Easter Event

Last Sunday the Orthodox Christians celebrated Easter. According to the church calendar of the East, this was the first day of the Easter observance. Traditionally when these Christians meet one another in this season, they exchange the following greeting: “Christ is risen.” To this the other person replies, “He is risen indeed.”

Meanwhile, the Christian churches of the West continue the Easter celebration that they began the previous Sunday. Their prayerful observance of Christ’s resurrection will continue for several more weeks.

This is the liturgical season when Christ’s Resurrection remains uppermost in the hearts of people everywhere who are committed to faith in Jesus.

Against this backdrop I wish to share some inspiration gained from the classroom of Father Stanley Marrow. This New Testament scholar is unique: a Jesuit who was born in Baghdad and grew up there an Iraqi citizen. As a young man he emigrated to this country, studied at Boston College, and became an American citizen.

Father Marrow is also unique in the way he appreciates the Gospels and other parts of the New Testament. By this stage in his career he has taught generations of students at Weston Jesuit School of Theology and elsewhere, imbuing them with knowledge and even wisdom about these sacred writings.

Sitting in on two classes last week, I admired the way this former colleague of mine combines solid knowledge based on New Testament scholarship with a deep spirituality that comes from his own life and his tradition of prayer and other spiritual exercises.  From what I could observe, his students leave the classroom both informed and inspired, an accomplishment most teachers would be proud to achieve.

This dynamic teacher emphasizes that the New Testament is a book of faith, based on proclamation. The Resurrection of Jesus is not provable; if it were, it would not be an object of faith.  This faith is freely given by believers in response to the testimony of credible witnesses. Miracles of any sort are not proofs, Father Marrow says, but instead signs intended to witness to the truth of God’s presence and activity.

In rising from the dead, Jesus saves his people, setting them free from the triple slavery of sin, death, and the Law. In saving humans from death, Jesus does not save anyone from dying, however. Everybody must go through this rending of the physical self as did Jesus himself.

It is a matter of history that Jesus died; that he rose is a matter of faith, an interpretation of what happened to the Lord. The appearances of Jesus to his disciples and others are not proofs of his resurrection but illustrations of the risen life that he now leads. And that others will lead after their deaths.

No matter what the circumstances of a person’s death, New Testament faith says that God creates out of nothing the same person who died. The person with all his or her relationships is brought back to life. Just as Jesus is identifiably the same person, so will the believer be through the saving action of Jesus.

Belief comes through love and, Father Marrow emphasizes, love remains the best sign that we have been made into a new creation. We have been given eternal life so that, in loving you, I need not worry about losing you. The relationship we have will never be lost.

For Christians, the important point about Jesus is that he died for others. This fact, known by faith, takes on palpable reality each time an individual encounters another person in faith and love.

In this faith, life led for the sake of others witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus. The quality of our love is the most important single reality of the Easter faith. Jesus died to save his people from death and this reality becomes manifest in the relationships that people have with one another.

Clearly, Professor Marrow places great emphasis on God’s love for everyone and the New Testament’s call to implement this love in real life. For example, he cites the attentive listening to other people as an important act of love. It emerges in sharp contrast to the way human beings use one another, manipulating the other for our own advantage.

By contrast, accepting others as they are and where they are is putting into practice the Easter message.

Richard Griffin

Composition of Place

Over the past two weeks, the Christmas crib in my living room has kept members of my family and me focused on the events at Bethlehem connected with the birth of Jesus.

In the middle of the scene is a wooden stable where the child lies, with Mary, his mother, bending over him, and Joseph, his father, standing nearby. In the same space is a friendly donkey and next to it a large ox. These central  figures make a most appealing tableau, a tribute to the craft of the French contemplative nun who molded these small characters.

Then, on the right, villagers approach the stable with cradling small sheep and other gifts in their arms; on the left, the three kings finish their travels as they near the baby. They have come a long way to see and give their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Some angels keep watch nearby.

This display can be seen as merely one of the decorations that come with the holiday season. You can regard it much as the lights that adorn so many homes. Or, from a more spiritual vantage point you can let it be more: you can make it serve as an inducement to contemplation and prayer.

