Ministry

My friend Bill, I discovered only recently, once arranged housing for a woman of my acquaintance when she had to leave home with her children because of violence directed against her by her husband. Bill (not his real name) found a house in Maine (not the real place) where the woman could stay until it became safe for her to return home.

I had the good fortune to become a friend of Bill when we were 14 years old and classmates in the same small high school. His friendship, in my eyes a gift, has continued over the many years since then. This means I have held a privileged vantage point for observing up close at least a few of his acts of kindness toward other people.

Providing a temporary residence for the woman in crisis is only one sample from a lifetime of generous services that Bill has provided to others. I have often felt buoyed up in spirit by knowing about some of them.

Bill has affected my spiritual life in other ways as well. If ever I needed a motive for feeling humble, all I need do is compare myself with him. He does more good, often at considerable cost to himself, than I could even imagine doing myself.

He often visits the sick, keeps in touch with old people in need of human contacts, has long supported a house for people with developmental disabilities, and reaches out to impoverished residents of a Latin American country who need medical attention.

Long ago, my friend managed to turn his career into a kind of ministry. As a businessman, he has always regarded his customers, not primarily as sources of money, but rather as human beings who often needed more than what anyone could sell them. In paying attention to their human problems, Bill went far beyond the call of his profession to serve them more deeply.

If Bill has a secret behind his attention to the needs of others, I suspect it lies in his ideal of ministry. Like many other people, he realizes how his spiritual tradition expects of him concern for others and service to them.

He does not leave ministry to members of the clergy but realizes that the laity also are mandated to serve. Whether explicitly or not, Bill exercises what a long tradition calls the priesthood of the faithful. It is not a mere sharing in the ministry of clergy but is a response to the call to service that each layperson receives at baptism.

If questioned, Bill would undoubtedly attribute great importance in his life to the example of Jesus “who went about doing good.” As a Christian, he takes seriously the words of Jesus: “As long as you did it to the least of my brethren, you did it to me.”

Like everyone else, Bill has known adversity. Health has often been a problem for him; so has the loss of family members and friends in death. But these experiences have probably had the effect of strengthening his ministry. As a “wounded healer,” he feels much empathy for those who are in difficulty.

Often people like Bill do not receive much recognition for their good deeds. He, however, has the admiration of more friends than anyone else I know. Among ourselves we sometimes joke about having a party for him but needing to rent Fenway Park in order to fit everybody in.

At a time when his church is suffering a deep crisis of confidence in its ordained leadership, Bill and countless others like him take on new importance. They are proving themselves to be the church in action as they reach out to their brothers and sisters in the human family. They show how the development of lay ministry has become one of the most important features of church life in modern times.

We would perhaps find ourselves on firmer ground spiritually if we changed our associations with the word “ministry.” Instead of immediately thinking of professional clergy, we might benefit by thinking first of people like Bill.

They are the bedrock of our communities of faith, the ones who each day carry out ministry to soul and body. They are church, they are everywhere, and to them we can look for inspiration.

Richard Griffin

Maxwell Grows Old

As William Maxwell approached 90 years of age, his interior life changed. “These days, it’s more that I’m rowing around on an ocean of experience,” he said, “and the ocean is memory. Sometimes I lie awake at night thinking about the past, and it’s as if I’ve put on the record player, and there’s no way stop it. It’s a form of reliving, and I can’t stop reliving it.”

Maxwell’s words appear in the book, My Mentor, published this year by his much younger friend, Alec Wilkinson. This modest volume celebrates the life of a man who was famous in New York’s literary world, enough so that his obit made the front page of the New York Times. Novelist, essayist, and editor, William Maxwell worked for much of his career at the New Yorker magazine where he was highly regarded as a judge of good writing.

My Mentor emerges as a combination of short biography – – Boswellian in rich anecdote and sayings of the master –  –   and the record of an unusual friendship. It has a worshipful tone about it that, despite its secular content, reminds me of the life-of-saint literature I used to read in my younger days. What especially interests me about the book, however, is its wealth of gerontological detail . Wilkinson first met his mentor when Maxwell was 68, and remained close to him until his death at age 91, giving him  the opportunity to observe close-up how it was to grow old.

Other people receive some attention in the book too, notably Wilkinson’s father and Maxwell’s wife. The latter, Emily Maxwell, was reputed to be one of the most beautiful of women and retained much of this beauty throughout her long life. The marriage between her and Maxwell was also beautiful, echoed in the statement she wrote on the small box she gave him  on his 90th birthday: “Each day I am as glad to see you as I am to see the sun rise in the morning and the moon cross the sky at night.”

Wilkinson first met Maxwell through his father who was one of the editor’s  best friends. The relationship between Wilkinson and his father lacked the untroubled intimacy that the writer would have liked. Knowing Maxwell as he did, the author found it difficult to understand how his mentor could have found his father so charming and amiable.

In words that evoke something of my feelings about my own father, Wilkinson writes: “What I ended up feeling toward my father is sadness for the relationship I wish we had had. We had failed to make some fundamental connection when we should have, and after that, nothing that should have happened between a father and his child had gone right.”

Back to Maxwell’s late life psyche: “In old age experience is prismatic,” he explained. “It’s as if you’re holding your life in your hands, turning it this way and that, and what you see are the sides of a prism. It’s half recollection and half a visual re-enactment of moments from the past, whereas when you’re younger, you’re simply living the experience.”

