Olivia, a fellow prayer group member, has returned from visiting friends in Hawaii. While there, she went swimming with dolphins and told of the connection she felt with them that went beyond words.

The second time out, she saw a pod of 20 dolphins, below her in the clear blue water. They began to leap out of the bay with exuberance, playing on the surface and under.

“They are trying to remind us of our natural place in the world,” she says. “When I closed my eyes, I began to see their luminous forms in my inner vision.”

We agreed, Olivia and I and other group members, on this experience as an indicator of contact with the spirit at work in our world. While swimming near the dolphins she felt herself in touch with mystery. Through a kind of “architecture of light” (her words) she renewed her feeling of a deeper meaning that goes beyond appearances.

Another image of spirit has stayed with me for decades. A friend told me what it was like to land on an aircraft carrier in World War II. As a Navy pilot, he managed to touch down safely dozens of times, first in training, then in actual warfare. But it was never easy or assured.

Navigating toward the floating landing field, he would first spot the alarmingly small ship far below as it rose and fell on the vast sea. In those days, carriers were much smaller than they have since become. The pilot’s task was to have his plane hit the deck in precisely the place where the plane’s tail hook could catch the chain that would stop it. A few feet off, and the plane would go overboard, possibly killing the pilot.

My friend would often compare this exercise in courage to his experience of the spiritual life. In both arenas he would be tested by the need to trust. Trusting in God meant for him facing the unknown with courage as he placed his wellbeing in the divine hands.

Many people go through ups and downs in their pursuit of God. For the popular saint, Therese of Lisieux, it was mostly downs as she devoted herself to the spiritual life within a French Carmelite convent in the 1890s. As those in my book group discovered recently, the nickname “Little Flower” gives the wrong impression of this saint. Far from delicate, she was a young woman who was strong enough to go through agonizing experiences of both body and soul.

Writing about this saint’s trials in Easter of 1896, Kathryn Harrison says: “Thérèse was abruptly plunged into what she called ‘the thickest darkness.’ The faith that she had always taken for granted―‘living,’ ‘clear,’ uninterrupted by doubt―vanished, leaving her in a despair so profound it defied articulation. Once, she had found words inadequate to the ‘secrets of heaven’; now she discovered they were useless when trying to describe what seemed a visit to hell.”

In conversation about Thérèse, I foolishly lamented my own superficiality that prevents me from experiencing such highs and lows. In response my friend Emerson, advanced both in years and in wisdom, replied: “And you don’t need them.”  This perceptive remark came to me as a bolt of lightening, bringing me back from silly fantasy to reality. In Emerson’s view, I was already receiving what I needed for my spiritual life.

Instead of regretting what I don’t have by way of spiritual gifts, I turn with admiration toward those friends whose courage in facing life-threatening disease inspires me. Each day two of them face the prospect of death possibly coming in the near future, doing so with greater pluck than I could imagine myself summoning up.

A Lenten prayer service last week also upped my morale. The dignity and reverence that marked this simple liturgy in my parish church made it a gift to our community of faith. Reading from the Bible, singing hymns, offering prayers for the needs of the church and the world, and gathering afterward over food and drink, all made for an experience of soul.

So did the talk from the visiting speaker, a layman filled with insight along with skill at words, often humorous and graceful.

These, then, are some of the themes that I have unpacked from experiences flowing in the last week in March. No one of them perhaps carries great weight but to me they offer signals for the life of the spirit.

Richard Griffin

Standing in the roadway waiting for a ride, I felt a gentle wind against my face. But it was not gentle to me. In fact it hurt my cheek. So did a single drop of water that later fell on my face.

This pain indicates how the disease called shingles works. This virus comes from chicken pox, an illness that most people get in childhood. When shingles strikes, the virus springs into action, producing swelling in various part of the body and exposing tender nerve endings, usually causing excruciating pain.

A week’s bout with shingles has stirred in me spiritual reflections on the meaning of being sick with a disease like this, one that is not life-threatening but extremely difficult to bear.

First, the experience offers a striking lesson of how complicated human beings are. That a virus can stay lurking in our bodies for so long a time and then suddenly work its havoc on us deserves, if not respect, at least, awe at its power. In her late 80s, a member of my extended family had this experience after a lapse of seven decades between the onset of chicken pox and the outbreak of shingles. We are fashioned with a mysterious subtlety that can continually surprise us.

Another truism that emerges from this illness is my ultimate frailty. Though this particular attack has proven amenable to treatment, other diseases could easily do me in. Getting shingles has given me a lively sense of how I can suddenly be surprised by a serious threat to my well-being.

