Mildred and North Cambridge

Last week, we said a final good-bye to Mildred McLaughlin. At her parish church a small group of relatives, and a smaller group of friends, gathered for her simple funeral Mass. No one dropped tears because we felt happy for Mildred’s entering upon a new world after 94 years in this one.

I write about a unique woman and her family who lived in the city where I live. However, there are undoubtedly similar long-lived women and men in every other city and town. They are the people who get to be known as “old timers” and become part of local legend for their style of living, not to say their peculiarities.

Mildred’s home for all but the last two years was on Jackson Street in North Cambridge, several blocks away from the church. There she had lived with her four older sisters in a plain, three-floor wooden house built by her father in 1890 for $1500. In this house the sisters had grown up, learned their place in the family, and took care of the animals they kept in their back yard. These included a cow named Bessie, chickens which provided eggs abundantly, and a dog.

When the McLaughlins were growing up, their section of Cambridge was filled with people of French ethnicity who went to a French-language parish church nearby, but the sisters belonged to the Irish enclave. Both of their parents, William and Mary, were born in Ireland and all of the sisters but Mary eventually visited that country.

Politically, this was Tip O’Neill territory and they were his enthusiastic supporters all the way. In the words of their niece Joanne, “they thought he was the best thing going.”

Mildred’s four older sisters – – Mary, Helen, Cecilia, and Veronica – – went to public high school, then called Cambridge Latin, no short trip from their home. The girls walked the route, a couple of miles each way, without thinking it extraordinary. Mildred, however, was sent to a Catholic school nearby because, in the words of her niece, “they thought she needed it.”

They owned a car but only Cecelia knew how to drive it. Helen had learned but, on one automotive outing, ran into a pear tree and never drove again.

Ultimately, all the sisters, except for one, found employment outside the home. Mildred worked for an insurance company in Boston, making it a practice to eat her lunch at a restaurant each day.  

The oldest sister, Mary, stayed home to take care of the house. Helen, Cecilia, Veronica, and Mildred paid her to do the household work, Monday through Friday, surely a rare arrangement then and now. With even rarer foresight, they also paid Social Security taxes on her employment so that she would have income when she came to retire.

The two brothers in the family, William and John, died in middle age but four of the sisters lived well into their 90s and the other died a few months short of her 90th birthday. As if with a sense of fitness, they died in the order of their birth, beginning with the oldest.

Through the years they enjoyed one another’s company, though Mildred, as the youngest was somewhat spoiled and sometimes out of sorts with the four others. Family members, especially their niece and nephew, loomed large and they relished celebrating holidays with them. Church also was close to the center of their lives offering them a faith that sustained them in hard times.

Despite their other healthful habits, the sisters were not exactly models of nutritional correctness. At the family dinner table, each of the sisters had her own salt shaker. And they would finish each meal by eating something sweet. Mildred also smoked for decades but without any apparent ill effects. She never needed any medications until her last two years.

When she had to move into a nursing home, Mildred found some consolation in knowing that a young family would now live in her house. John, his wife Trudy, and their six-grader son Isaac came to reside on Jackson Street. Only the second family to inhabit the house, they took initiative to meet Mildred and talked with her about the history of the place they had bought from her.

Now that Mildred, the “last leaf,” has fallen, that family tree stands shorn of foliage. She leaves behind a saga of 20th century living in a style vanishing quickly. With rising real estate prices, her neighborhood now boasts families attuned to the high-powered professional world. No longer does one commonly see households with seven children, and adults who walk everyplace they go.

One legacy left behind by Mildred and her sisters is a set of habits that make for good health and longevity. Exercise, low stress, strong community, spiritual life – – these and other elements certainly conduced to long and happy lives for them. Their peculiarities, too, fascinating and endearing, added zest to their lives and perhaps extended them also.

Richard Griffin

Last September, a Year Later

Even after a whole year, the images have tremendous power. People in free fall after leaping from the windows of their office. Smoke and soot enveloping city blocks as the great towers burn and fall. Men and women shaking with emotion as they weep for loved ones lost. Steam shovels gathering up huge chunks of debris in their giant mouths. Firemen taking off their helmets in silent salute as the bodies of their comrades are borne past them.