Using scenes from the Bible like this one as a help in prayer has a long history in the Christian tradition and, undoubtedly, in other traditions as well. One master of the spiritual life, St. Ignatius Loyola, made it an important part of his approach to meditation. In his small book, Spiritual Exercises, this Spanish mystic taught his followers and others to use their imagination when they came to pray.

He called this preparation for prayer the Composition of Place. This means putting together the pieces of a biblical scene imaginatively so as to enter into a prayerful mood in mind and heart. One can use scenes other than those that come from the Bible. Any other sacred situation might do, such as an event from the life of a saint.

The Christmas crib or crèche thus serves as an external playing out of what meditators might have within their imagination. Of course, a person can feel free to add new details; in our crèche, the villagers are bringing the child their own gifts: a rooster, a bird’s nest, even a small sweater.

For many people, this approach to prayer through their imagination could prove the simplest and the most enjoyable. There is something profoundly human about using one’s senses to appreciate holy persons and sacred events. This is a way of bringing the Bible to life and finding in its pages inspiration for daily living.

Thus you can imagine the characters talking; you can become part of the scene yourself; you can enter into the conversation. These are typical of the suggestions that St. Ignatius makes about how to pray. Whatever works for you can be the rule of thumb for your style of prayer.

He also suggests using other senses. For example, you could feel the heat given off from the bodies of the animals. You might even conjure up the smell that comes from the sheep. And, in a childlike spirit, you could touch their warm, fluffy wool.

This approach to prayer does not suit everyone, to be sure. And those who do find it sweet could carry it to excess. The important point throughout is, of course, union with God. Whatever helps toward that goal serves us well.

Simple as this method of prayer may seem, it can lead toward mystical depths as well. It would thus respond to what Abbot Thomas Keating calls “an enormous spiritual hunger in the human family.” So many people want a deeper day-to-day existence than what we learn from most television sit-coms.

I am going to feel disappointed this week when the crib comes down. The living room will seem empty of something that added another dimension to the place. Not until next December will the small figures bring their charm and grace to our home.

But in the meantime we will be free to build new cribs or other scenes in our imagination on the way to prayer. We can compose as many places as we wish, with only our mind’s eye limiting our scope.

Richard Griffin

Fifty Years Ago and Now

Fifty years ago, in January 1953, my father wrote a long front-page editorial in the Boston Sunday Post hailing the forthcoming inauguration of Dwight Eisenhower as a “momentous day in American history.”

He welcomed the new administration in Washington and rejected those who criticized Eisenhower’s cabinet appointees because they were wealthy businessmen. My father also felt enthusiastic about reversal of a philosophy whereby “the domination of the individual by the State has progressed to a point where it is dangerous to the American way.”

By contrast with my father, I did not “like Ike,” as a presidential candidate and had voted for his opponent Adlai Stevenson. Though, by contrast with my newspaperman father, I stood far removed from public affairs, I would have strongly rejected his scathing appraisal of  “the motley crowd that found its way to Washington and into governmental agencies” in the earlier administrations.

To me, Roosevelt’s appointees and, to a lesser extent, Truman’s had led us to both a greater measure of economic fairness for ordinary citizens and to victory in World War II. I admired the work and thinking of people like Harry Hopkins, Frances Perkins, and George Marshall, stars in the two Democratic administrations.

Given our tensions, it would have been difficult for us to exchange views about politics, but I now wish we had been able to. At the time, I was in monastic seclusion in Lenox, Massachusetts, for from the public arena. This business between us will always remain unfinished, much to my continuing regret.

Were he looking at the national scene this January, my father would presumably not mind the presence of wealthy businessmen in the Bush cabinet. The president’s and the vice president’s devotion to big oil companies would not cause misgivings in him the way they do in me.

But the enlarged role of the federal government in the private affairs of  individual citizens might well give him pause.

Looking toward 2003, I feel anxious about what is happening to our country as mobilization for war continues. Memory of what happened to us in the early fifties stir in me fear of repression like that led by Joe McCarthy.

