pushed back giant bronze ornamental doors that had been bricked up for a year. He also issued a call for people around the world to change, to put behind them enmity and hatred, replacing them with love.

Not just individual people need change, however. Institutions also must turn away from past sins and be renewed in the spirit of justice and charity. This need applies above all to religious institutions. In that spirit the pope declared that his own church needs forgiveness for past transgressions of God’s law and must be renewed in love for all people.

For that to happen, the church and, in fact, all of society will depend upon new leaders who will help shape the beginnings of the new millennium,.men and women who can provide vision and who can inspire others to live by love. Our past century, amid its horrors, has seen the rise of many such people.

Spiritual inspiration coming from such leaders as Mahatma Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt,  Pope John XXIII, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, and the present Dalai Lama, to name only a few, has helped to redeem this century from its bloody hatreds. These individuals have enabled us to take away something valuable from the century despite the awful slaughters of these last hundred years.

One likes to think that the merciful God raised up these men and women so that, amid the carnage, we could salvage vital values. They all looked across barriers of race and ethnic origin and saw brothers and sisters who belong to one another. All met resistance from those who found profit in stirring people up to fight one another.

I will never forget what one such person said of Martin Luther King – “He was always stickin’ his nose in other people’s business.” Fortunately for all Americans, he saw that social justice was everybody’s business and he had the courage to act on this basic spiritual insight.

Like the other leaders mentioned above, Dr. King stood solidly in the tradition of nonviolence. Despite this past century’s unimaginably large expenditures on weapons of mass destruction and the unleashing of these weapons on so many innocent people, these spiritual leaders insisted that only nonviolence could ultimately bring about peace and justice.

Who will be the spiritual leaders in the global society of the next century? No one knows, of course, but we can hazard some predictions about them. Certainly they will meet unrelenting opposition. Like several of those mentioned above, they may face imprisonment for their attempts to change society. But time spent behind bars often turns out to give people time and motivation for spiritual growth. Nelson Mandela transformed his twenty-seven years of imprisonment on Robben Island into a kind of monastery for self-discipline in the arts of forgiveness and love.

Probably, more of these new prophets will be women than was formerly the case. As we move into an age when women take their rightful positions as leaders of nations, we can expect them to exercise widespread influence. Some evidence suggests that women turn to  spirituality more readily than do men. Perhaps the world will see a greater number of women emerge to provide leadership in justice and peace.

Finally, one can expect the new spiritual leaders to reach beyond their own local or even national communities toward the whole global village. New communication technologies whereby information is passed from one end of the world to the other instantaneously will extend the influence of those who show outstanding leadership. In this way women and men in the future will be well positioned to make a spiritual difference in the whole world.

Richard Griffin

Would you like your doctor to pray with you? The very question will seem odd to most people. Only a few of us will ever have thought of it as a possibility.

And yet, when they are asked about it, many Americans say they would welcome this activity as a support in times of illness. In one survey, an astounding 64 percent of those polled went beyond desiring such collaboration. They spoke of obligation, answering that physicians should pray with their patients.

Even larger numbers of Americans believe that doctors should at least talk about spiritual issues with those whose care is entrusted to them. Since it has been shown scientifically that faith, by reducing stress, can help a person to recover from illness, the importance of such discussion becomes evident.

And yet, many obstacles get in the way of this kind of dialogue. One leader in the field of spirituality and medicine, Dr. Dale Matthews, says that, in four years of medical school, only once did he ever hear the word “religion” mentioned and that once in a belittling context.

In a survey of medical residents done in 1998, 85 percent said they felt uncomfortable talking to patients about dying. Since spiritual issues usually become sharpest at this time of crisis, these residents would presumably find it impossible to pray with these patients.

These facts and many more emerged from a conference held by Harvard Medical School last week in Boston. Organized by the well-known cardiologist Dr. Herbert Ben-son, the forum was called “Spirituality and Healing in Medicine” and attended by hundreds of physicians and others interested in the connections between body and soul.

The number of participants is a sign of a notable change in attitudes on the part of MDs and other medical practitioners. Over 61 medical schools in the United States now offer courses on spirituality in medicine. To hear conference leaders talk, one senses that barriers between faith and science are rapidly breaking down like the Berlin wall between East and West.

For those physicians who want spirituality to become part of their practice, Dr. Matthews proposed three steps, under the acronym WEB,  that can be used with patients.

• First is Welcome, whereby the doctor makes the patient feel accepted and reassured. The physician may wish to make explicit that he or she welcomes people with all kinds of beliefs.