These images remain etched on our souls as we recall the horrific events of September a year ago. Even those of us who did not lose a family member or friend in the catastrophe of the eleventh can feel as if we did. And those of us whose faith in God was shaken by the unspeakable terror of it all continue to grope for meaning.

Terry McGovern, a thirtyish woman who lost her mother in the World Trade Center that day, says “You have to believe there’s something deeper going on, that there’s spiritual life.” As she explains on public television’s “Frontline,” aired last week, she has turned toward the faith she had previously lost.

For her, the death of her mother amidst a scene of terror has restored faith, a return that contrasts with the loss of faith experienced by others. “I want the church’s teaching about the afterlife to be true,” she now says. She needs to believe her mother lives on in a different way.

A man who saw, among the people falling from a thousand feet up, a man and woman hand in hand, finds in that image “the most powerful prayer I can imagine.” As he reflects on this awesome sight he expresses his faith: “It makes me think we’re not fools to believe in God, to believe that love is why we’re here.”

And yet others interviewed for Frontline report the destruction of faith. “If there is a God,” says one man, “he is an indifferent God.” Another sounds despairing: “Our hope was sucked out at Ground Zero.”  Still others, blaming religion for the hatred and the violence, feel bitter at teachings that spawn destruction.

A fireman still retains faith but longs to be in contact with his son: “I wish God had a telephone number,” he says with tears in his eyes. Others are moved to tears as the soprano Renee Fleming sings “Amazing Grace.” She herself confesses having been unable to look at her audience at Ground Zero as she sang, for fear of being overcome with emotion.

As I look back on the terrible events of a year ago, my own faith continues to provide support. The spiritual traditions that have marked my whole life still offer me insight and solace even in the face of unappeasable evil. Though I cannot understand evil’s power over the world, I continue to draw strength from a community of faith.

The gestures that my wife and I made on September 11 last year still seem to me appropriate. We walked to our parish church and joined with others in praying for the victims and their loved ones. We had no answers but felt that sharing a sacred meal made sense. Admittedly, it was an intangible response that could help only spiritually. Still, it was important to us and, we felt, others directly involved might appreciate it too.

If there was ever a time when mere spirit could help, this was it.  We were far from the scene of disaster,  so could do nothing physical. However, we did put ourselves in spiritual contact with brothers and sisters undergoing great travail. There was nothing much that could have been said had we been there. Just being present to them spiritually still seems the most appropriate response to unspeakable tragedy.

The spiritual values that emerged for me a year ago remain central. The precious value of family relationships and those among friends, with special attention to reconciliation among those estranged; the heroism of people called to duty in the most hazardous situations; the primacy of spirit as a response to the mystery of evil.

A woman involved in the dire events says for the television cameras: “I was so materialistic; now I want to be more spiritual.” She has found something valuable that has emerged from the ashes.

Richard Griffin

Bill’s Spirituality

“Compared to other people, I’ve got it easy.” So says a friend, whom I will call Bill, of a chronic health condition that causes him both pain and embarrassment.

Recently I encountered Bill at noontime when he and I happened both to be out walking. I noticed immediately that he was not looking his best: his face was gray and his expression somewhat strained.

In response to my inquiry, he acknowledged not feeling well that day. His intestinal problems were particularly bothersome. It hurt in a different way that he could not spend time in other people’s homes because of social embarrassment caused by this ailment.

Bill is a deeply spiritual man, as I know from previous contact. He has traveled widely and has lived and worked in other countries. Though he has learned much from this experience the doctors believe that his health problems may have resulted from it.

This encounter marked the first occasion on which Bill had talked openly with me about his health. Usually he cheerfully ignores the subject in conversation, preferring not to focus on matters he regards as private and too intimate for polite exchanges with friends.

Clearly he was feeling oppressed by illness on that particular day, enough so that he broke his usual reticence. For my part, I felt touched by his disclosures and took them as a sign of a growing friendship between us.