A deeper realization of my dependence on other people has flowed from coping with this illness. Of course all human beings are always dependent on others, whether they acknowledge it or not. There is no such thing as the person who can go it all the way alone.

In this instance, I depended not only on my spouse who provided me with loving support and care. I also needed the kindness of strangers, notably members of the medical staff at my health clinic. The nurses, doctors, and other staffers there treated me not only with professional skill but also with a gentleness and sympathy that upped my morale.

Though I have not talked with these healers about their motivation, I suspect they have implemented spiritual ideals into their work. These staffers, now mostly women and many among them people of color, express a compassion for their patients that must count in advancing the healing process.

They probably would not use the word, but it seems to me that they manifest love as they minister to fellow human beings when we feel vulnerable. If God is reaching out to me, as I like to believe, God is doing so through their hands.

I also admire them for often being more patient than we patients can be at times of distress. They realize the impossibility of always being successful in their remedies but they seem not to forget the importance of compassion as a universal value.

Even with the gift of all this help, I tend to cope badly. In my weakness I often feel the pain may never end. I understand why some desperately ill people would prefer to die rather than to suffer further. Though I would not choose that way myself and think it mistaken, I can imagine being tempted in that direction.

Thus I come away from the experience with greater sympathy for others in their struggles with disease. So many people, including those who have lived many fewer years than I, suffer so terribly over long periods of time as to deserve all the compassion we can give them.

At the beginning of Lent, I wondered how best to enter into the spirit of penance prescribed by my spiritual tradition. The answer came in the form of something I would never have chosen, namely putting up with the excruciating pain of shingles and its other unwelcome effects.

That same tradition has taught me to believe in the redemptive power of suffering. Thus I like to think of this experience as being of some mystical use to other people as well as myself. There is a community of suffering that may just possibly benefit the world at large. This, of course, should never allow us to give up trying to reduce the suffering of sisters and brothers everywhere but can provide us with some consolation for our own.

Richard Griffin

According to press reports, a blue and white  statue of the Virgin Mary outside Sacred Heart Church in Medford has been shedding tears since this past February. People have been visiting this site, some moved by religious devotion, others out of mere curiosity. The supposed sight of tears coming from this statue has led to speculation about why the mother of Jesus might be weeping.

This event follows another such phenomenon last summer when crowds of people came to Milton Hospital to gaze at what they saw as an image of the Virgin in a window of one of the buildings. For a time, the arrival of large numbers of curious visitors created problems for hospital authorities.

I have not visited either place, though I have seen photos of them on a web site called Revelation 13 after a chapter in the last book of the Christian Bible. Despite–or perhaps because of–the fact that my Catholic tradition pays great honor to Mary, I must confess to a certain skepticism about alleged appearances. Like the Catholic Church on the official level, I am wary of accepting miracles as a matter of course. And like many Catholics on an unofficial level, I prefer images of Mary to be more beautiful and durable than a pattern of shadows on a hospital window.

On the other hand, I do take seriously the religious impulse to find the presence of the divine in the things of this world. And these things need not always be beautiful.Pilgrims venerate Mary in the magnificent cathedral at Chartres and before Michelangelo’s Pietà in Rome; but Lourdes in southern France, which would never win any prizes for esthetic standards, is one of the most popular shrines anywhere.

People come to Lourdes from all over the world, some–but not all–in search of the miraculous cures that are attributed to its waters.My family and I visited Lourdes a few years ago. What most impressed me there was not the record–a fairly short one–of authenticated cures, but the fact that a genuine healing of souls seemed to occur there. The shrine is also a place where faith is felt and manifested. To participate (as I did) in a candlelight procession of thousands of pilgrims is to be profoundly moved.We were part of a tradition of worshippers going back to 1858, when a poor village girl named Bernadette Soubirous had  visions that she came to identify as the Virgin.

It is worth remembering that Bernadette’s experiences were greeted with scepticism, even–or especially– by church authorities. To be accepted by the Church, apparitions must be judged as promoting genuine faith rather than superstition. A connection with genuine holiness is also important–Bernadette’s subsequent life bore witness to this–and the alleged appearance must have some staying power in its effects. However, the Catholic Church does not require its members to believe in any apparitions, even in those instances when it celebrates them.

A search of the newspapers of the last hundred years will yield up reports of a number of apparitions which , for one reason or another, are forgotten today. One can reasonably doubt that many will remember either the Milton or the Medford site five or ten years from now.  And undoubtedly, more reports of Marian appearances will reach the media in the interim.