Of course domestic Communism posed some threat to the well-being of the United States at that time, but the witch hunt by McCarthy and his henchmen did considerable damage to our fellow citizens and threatened even more. Eisenhower himself seemed afraid to intervene for fear of adverse political reaction.

Apparently more wary of Communism than of the loss of civil liberties, my father sided with McCarthy. Even now I find it poignant and distressing that among the wreaths that arrived for my father’s funeral came one from Senator Joe McCarthy.

But I still believe proposals for the “Total Information Awareness” program that Admiral John Poindexter has been appointed to engineer would trouble a journalist worried about the “domination of the individual by the State.”

Total Information Awareness seems to me a term based on hyperbole but nonetheless terrifying in its import. It would be a way of linking electronic data from sources such as credit card transactions and calling card uses. This so-called “data mining” would be used with “profiling technologies” to reveal suspicious behavior that could be spotted by government bureaucrats.

Thus government could snoop on the actions of private citizens no matter how inoffensive their business might be. Citizens of certain backgrounds would likely suffer suspicion simply by reason of their religion, national origin, or organizational affiliation. All would be done in the name of patriotism and the defense of our country against foreign and domestic attack.

This system has been planned by the Pentagon and would thus give to the military widespread and unprecedented power over civilian life. It would mean the triumph of technology over individual freedoms to a degree that I find frightening. Perhaps the time has come for ordinary citizens like me to voice our misgivings about this system before it becomes too late to exercise any control at all over it.

I take heart from resolutions passed by some two dozen cities and towns, including my own, urging local government officials to oppose the federal war on terrorism when they see it as violating the rights of private citizens. Even places not known for radicalism,  like Tampa and Fairbanks have passed such municipal resolutions.

A terribly destructive war in Iraq is a daunting enough prospect for the new year without adding to it a campaign repressive of American’s civil rights. The older I get, the more important these rights appear as the bedrock of our democracy.

Though we disagreed on so much, and he did not consistently uphold it, perhaps I can invoke the same principle that my father espoused at the beginning of the new year 1953. We, too, must be on guard against antiterrorist programs that violate civil rights.

Richard Griffin

Frank’s Kairos

In this season of hope, Frank, an old friend, writes from Kalamazoo about his volunteer job one afternoon a week. The house where he works is called Kairos Dwelling, a place where poor people who are terminally ill come to be cared for free of charge.

Kairos, as my friend explains, is a Greek word used by St. Paul to indicate the fullness of time.  For the people who live their last weeks or months there, this is indeed kairos, the time when they will die.

The house is not like a hospital but more like a hospice. People are given drugs to make them comfortable and relieve pain rather than in the expectation that they will get better. These are people whose families cannot take care of them or afford to place them in an institution.

Contrary to what one might imagine, the atmosphere of the house is cheerful, my friend reports. On his first visit there, he was greeted by a large spaniel-like dog and one of the patients was sitting at the kitchen table eating a beautifully cooked meal with the volunteers and a professional staff member.

At first, Frank wondered what use he could be. After all, he calls himself a retired and sometimes miserable old professor. But he soon learned how to serve dying people in ways that he had never imagined.

Here’s the way he describes his work:

“I have learned to help turn an old one in bed, to help clean the bed and the person if she is incontinent. I have learned to sit quietly by the bedsides of our people, not speaking, just sitting there, perhaps quietly holding a hand. I have learned to give manicures and pedicures.

“I am learning how to massage the feet of our people. I am learning to talk to people who quite possibly may not be able to talk to me. Sometimes I sit in the small ecumenical chapel and pray for my people. Most importantly, I have learned that I can laugh and joke there while doing the dishes or folding laundry. I have learned that our people often want the comfort of a hand in their hand or an arm around their shoulders.”

To his surprise, Frank finds himself rested and peaceful when he returns home after his stints at Kairos. His wife has noticed the difference in him.