As he talked, I noticed how often he repeated the line quoted above: “Compared to other people, I’ve got it easy.”  It became a refrain in his conversation, one that reveals a certain attitude of soul.

It’s obvious to me that Bill does not, in fact, have it easy. His saying so, however, does him credit because it shows a spirit remarkably free of self-centeredness. Pain can easily narrow our outlook on the world and make us turn toward self as the only reality. “Why me?” we ask as if it’s all right for others to suffer but surely not for me to undergo the same fate.

The refrain about other people’s suffering being worse than his also reveals to me an attitude of compassion. He knows first hand about the problems of other people, having served as a counselor to many in the Boston area. He also has observed the conditions under which people in other parts of the world live and knows first-hand the afflictions many of them have to endure.

So he resists the ever-present temptation to self-pity by calling to mind the sufferings of others. He does not feel himself alone in coping with health problems that can perhaps be soothed but not cured. This perspective enables him to accept the physical pains that go along with the human condition.

On several occasions in church, I have noticed Bill absorbed in prayer. His hands folded and his face set in recollection, he kneels in silent attention to God. Of course I have no idea what he is praying about. But I wonder if he is not committing his ongoing health problems to the divine healer, asking for strength to accept his situation.

Though suffering is not desirable in itself, it can serve as a reminder that our life is more than it appears to be. Pain can rouse us out of our complacency and make it impossible to go on thinking of life as assured. I like to think that God hates pain even more than we do, but still God allows the mystery of evil to mark our lives.

When it comes to facing pain, one of my friends calls himself a “devout coward.” That inglorious description also applies to me. But, like Bill, I find it important not to see my own pain in isolation. In times marked by suffering, as in times of gratification, we belong to the human community.

I hope Bill finds relief from his pain and deliverance from those aspects of his condition that make it hard for him to visit the homes of his friends. However, such relief and deliverance cannot ever be assured. Whatever happens, I will continue to regard his perspective –  –  appreciating the suffering of others and seeing his own in that light –  – as a precious spiritual gift.

Richard Griffin

Mildred and Age Ads

Have you seen the television ad showing a little old lady getting a helping hand from a young man as she crosses a parking lot? Normally, I am ad-adversive, but this one has caught my attention several times and held me fascinated.

The lady has just been food shopping and is presumably walking toward her car. When she meets the nicely dressed young professional, who works in a Citizens Bank branch at the supermarket, she asks him to lend her his arm. This he gladly does, assuming her automobile to be parked nearby. When she delivers her punch line, he has been clearly one-upped: “Oh, I don’t have a car,” she says sweetly.

This ad, I have discovered, was filmed last January in California. This information comes from the woman who stars in it. Last week I interviewed her by telephone in Forest Hills, New York where she has lived for a long time.

Her name is Mildred Clinton and she describes herself as a “character actress.” Over the telephone she sounds just as charming as she does in the ad. The extent of her work as an actress surprised and impressed me. She played the mother of the Al Pacino character in the film Serpico and she has appeared in three movies directed by Spike Lee.

Early in our conversation I told her my age of 74, hoping this would make it easier for her to tell me hers. But “women can’t tell their age,” she informed me firmly but sympathetically, thereby revealing she’s in a certain range. Also her frequent use of “Jiminy Cricket” as her expletive of choice suggests that she was not born the day before yesterday.

As the ad shows, Mildred is short in physical stature. “I always had a good figure,” she says of herself, but she was only five feet three-and-a- half inches in height. By now, she has become shorter still, she volunteers. In some of her ads and films she appears taller, however.

What most impressed me about Mildred Clinton is her zest for life. “I fall in love with whatever I’m doing because it’s always a challenge,” she says of her work.

Mildred is determined to resist negative thinking. “I think each of us is our own most severe critic,” she told me, “and some days I feel positively negative.” However, the personal dynamism of the woman became almost tangible to me in our phone conversation.

How does she feel about growing older? “I am very lucky,” she replies, “to be busy with work that I love. My whole life was set in a way in which you do interesting things.”