It would be a mistake to see these events, however ephemeral, as mere expressions of superstion or group hysteria. It is possible even for devout Catholics to find them distasteful; but others, and not only the conventionally devout, may find them an occasion to be conscious of a loving, maternal presence that puts them in touch with the divine. Those who pray to Mary see her as a mother, and children know that a mother’s presence can be evoked by all kinds of less-than-perfect images.

That said, it seems to me unwise to build one’s whole spirituality on events like those in Milton or Medford. Evidences of the mother of Jesus appearing in human life can promote spirituality, but single-mindedly pursuing them can lead to superficiality or even mania. As always, we should measure spiritual vitality by the quality of one’s love for God and the compassion one shows toward other people. Those who live by love, divine and human, seem to me ultimately the most spiritual

Richard Griffin

The one new film I wanted not to see this season is The Passion of the Christ. Its absurdly inflated hype, starting over a year ago, and Mel Gibson’s stated purpose in making it (to show the death of Jesus “as it really was”) were enough to put me off. Also I felt revulsion at the violence, widely reported to be extreme.

Now, however, I have gone against my resolution and have sat through the film. I did so in order to have enough credibility to discuss in this column the reasons why it has become so controversial.

Is the film anti-Semitic? To answer this question I take my cue largely from those Jewish people who have either found many parts of “The Passion” offensive or feel it likely to support the new wave of anti-Semitism that has sprung up in Europe and elsewhere.

You can make a case for its being no more anti-Semitic than the Gospels. However, the Gospels have been used through most of the last 2000 years to justify Christians persecuting the Jewish people.  

I can judge Mel Gibson sincere when he disavows any intention to blame Jews for what happened to Jesus. But you have to ask what value there is in making a film that he must have foreseen would offend and might even harm present-day Jews.

Its effect is to set back the progress made in the last few decades in mutual understanding between the Jewish and Christian communities. At the very least, it fails to reflect the spirit that inspired the Second Vatican Council in its strong rejection of anti-Semitism.

My central problem with the film, however, is what it says about Christianity. The very virtues of Gibson’s filmmaking distort the Christian faith. His cinematography is impressive: the characters are vivid, the scenery often striking, the images memorable. I will not soon forget the shots of Jesus and the two thieves outlined against the sky on a hill over Jerusalem

Filmgoers will not see things “as they really were.” That is impossible because the sources of our knowledge are the Gospels. These writings, as biblical scholars of the last two centuries have taught us, are not basically eyewitness reporting but rather documents that witness to the faith of a people. Of course, they often take as starting point real-life events, but they shape their accounts of these events so as to fit the needs of the faith community.

The writers of the Gospels were neither journalists nor academic historians. Sometimes their writings contradict each other. Nowhere in Scripture can we find what claims to be a simple, definitive version of events. In preserving four Gospels in the New Testament, the Christian church seems to reject the idea of a single such version.

My most serious quarrel with Gibson is the way he has distorted Christianity to make it seem a religion of death. By playing out in such agonizing and bloody detail the suffering and dying of Jesus, the director exalts the Passion beyond its proper place.

Of course, the sufferings of Jesus will always remain vital to the Christian faith. In a world where so many people die horribly, the example of the Lord retains its value for those facing indignity and loss.

But Easter is even more important in the life of Christians than is Good Friday. That Jesus rose from the dead must loom larger than his dying, important though the latter remains. Christianity is a faith that celebrates life rather than death. Yet Gibson gives scant notice to Christ’s resurrection.

The violence depicted in Gibson’s film is so horrific as to cause viewers of any sensitivity considerable pain and suffering. Though I am not especially sensitive to images, I felt much discomfort while watching it. I would advise parents not to allow children to see it; doing so could be seen as a form of child abuse, however unwitting. And, given the power of images over them, children may well believe that everything shown here is really happening as they watch..

The scourging of Jesus inflicted by Roman soldiers with whips and chains is agonizing to see. The victim is almost completely covered with blood. Yet all four Gospels devote only a single phrase to this action that in the film goes on and on.

Similarly with the nailing to the cross, we see what is done to Jesus in such agonizing detail as could make us sick. Is that the faith of Christians or does not the emphasis upon these physical details distort that faith?

Richard Griffin

In the majority religion of India, Hinduism, believers want above all to see the divine. This emphasis makes them different from Christians (especially Protestants) who place more emphasis coming into contact with the divine, not through seeing, but by hearing the word of God.

Diana Eck, who teaches religion and Indian studies at Harvard, considers seeing as a key to understanding how Hindus approach the deity. She entitled her first book “Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India,” and there she explored some of the many ways religious people encounter images of the gods whom they venerate.