During his academic career my friend taught courses on the religions of the world. Not surprisingly, he finds this legacy rich as he reflects on his experiences at Kairos. Drawing on the Christian story of the Three Wise Men, he writes:

“Sometimes I feel like one of the Magi visiting a very old Messiah. I have gifts to bring; I know I am in the presence of people in need of touching and caring. And so I bring my own version of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

“And I know that I am in the presence of the one I have come to call My dear old Lord. This is my Christmas and I feel luck to have found this cave, this stable, and the bewildering array of old Messiahs who come there.”

Frank’s story has inspired me as I look for the at the approach of the New Year, 2003. War and rumors of war fill the air; human calculation makes the coming year look ominous indeed. But hope is not based on human calculation.

A friend not thinking he could be of any use but finding otherwise; taking on  disagreeable tasks such as cleaning someone incontinent; discovering the power of human touch –  –  all of these breakthroughs I find enspiriting.

My friend has also come to appreciate the power or simply being there, not saying anything but sitting by a dying person in silence. He carries that silence to the chapel where he prays for those to whom he ministers.

These approaches to people in need take courage and express the highest human values. My friend does not give mere lip service to the spirituality that he has taught in his long career as an academic. Rather,  he shows this spirituality to be more than skin deep. It has penetrated to his depths and pours out in service to people in their kairos time.

Richard Griffin

Church Crisis Continues

In January 1994, I published a column on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The article appeared in the Cambridge Chronicle and started like this:

“When will it ever end? Yet another revelation of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy of children and adolescents has shocked a nation grown accustomed to such reports.”

Even with the resignation of Cardinal Law, the crisis I wrote about almost a decade ago has not yet come to an end.  However, the hope of something better has finally begun to shine through. A new archdiocesan administration, on a temporary basis, and then the prospective appointment of a new archbishop offer the promise of something better: action to repair some of the damage and to find new ways of putting  the needs of people first.

Rome, after a time of seeming eyeless like an ancient classical marble statue, has finally acted to sweep away the old leadership and bring on the new. Catholics and others can now hope that a new era can begin. But it is much too early to stop thinking about the Archdiocese’s betrayal of public trust.

In reflecting on the trauma of the past year, one can pretend that church corruption in Boston is without precedent. However,  for the Catholic Church in Boston, moral crisis is nothing new. Some of its history, not widely known, reveals seeds of corruption planted long ago.

The tone of ecclesiastical life was set here back in 1907 with the appointment of William O’Connell as the fifth bishop of Boston, the second to be an archbishop and, in 1911,  the first cardinal. He was to reign (the appropriate word) until 1944.

In 1912 the cardinal appointed his nephew, James O’Connell, to the office of chancellor of the archdiocese. Only 28 years old at the time, James O’Connell benefited from this nepotism to assume great power over church affairs. A fine account of this period can be found in the 1992 book Militant and Triumphant, written by James O’Toole,  now professor of history at Boston College.

The astonishing fact hidden behind the career of Monsignor James O’Connell is the fact that,  during most of the time of his chancellorship, he was secretly married. Under the name James Roe, he lived with his wife for a few days each week in New York City, where he became prosperous through investment of money apparently embezzled from the Archdiocese of Boston. Each week,  he would take the train to and from New York, changing back and forth from his clerical costume to mufti.  

Eventually word of this marriage reached Rome where Pope Benedict XV, in 1920, confronted Cardinal O’Connell with the fact of his nephew’s marriage. The cardinal denied the charge until the pope angrily produced a copy of the marriage license. Thereafter began a serious effort by some of his fellow American bishops to get the cardinal fired, an effort that lost steam when Pope Benedict XV died.

Thus ended a cover-up of dramatic proportions, one in which the cardinal was almost certainly complicit. In addition to this case of corruption, his biographer writes that William O’Connell’s opponents found in him a “ lack of true religious feeling.” One priest said of him: “an awful worldliness has crept into the sanctuary here” and he condemned the cardinal’s “scandalous parade of wealth, .  .  .  his arrogant manners, his strange and unecclesiastical method of living.”