Her interesting things began long ago. She appeared in a play that featured Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne when it tried out in Boston decades ago. “They were amazing people,” she says of the Lunts. Remembering a certain by-play between them during a rehearsal, she still marvels at their exchange.

Sitting in the theater, Alfred Lunt called out to his wife “You’ve got too much eye makeup.” Lynne ignored him for a while but finally gave in. “Oh Alfred,” she exclaimed as she left to brush away some of the make up. Mildred still feels the music of Lynne’s voice in those two words “Oh Alfred.”

Mildred worked with another famous theatrical couple – Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn. She thinks it was in a television drama rather than a performance on the stage. “You could have hugged them,” she says, as she recalls feeling tempted to ask Cronyn if she could.

Mildred Clinton appreciates late life in other ways as well. “Everything makes me feel rich,” she says. “When you’re young, 13 or 14, these things seem unreachable.”

The only downer in Mildred’s life is widowhood. She lost her husband to an early death, at age 42, and has lived by herself in Forest Hills since that time. She boasts of being a “distinguished alumna” of Brooklyn College where she majored in French.

Talking with this woman buoyed up my spirits. And that was without being able to accept right away her invitation to take me to lunch at Sardi’s,the famous Manhattan restaurant. At the end of our conversation, Mildred told me, “You’ve made my day!”  Those words exactly echoed my own sentiments.

For an appraisal of the ad, I turned to my favorite advertising guru, John Carroll. He appears on Boston’s public television show “Greater Boston,” for which he is executive producer. He thinks this ad “works” in delivering its message effectively.

Of Mildred Clinton’s performance, Carroll says, “She delivers a great punch line,” a sentiment that no doubt the veteran New York character actress and her fans will be happy to hear.

As to the view of aging presented here, Carroll gives this ad high marks. “It casts older people in a reasonably positive light,” he says. “I find it kind of endearing,” he adds.

So do I.

Richard Griffin

Nun Study Spirituality

The researcher felt nervous about the request he was about to make of the nuns. Though David Snowdon had become well acquainted with these School Sisters of Notre Dame and counted many of them as friends, what he was now asking of them went beyond anything he had asked them to do previously. He wanted them to donate their brains to his scientific study.

Speaking in 1990 to the first group in Mankato, Minnesota, Dr. Snowdon explained the nature of Alzheimer’s disease and described his research plan. If they agreed to take part, the sisters would have a series of physical and mental tests each year. They would also donate their brains after they died.

In his book, Aging With Grace, published last year, Dr. Snowden shares some of the reactions of the nuns faced with this request. At first there was dead silence but gradually the sisters began to speak.

One of them, Sister Clarissa, said “Well of course he can have my brain. What good is it going to do me when I’m six feet under?”

Another, 95-year-old Sister Borgia, posed a question: “He is asking for our help. How can we say no?”

Of this first group, 90 percent of the eligible sisters in the Minnesota convent agreed to the request. By the time Dr. Snowdon made his presentation to the sisters living in other states, an astounding 678 had pledged to make the same gift.

The obstacles expected by one member of Dr. Snowdon’s scientific team proved surprisingly weak. This medical researcher, David Wekstein, had agreed about nuns being more altruistic than the average person but he thought they might still not want to donate their brains. “The brain is not like other organs,” he said. “People think of it as who they are–it contains their identity. It’s loaded with meaning–personal, emotional, spiritual.”

Dr. Wekstein was right about a few of the nuns: one explained her rationale for not donating by saying “I must return to God the way I came.”

Several others would have faced trouble from their families who objected to brain donation.

But the great majority of the nuns felt motivated by spiritual reasons to give this precious part of their body for love of God and neighbor.

Sister Rita Schwalbe undoubtedly expressed the attitude of many when she explained: “As sisters, we made the hard choice not to have children. Through brain donation, we can help unravel the mysteries of Alzheimer’s disease and give the gift of life in a new way to future generations.”

Yet these words should not make one think the commitment was prompt and easy for all of the sisters who made this choice. Dr. Snowdon was impressed with the “intense thought and prayer” that went into the decisions.