The word darshan means a kind of sacred seeing, whereby a deity is manifested to his worshippers in a variety of forms. Professor Eck calls darshan “the single most common and significant element of Hindu worship.”

So much does this hold true that worshippers are likely to say “I went to darshan today,” meaning that they looked on a shrine where they saw some emblems of divine presence.

In a recent talk, this Harvard scholar focused on the Hindu god Shiva and described many of the shrines where pilgrims approach him. Shiva ranks as one of the three most important deities in the Hindu faith and remains a chief object of worship throughout India. Along with Vishnu and Devi, he stands out as a principal divine being.

To non-Hindus, it can be confusing to discover how many different gods Hindus honor. At first, this religion can seem simply to promote worship of false idols rather than the true God. However, on closer inspection Hindus are seen to stand closer to belief in one God than Westerners commonly realize.

Professor Eck considers it a matter of seeing the divine from many different aspects rather than believing in many different gods. She likes to tell an ancient story from the Hindu scriptures about a student who asked a wise man named Yajnavalkya how many gods there are.

The sage answered: “As many as are mentioned in the Hymn to All the Gods, namely 3,306.
“Yes, said he, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?
“Thirty-three.
“Yes, said he, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?
“Six.
“Yes, said he, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?
“One and a half.
“Yes, said he, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?
“One.”

Hindus worship the divine in many different forms and they believe that the images of God are so many as to be countless. And the individual gods whom they reverence are shown in various guises and roles, notably the god Shiva.

In one of his innumerable images, Shiva is depicted as having three eyes, one hand raised in blessing, the other holding a trident. His posture is meditative and his face looks soft, to show that he combines features of male and female.

At times, this deity is shown against the backdrop of the snow-capped Himalayan Mountains, where Shiva originated. From there he moved to Banares and adopted this holy city as his own.

Shiva can be seen as present in various objects. Hindus call these objects lingas and understood them as emblems or signs of the god. At one shrine, for instance, the linga is a chunk of ice, at another a large rock.  Almost anything can serve to manifest this god.

Thus a shaft of fire reveals Shiva; so does a beam of light. Housewives are fond of drawing designs outside on the pavement outside their houses to show reverence for the god. Some people take the sand on a beach and fashion from it a pattern that honors Shiva.

Professor Eck points out the importance of understanding how the basic features of Hindu piety can connect with people of other traditions. For example, she says of the shrines where people gather to worship: “God is far larger than the place God has condescended to be.”

Worshippers know that God is everywhere but, through their creativity, they can have a divine presence at the doorway of their home. They also know that even when worshipping Shiva, there are many other deities and images of God.

The Hindu way of worshipping through lingas at shrines encourages the use of beautiful objects to bring them to a deeper sense of the divine. Their religion sharpens people’s appreciation of beauty through color, shape, and variety.

Richard Griffin

How can a story familiar to hundreds of millions of people all over the world have never been heard by me?  That is the question I ask myself after finally hearing it told two Sundays ago.

Not only is this narrative known far and wide but the event it describes is celebrated each year by communities of believers in dozens of nations, including the United States.

The story bears the title “The Ascension of the Prophet” in English. In the Arabic language it is referred to as “Al-Miraj,” a name that can also refer to the holy day that is observed on the 27th day of the seventh month of the Islamic year.

I heard the story told by Ali Asani, a scholar of Islam who teaches at Harvard University. Professor Asani, speaking to a group of Christians seeking deeper understanding of Islam, shared with us an ancient narrative that centers on the Prophet Mohammed and his face-to-face encounter with God.

In beginning his talk, Professor Asani stressed the core belief of Islam, namely that God is one. Each believer bears witness to that basic fact about God.

“There is no god but God” expresses the faith of every Muslim.These words contain both a negation and an affirmation, the denial of existence to false gods, and the full acknowledgement of the one true God.

What all Muslims must do is submit to Allah. This submission involves turning away from being centered on oneself and instead becoming centered on God.

The holy book of Islam, the Qur’an, frequently mentions seeing God, though it also teaches that human beings cannot physically do so. The Prophet Mohammed, however, receives the privilege of a personal meeting with God.

When Mohammed ascends toward God, he leaves from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem under the guidance of the angel Gabriel. This guide will not be allowed to go all the way up, however. Only the Prophet himself does so.

Muslim tradition has sweetly interpreted God’s motive for having Mohammed make the ascent. The reason is: God could not bear being separated from his beloved so he had Gabriel call him forth.

Returning to an earlier theme, the storyteller emphasized that submitting one’s ego is a prerequisite for seeing God. You must “die before you die” said Professor Asani as he explained the self-transformation that Muslims understand to be the goal of life.

