Looking back at his life, Hob’s wife Olivia speaks of his “hard edges which softened with his age; he had a beautiful soul.”

These words come from a new video, entitled “Hob’s Odyssey,” that family members and friends have been viewing recently. It has been a year since Hob’s death last Thanksgiving Day at age 78. As we celebrate the same holiday again this week, I am giving thanks for the life of this friend who provided much inspiration to me as he did to many others.

What strikes me most about his life as shown in the video is the transformation of character he shows from early adulthood to his middle and later years. Seeing him as a jaunty and debonair young man in New York City, I found it hard to connect that person with the friend I came to know decades later.

The changes in him happened in large part because of the spiritual quest on which he entered as he grew into middle age. It was a searching shared by his wife Olivia as the two traveled widely together, on both external and interior journeys.

Olivia’s sense of adventure supported Hob as he experimented with truth. “How can you not rejoice to see your partner jumping into the new?” she asks. The sober answer is, of course, “Easy.” Many partners would be made unhappy seeing the person closest to them constantly looking for change.

But Hob’s partner saw the “transformative influences” of  the spiritual practices that he adopted. She later observed that as his spirituality took hold, “the depressions vanished and the volatilities.”

A crucial event occurred in 1982 when they visited India for the first time. While there, Hob became crippled by dysentery making it impossible for him to walk. In Bombay they met a charismatic woman healer named Sree Chakravarti who, in front of 200 onlookers, touched Hob and commanded him to stand up and walk. “It just blew all his circuits,” says Olivia of this event. “I saw him the victim of a miracle.”

In India the couple became friends with Father Bede Griffiths, an English Benedictine who had established an ashram there and lived as both a Catholic priest and a Hindu holy man. This friendship was to take hold and last the rest of Father Bede’s life while exercising a creative influence on Hob’s search.

Other spiritual leaders helped Hob find his way toward enlightenment. Among them, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Han was perhaps the most significant. At his hands, Hob was ordained a senior teacher in the Buddhist tradition, an office he felt honored to hold.

Others from whom Hob drew inspiration were the Dalai Lama, Jean Vanier, and Father Henri Nouwen. Vanier, a Canadian who founded L’Arche, a network of communities uniting people with developmental disabilities and their helpers, opened new insights for Hob. For a time he worked as a volunteer in a L’Arche house in Erie, Pennsylvania, an experience which contributed to his spiritual growth.

Father Nouwen, the Dutch priest whose spiritual writings have moved many, helped Hob to find value in suffering. Within fragility of heart lies great strength, Nouwen taught, a reality that Hob was to show forth in the last years of his life.

Those years were the time when Hob had Alzeimer’s disease. This he managed to accept with remarkable grace, though it would be a mistake to underestimate the difficulties. “What made it doable, and even light at times, is we’ve chosen to do it together,” Olivia said of the ordeal. “That’s not to gloss over the losses,” she added. “The depth of his pain and rejection surprised me.”

As the video confirms, the support that Olivia gave her husband then was crucial. I never tire of repeating what Hob once told me when I asked him a question that he had forgotten how to answer. Turning to Olivia, he told me: “She is my memory,” beautiful words I continue to treasure.

No wonder Olivia says “Hob is one of the most intriguing persons I have ever known.” She also speaks of what they had together –  – “intertwined Karmas off the charts.”

Seeing a person’s life whole, as “Hob’s Odyssey” enables one to do, stirs thoughts too deep for expression. The adventure, the beauty, the surprises, the pathos, the twists and turns, –  –  all contribute to a richness that goes beyond easy expression. The 78 years have a power in them that lasts beyond the confines of mortality.

The video concludes with a song by Leonard Cohen that celebrates what Hob and Olivia held together. “Dance me to the panic till I’m safely gathered in,” says a verse. “Dance me to the end of love,” goes the refrain.

Hob has been safely gathered in. This love, however, does not end. In touching  family members and friends, this love remains a present reality.

Richard Griffin