Dr. Snowdon quotes from a few sisters about how they made their choice to donate, words that emphasize their belief in life transformed after death.

“It is the spirit that is important after death, not the brain,” one said. Another shared her faith: “At the resurrection, I believe our bodies will be glorified and perfect. We will have no illness and no physical defects. Resurrection does not depend on how our bodies are in the grave.”

A key concept that helped motivate the sisters who agreed on making the gift of their brains was the spiritual idea of charism. They understand it as “a gift of the Spirit given to an individual for the good of all.”

Sister Gabriel Mary explained it further: “Each sister carries the charism with her as she devotes her life to others. It’s the spirit of our congregation.”

And Sister Rita stressed that this charism motivated them to work with the poor and powerless. “Who’s more powerless,” she asked, “than someone with Alzheimer’s disease?”

The farsightedness of these sisters and their generosity suggests a deep spiritual life. Indeed most people do feel wary of giving away their brains even after they have no more use for them. But these women live their whole lives with eyes directed toward the ultimate reality of God and the service of their fellow human beings. The brave decision to make a gift of their brains gives dramatic expression to their love of God and neighbor.                    

Richard Griffin

Andre’s Memoir

André at age 90, and nearing the end of his life, decided to write some recollections of his early years for his grandchildren and other family members. Each week for almost a year, he would send them installments, in longhand, describing his experiences during World War II. Last fall, these installments were collected and became a printed memoir of 60 pages entitled “Memories from the Time of War (1939-1945.).”

André lived in Ottawa where he his wife had emigrated long after leaving their native Poland. Writing in French, his second language, he intended the memoir for his descendants; however, his daughter Maria has allowed friends as well to read its pages and me to use the material in this column.

On September 1, 1939, André was a lawyer living with his wife and two-year-old daughter in Warsaw when German military forces unleashed their lethal attack on Poland.  In response to a national radio broadcast calling on men to join a military unit, André fled Warsaw a week later in a car owned by his father, a physician. The capital was to be declared an open city, so he and his wife thought it better for her and their daughter Maria to stay behind.

André, his sister, and his father arrived the next day in the city of Lublin where they experienced their first German air raids. From there he traveled east and south, looking for military sites where he could help defend his country. When that proved infeasible in Poland, they drove across the Romanian border all the way to Bucharest.

There he discovered Polish friends who were driving to Milan, from which city a train took him to France where he would spend the rest of the war. It was an agonizing time, filled with worry about his loved ones and marked by narrow escapes from the Gestapo.

On one such occasion, he had a nine o’clock appointment to meet his contact with the French resistance but felt so tired he needed to postpone the meeting. Later he discovered that the Gestapo had raided his contact’s apartment and took him off. “This was the first time that I felt myself saved by Providence,” he wrote.

Various jobs with the Polish Red Cross in exile enabled André to help many fellow Poles and to collaborate with the French resistance. In the war’s latter stages, he was responsible for listening to radio broadcasts from England and other countries for information helpful to the French freedom fighters. It was dangerous work but he managed to evade detection and capture.

Getting his wife and daughter out of Poland and into France in the spring of 1940 greatly helped his morale, though concern for their wellbeing continued to preoccupy his thoughts. Before leaving, his wife (whom he refers to throughout as “Babcia,” the Polish word his grandchildren always used for their grandma), had been arrested by the Gestapo but she managed to persuade her captors to let her go and even drive her back to her house!

When the liberation of Paris happens in August 1944, he describes the ecstatic scene of American and French troops at the Champs Élysées and finds himself unable to sleep much on that memorable night.

But André’s joy in the Allied victory is mixed with bitter disappointment over decisions made at the Yalta Conference. There Roosevelt and Churchill sold out to Stalin, he feels, and allowed the Soviet dictator to subjugate his beloved Poland. “All our hopes of seeing the victory of the Allies as a true liberation of Poland were evaporating,” he writes.

Despite the war and its mortal dangers, André continued to enjoy his many friendships, French cuisine, and movies. A professional interest in films was to mark his whole life and his work as a lawyer was largely oriented toward the people who made movies.