Another part of this welcoming process is to invite the patient to talk about such beliefs. Rather than keeping them off limits, as has been common practice, the doctor is happy to solicit discussion of important spiritual values.

Going further, the physician may wish to acknowledge the presence of God but only after some sign that this would be welcomed by the patient.

• The second step in the WEB process is Encouragement. This would include supporting the patient’s spiritual practices and pointing out how helpful they can be to healing of body and mind. It might even extend to encouraging people not given to spiritual activity to consider getting involved in it.
• Finally, the physician can give the patient a Blessing. This would probably not be a formal gesture such as a priest or minister might make. The doctor might simply say something like “God bless you,” or perhaps, “Shalom.”

Probably this kind of behavior on the part of a physician, when first encountered,  would come as a shock. We would perhaps wonder what got into our doctor to make him or her act like this.

Most people never see their doctors as people for whom spirituality may be important. We forget how many of them are religiously active themselves. Also we probably do not realize how many doctors have become aware of scientific research that shows the benefits that come to our physical selves through prayer and other spiritual activities.

If the spiritual life is important to you and you have a comfortable working relationship with your doctor, you might try taking the initiative. I brought up the subject myself this week with my ophthalmologist during a routine eye exam. She readily acknowledged that she had never raised spiritual questions in her practice.

But, on further reflection, she acknowledged that stress could clearly have an influence on the health of our eyes. To her knowledge, there has been no research on the subject but she now thinks it might be worth looking into.

Richard Griffin

A college minister recalls an anxious father wanting to talk with him about his daughter, an undergraduate. Anticipating what the man would say to him, the minister surmised that the young woman had lost either her virginity or her religion. He scrambled in his own mind to discover the best way to answer the father’s concerns about these long-familiar problems.

As it turned out, however, the problem was not that the student had lost anything, but rather that she had found something. What she had found was religion. Her father was worried that this new discovery of something that was foreign to him would be harmful to his daughter and he wondered what he could do to protect her.

This anecdote was told last week by Rev. Peter Gomes, for the past twenty-five years the University chaplain at Harvard and a person famous for his preaching. Rev. Gomes used this story to highlight the change of situation among young people in college these days.

He finds widespread interest in the subject among young people at Harvard, among other places. “Levels of practice have significantly increased across the board,” he says. “Virtually all my colleagues in the ministry here would agree.”

These students who are active in the practice of religion form one group. Three other groups are identifiable:

1. Those who take courses in the subject. Such courses are now widely subscribed, with many more students than formerly now choosing to major in religion.
2. Those who carefully observe fellow students who are religious. These are young people not ready themselves to make a commitment but interested enough to follow what religious people are doing.
3. Finally, there are the students who discover religion for the first time. They tend to be sons and daughters of parents who belong to the first thoroughly secularized generation, people who have had no vital contact with religion.

As the beginning anecdote suggests, it can be upsetting for such parents to have their children “get religion,” especially if the parents have long associated religion with brain-washing and other violations of personal freedom. They wonder how this has happened to their children and come to experience the phenomenon – “religion rejected becomes religion intensified.”

For fear mainline churches and other religious centers get overly encouraged by the picture drawn above, some further realities need attention. A recent study supported by the Lilly Foundation found these four traits in the religion of young Americans.

1. Many are not so much interested in religion as in spirituality. The extent to which you can separate the two is another subject needing discussion.
2. Church attendance among younger people remains low.
3. The study of religion is more popular than its practice.
4. Spirituality among younger people tends to be connected with service to society.

To get some sense of religion at work among students, I attended last week a special meeting of the Christian Fellowship at Harvard. This session brought together hundreds of young people from the various parts of the university into an auditorium for a service of worship and for celebration with one another. The quality of both impressed me.

These young people showed themselves unabashed in their professions of faith in Jesus. This faith found expression in the singing of Advent hymns, belted out with fervor. Then followed scripture readings from Isaiah and John’s Gospel. The silence of the listeners during these readings had a spiritual quality to it that fixed my attention.

Next came a talk by N.T. Wright, visiting professor of New Testament at Harvard Divinity School. Dr. Wright, an Anglican theologian who works as a canon at Westminster Abbey, spoke fervently about the Resurrection of Jesus.

His announced topic was “Jesus’ Challenge to Postmodern Students.” His main message was that even Christians have not yet come to terms with who Jesus really is. If they did, they would recognize Easter as “the first day of God’s new world.”

Again,the fervor of the congregation was evident. Though diverse in ethnic and religious background, these young people were united in their commitment to Jesus. They gave striking evidence of the rebirth of religion in the academic setting that Rev. Gomes and others have discovered.

Richard Griffin