Another part of the story has the Prophet meeting Moses when he returns to earth. “How was it?” Moses asks. Mohammed answers: “He told me my community should pray 50 times a day.”

Moses told him that 50 was too much, unrealistic, and suggested that the prophet return and ask God for less. The next time he bargains God down to 25 but Moses judges that still too much. Finally, the Prophet comes back with an agreement for five, and that is why Muslims pray that number of times each day.

How does the Muslim community interpret the Prophet’s encounter with God? Some take it literally but others understand it as an allegory. They call it the Prophet’s mystical vision of God.

They buttress the mystical interpretation by telling that, when the Prophet came back, his bed was still warm. In this view, every believer can have a mystical experience similar to what the Prophet had.

Ultimately, Professor Asani points out, this adventure is a story of love. It is an object lesson not only about human beings yearning to see God, but about God yearning to see human beings.

Though not as learned in the Muslim tradition as I would like to be, I find it easy to relate to this charming narrative. It smacks of authentic religious feeling and speaks beautifully of love both divine and human.

The story also validates the mystical tradition as it has unfolded over the centuries. It dramatizes an intimacy between God and God’s creatures featuring an interplay back and forth. Though God remains above human grasp, human beings can enter into a love relationship with God.

James Herrick, author of a recent book on spirituality, asserts that “mystical experience is the common core of all religious traditions.” If so, this story can feed the soul of people who are not themselves Muslim but who relate to some of the spiritual wisdom in the Muslim tradition.

Richard Griffin

“In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.” This advice from Deepak Chopra sounds inspiring but trying to do it proves hard.

For me, the better way to start is by reducing the noise outside us. How about turning off the TV, for example?  Some people leave it on all the time, making the atmosphere around them always potentially intrusive.

Others have talk radio on continually, or programs featuring music. Some cannot go outside for a walk without being wired for sound. Or they will chatter on a cell phone while hurrying to their next destination.

Many modern Americans are in thrall to their computer. Always turned on, this marvelous machine produces its own noise that can act like a drug. Movies, rap singers, news reports – all come tumbling out and cloud our minds with a surfeit of information.

It’s awfully hard to get away from this environment dominated by electronic devices. They make themselves indispensable to us. Getting along without them on any given day comes to seem like a thoroughly unacceptable deprivation.

But noise of this sort has profound disadvantages that we can too easily ignore. All-sound-all-the-time blocks the spirit from making its presence felt inside us. How can anyone cherish interior richness when there is always such din outside?

I realize that, for not a few people, the sound becomes a kind of white noise. It remains in the background of their consciousness, a presence hardly attended to. You can ask them what’s on and they might not have any idea.

For many, an environment marked by sound brings reassurance and comfort. For those left alone, especially, a talk show host can provide the sense that someone is there. At times when we need cheering up, we can all find support in music or a comedy routine that speaks to us. We all need to be distracted from ourselves from time to time.

Perhaps for those of us who have become addicted to noise it would be unrealistic to go cold turkey and shut off all our sources of sound. Going on a TV fast or a radio vacation might prove extreme. No longer would I want to keep silence for eight consecutive days, as I was required to do each year during the time of my spiritual training.

But shutting down television, radio, cell phone, computer and other noise producing devices once in a while could prove a relief. It could draw us away from the clamor of the world and enable us to confront ourselves.

More positively, it could introduce us to a whole new world, that of our own spirit. There we might taste a peace of soul previously unknown. This might not happen all at once but we might be taking the first steps in the garden of peace.

If we have a solid spiritual tradition to draw upon, it is not hard to find strong backing for such a move. In mine, the season of Lent is a time for making this kind of discovery. For Jewish people, the time of Yom Kippur provides motivation for moving in this direction as does every Sabbath, and for Muslims, Ramadan, recently ended, also offers rich incentives. And, of course, other great spiritual traditions such as those adhered to by Buddhists and Hindu offer their own rewards.

But those who do not relate to any such tradition, experimentation with silence can prove similarly rewarding. That helps explain why so many Americans love retreats, either the do-it-yourself variety or those organized by churches, monasteries and other established groups.

To practice silence is to strike a blow for freedom. It puts you on the pathway of discovery, revealing inner riches you did not realize you have. Talk with a friend who has just been on a retreat and almost invariably you will find out what a freeing experience it was.

But to taste some of this you do not need to go to a retreat house. You can stay home and find some of the same new freedom. If you dare to impose silence, for even a short time, on the noises that confine us as if with metal curtains, you may be on your way to a more satisfying experience of daily life.

Richard Griffin