Now that André has departed this world, his children and grandchildren as adults have a document that will help keep his presence vivid. He lived courageously through times of great upheaval, and he saw his native land devastated by forces practiced in horrific brutality.

He had the gift of long life and so was given the advantage of being able to look back on the events of 1939-1945 with the perspective of almost six decades. Among other things, he lived to see a fellow Pole become pope and to enjoy friendship with him. And the eventual liberation of his native country from the stranglehold of Communism cheered his heart.

Longevity does have its advantages, especially if you learn to draw on the events of your past for perspective on the world and your own life. Old age is not just for recollecting one’s past life but it is certainly for that also. Those of us who, in whatever form, put together a record of at least some of our days almost invariably benefit ourselves and usually please other people too.

Richard Griffin

An Archbishop’s Prayer

“There comes a level of prayer where it is no longer a question of ‘are you seeing something?’ but ‘are you aware of being seen?’ – if you like, sitting in the light and of just being and becoming who you really are.”

This talk about prayer comes from Rowan Williams who has just been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, the most important position in the Anglican Church. He made these remarks in an interview first appearing in an Australian church publication, and later reprinted in The Tablet, a Catholic weekly from London.

To hear an archbishop talk about prayer is, strangely enough, unusual. Most prelates of that rank, it seems, focus in their public statements more on issues of public policy than on the spiritual life. But this Welshman, who will soon bear responsibility for the Church of England as its chief bishop, gives top priority to his own relationship to God and his search for the spirit in all that he does.

Rowan Williams, in addition to his spiritual orientation, is a practical man with domestic responsibilities. As a married man with young children, he is concerned each morning about getting them ready for school and giving them some personal time. But he still manages to fit in about a half an hour of prayer each morning using a formula popular among Eastern Orthodox Christians.

This is the so-called Jesus Prayer that goes: “O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” The archbishop uses a prayer rope favored by Eastern monks and featuring 100 knots at each one of which a person says this prayer.

Rowan Williams describes the effect of this prayer as follows: “By repeating the Jesus Prayer the mind is stilled and the heartbeat and the breath slow down, and you become more present to the place you are in. It’s really an anchorage in time.” So he experiences the effect of that ritual on both his soul and also his body.

This kind of prayer is obviously active as one recites the same formula over and over. However, it also has the power to transport a person into a new awareness of the divine presence. Much like the rosary, it fixes the mind on holy persons and events while allowing a freedom to just be present.

Archbishop Williams loves the writings of St. John of the Cross and finds much inspiration in them. Following this Spanish mystic, he takes pains to distinguish between prayer and feelings, in words that many people who want to pray may find helpful:

“You may be feeling terrible and God may be active; you maybe feeling nothing in particular, but God may be very active; you maybe feeling wonderful, and that may have nothing at all to do with God’s doing.”

The archbishop also favors a simple rule for prayer that he quotes from a former abbot of the English monastery, Downside: “Pray as you can and don’t try to pray as you can’t.” Keeping to this advice could save some people a lot of frustration. It’s almost like saying: all you have to do is follow your own instincts.

This man of prayer wants to avoid complication. Instead he favors simplification of the heart whereby “we simply become what we are and just sit there being a creature in the hand of God.” Just dwelling on God having us in his hand could be enough to sustain a beautifully simple prayer that might carry us through a entire period set aside for spiritual quiet.

It’s not about me, it’s about God: this is a sentiment about prayer that the archbishop might approve. If you feel lost when praying, that’s something probably shared by many other people. As the archbishop says, “Being out of your depth seems to be very basic to what’s going on in the sense that in prayer you cannot contain what is given.”

It sounds easy enough, simplicity in prayer, but it takes a kind of spiritual maturity to put this approach into practice. “Don’t just do something, stand there,” was ironic advice popular in the 1960’s. In the light of  Archbishop Williams’ habits of prayer, standing there (or sitting or kneeling) becomes a way of being in contact with God and growing in the life of the spirit.

Richard Griffin