Historian O’Toole also reports serious “irregularities” in O’Connell’s handling of finances when he was bishop of Portland, Maine. The evidence suggests that when he left Portland for Boston in 1907, he took with him some 25,000 dollars that belonged to the diocese he was leaving,  money that he was forced to return.

His predecessor, Archbishop Williams,  had lived in a room in his cathedral rectory in the South End. By contrast, O’Connell in 1926 took up residence in a Renaissance palace he had built at the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Lake Street in Brighton. This was yet another step in establishing a princely style of life and a clericalism that was to take firm hold in Boston.

One cannot perhaps easily establish a direct link between the events described here and the current crisis. However, the history inherited by the clerics of the Boston Archdiocese suggests a disconnect  with the values of Jesus professed by the church at large. In fact, Boston has been long regarded by Catholic observers in other parts of the country as both unprogressive and highly clericalized  

My maternal grandmother, I remember, used to speak warmly of Archbishop Williams who  served the church in Boston from 1866 to 1907. His simplicity and unassuming personal style presumably represented to her what a bishop should be. But, as the Catholic community grew and developed in presence and power,  its leaders took on power without a corresponding sense of social responsibility and fidelity to Gospel values.

The mess we have now has deeper roots than is commonly realized.

Richard Griffin

Meditation Group

“I almost visualized each of you being surrounded by love. It was weaving the circle of the four of us, weaving us together in love.”

This is how Olivia, one of my prayer group members, speaks of what she did during our half-hour meditation one afternoon last week. Sitting in her living room we closed our eyes and entered into this spiritual exercise for a half hour, as we have been doing regularly for the last three years.

After the bell rang for an end to last week’s session, I asked the other members –  – Olivia, Donna, and Emerson –  – to say what they do during the meditation. It was the first time I had posed this question, though I had long wondered.

On this occasion, Olivia was mourning the death, the day before, of a dear friend.  She began by  “dropping of my awareness into my heart center.”  There she turned to “wishing her friend into the light.”

Then Olivia turned her attention toward her breathing. This helps her awareness to drop from her mind into her body. She established a rhythm for her breathing: in/out/; deep/slow.  You discover an “inner smile” that says everything is OK,  no matter what your mind is doing. The present moment, she comes to realize, is the only moment. She discovers within herself a sacred silence.

Olivia suddenly thinks about what she has to do but she recovers from this distraction by coming back and anchoring herself in the present.  

Sometimes the meditation becomes boring and hard, she says. “But you deepen with insight and compassion. This is the grace. Out of the stillness spontaneously arises my love for other people and connection with them.”

For her,  meditation is not self oriented or narcissistic. On the contrary,  the “ego self vanishes and you connect with compassion for all people. It was very tender.”

Donna, for her part, recalls the way Hob, a member who died a year ago, used to lead us into meditation. “He had the capacity for leading us in such a natural way that we automatically went into a peaceful state,” she says.

She likes to use two phrases as mantras: “Come Holy Spirit” and “Come Lamb of God.” Repeating these words in her heart, Donna appreciates them as a gift. Through them and other spiritual exercises, she finds peace and joy.

And, yet, she sometimes finds it a relief when the appointed time of meditation ends. Serving as the ringer of the small bell to mark the end, she finds herself sometimes distracted by this task. “The last 10  minutes felt like 20,” she confesses.

Emerson describes his approach like this: “First I quiet myself and I feel the quietness going all over me. I do a prayer for everyone in the group. I come back to me and I wish myself happiness and good health.

“I then just sit and ward off those thoughts that I should be doing other things and what you are going to do when you leave. But I think of being content where I am.

“I think about family and other good things around me. I go through the names of my 11 grandchildren for two purposes: to be mindful of them and to remember their names when I see them.

“I never open my eyes during that time, it keeps me connected to the meditation. For me it’s being silent and feeling the energy from the group. It starts when we all sit down together. We’ve been doing it for a long time now and it feels like family.

“But I don’t stop thinking about everyday things. I call it mind chatter.”

Finally, I shared with the others some of my own experiences during the period of silence. “I can answer in one word what I do: nothing.”  That is, I try to keep my mind free of thoughts while becoming present to the sacred and the holy that envelop us.

Like everyone else, I suffer distractions and often find the time of silence weighing on me, making me wish for the bell to ring. But I keep returning to the stillness of the interior heart in keeping with what others around me are doing.

Richard Griffin

Heat Wave in Chicago

In the summer of 1995, a heat wave of unprecedented  intensity struck the city of Chicago with devastating results. An estimated 739 people, most of them elderly, died during a single week in the month of July. This may seem a strange event to discuss in the cold of December, but the catastrophe can prove instructive about  how to live well in every season of our lives.

On day one of the heat wave the thermometer reached 106; during the following days it ranged between the 90s and the low hundreds. At night, the temperature did not fall below the 80s and people in apartment houses and other residences baked.

As thousands of people became sick, the city’s medical facilities were overloaded. Ambulance drivers had to travel for miles until they could find a hospital to admit their passengers. Twenty-three hospitals could not accept new patients because they were  filled with emergency cases.

On news programs around the country, Americans saw ghastly images of refrigerator trucks with the bodies of people who never reached the hospital.

The lessons learned from this dire event figure large in a new study by Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at Northwestern University. His new book bears the title Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. While watching an interview with the author, I felt confirmed in several  of my views about desirable, even indispensable, features of life in one’s later years.

Some of Klinenberg’s findings come as a surprise. For instance, men were twice as likely to die as women. Also Latinos died at a much lower rate than African Americans. As the author says in an interview found on the Internet, “Latinos, who represent about 25 percent of the city population and are disproportionately  poor and sick, accounted for only 2 percent of the heat-related deaths.”

Poverty alone does not provide a sufficient explanation.

Risk factors cited by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention include the following conditions:  “living alone, not leaving home daily, lacking access to transportation, being sick or bedridden, not having social contacts nearby, and of course not having an air conditioner.”

Confirming these factors, Klinenberg confirms that hundreds of the victims died alone, “behind locked doors and sealed windows.” If they had friends, these victims had no effective contact with them. Neighbors and social service agencies never reached them either.

The author also mentions the culture of fear that marks the lives of some elders. Whether realistic or not, their anxiety about being assaulted prevents them from venturing outside or even opening their doors.

He also emphasizes the effect on a neighborhood of businesses, service agencies, and other people moving away. That leaves behind those with no other options and they remain vulnerable to isolation. Single room occupancy buildings and what Klinenberg calls “last ditch housing” also expose people to terrible dangers.

The author refuses to assign blame to any one individual or organization but finds a large number of agencies sharing responsibility for the tragedy. The city certainly failed to recognize the scope of the tragedy as it began and developed. Much more than the municipal government realized, greater resources were needed and so was coordination of services.

My own reflections on this sad debacle center on the need for community. Even if it did not expose me to danger, I would still judge isolation from other people terribly sad. Too many of us, young and old, cherish  false myths of independence. To me, it’s simply not desirable to go it alone, especially as I grow older.

Even what seems a highly desirable ideal – – aging in place – – turns out to have limitations. For some people, living alone in their own house can become both emotionally impoverishing and physically dangerous. Almost all of us need the support brought by interchanges with other people.

Yes, some people end up alone in situations not of their own choosing. But, as a society, we must try to become more imaginative about ways of reducing segregation and bringing people together. Both our bodies and our souls require this stimulus and a disaster like the Chicago heat wave of 1995 can help us recognize this need.

We men are in special need. Lacking the domestic skills required for a gracious lifestyle, as so many of us do, and often being averse to developing close relationships with other people, we can find ourselves dangerously isolated in old age. Perhaps we can get by on our own at age 30, but at age 85 can any of us? And, is it even desirable?

The Chicago experience also suggests that the quality of our neighborhood has great importance also. Granted the difficulties of finding places to live that are both supportive and stimulating, we still have reason to be wary of areas in decline. If they lose residents and businesses also leave, that can create vulnerability for us.

A heat wave can thus stir reflection on what makes for a good life as well as a reasonably safe one.

Richard Griffin