Toward the end of his life Maxwell gradually lost his facility for sustained literary effort. One explanation the author gives for this falling off was this: “He seemed to have lost touch with the place where stories and novels come from.”   

To all appearances he accepted his slowing down quite gracefully, and yet some indications suggest otherwise. As Wilkinson remembers it, “He sometimes said that when people asked him what he was writing, even though he knew they only meant to be polite, he wanted to pick up something and throw it at them.”

But Maxwell did consistently exhibit the kind of benevolence that characterizes the later life of many people. Both he and his wife took pains to serve the needs of other people even when things could not have been so easy for themselves. Of this charming couple Wilkinson observes: “What was so admirable to me about the manner in which they conducted their lives –  – the courtesy to others, the care for other people’s difficulties, and their belief that we should do what we can to help each other.”

Maxwell did not profess any religious faith but had a spiritual view of the world. About his view of death, Wilkinson writes: “He said you never lose people you love when they die, because you incorporate parts of their personalities into your own as a means of keeping them alive.” But somewhat in contradiction he also said about two old literary friends who had passed on: “I will never again love an old man. They die on you.”

Wilkinson spent much time with his mentor during Maxwell’s own final days. What he writes about Maxwell serves as a kind of eulogy: “His great dignity, so natural and unforced, so courageous, never faltering when his death was near. His being so present in his mind. His compassion. His sympathy. His great capacity for friendship.”

Richard Griffin

Sheila and Jane

This is a story of something that should happen often but in fact too rarely does. The names have been changed along with some other details, but the story is true and comes from one of the women involved, with the other woman’s approval.

The narrator, Sheila, had been living in the house owned by her friend Jane. Sheila had always paid rent to Jane but, through the years, the two also considered themselves good friends. One day, however, thirteen years ago, Sheila received a call from her friend suddenly announcing that Jane was going to buy a condominium and that Sheila would have to move out as soon as possible.

Sheila, feeling under great duress, did move out in June of that year. “It was horrendous, horrible,” she says about the event. It was emotionally devastating to her, not only because she had no place of her own to move to, but because her friend was treating her so coldly. That was clear from Jane’s activity during the move: she remained in the house, sitting at her desk working at her high-tech job, without any involvement in Sheila’s labor or distress.

In the time that succeeded this break between friends, Jane experienced a series of harsh events. Both of her parents died, and later, so did her brother in a fire that burned down the family home. And Jane’s health was challenged in a life-threatening heart attack. Also her part in the break with her friend had bothered Jane for the entire 13 years of their separation.

Two Christmases ago Sheila received a letter of apology from Jane, along with a check for 1,000 dollars. This represented money that Jane felt she owed her friend. What had moved Jane to make this gesture of reconciliation was watching “A Christmas Carol” on television and how Scrooge his miserly ways affected other people.

Responding to a suggestion made by Jane, Sheila went out to dinner with her. During the dinner Jane “flat out apologized” to her friend for all that she had done. Sheila felt deeply touched by this turn of events, in part because “I had the most in common with her of any of my friends.”

Ironically, Jane revealed during this reconciliation that, on the very evening of the day her friend had moved out, she had left on Sheila’s pillow a note changing her mind. Unfortunately, Sheila never saw the note and the expulsion went through. Jane had also made other early efforts to contact her former friend, even sending a birthday card in August after the break, suggesting they get together.

Since the reconciliation, the friendship has regained its old strength and may even have improved because of the shared pain of separation. Sheila has spent time at her friend’s vacation house; they have gone to cultural events together; Sheila has accompanied her new-found old friend to medical appointments.

“We have a great relationship now,” says Sheila in summing up the restoration of the bonds between them.

And about Jane’s initiative, Sheila waxes enthusiastic: “I have to hand it to her –  – it is very seldom that someone apologizes and does not make any excuses.”

Surprisingly, not all of Sheila’s friends have hailed the reconciliation. Some have suggested that she should not have been so forgiving. However, Sheila considers herself fortunate and takes continuing pleasure at her rediscovered friendship. And Jane feels a burden lifted as she resumes the benefits of a relationship that once meant so much to her and now does again.

Jane had the good sense not to wait till old age before taking action to repair a broken relationship. But it is never too late or too early to act this way, as some other people have had the wisdom to realize.

One such person was William Maxwell, a writer and editor at the New Yorker magazine. His friend Alec Wilkinson, in a recent memoir about Maxwell, recalled an action  taken by him in middle age: “When he was in his fifties, Maxwell wrote letters to every person he felt he had harmed, to apologize.”

As it turned out, Maxwell may have been overly scrupulous because, adds Wilkinson, “no one remembered the offense or recalled the incident in the same light that he did.” But this lack of response does not detract from the writer’s noble impulse to attend to the spiritual health of his personal relationships. Like Jane, he was to enjoy the rich benefits  that come with reconciliation.

Richard Griffin

Janet Irving, 100

“You just go from day to day; you wake up and you’re still here.” This is how Janet Irving describes the view from 100.

This resident of Manchester-by-the Sea enjoys remarkable vitality, highlighted by the gifts of good hearing and eyesight. On a hot summer day she graciously received this visitor and regaled me with good humor and rich memories.

“I just keep on going,” she adds about her current life. If she has a secret formula, it’s probably this: “You must keep on working at something that interests you; otherwise you become dull.”

No one would ever accuse Janet Irving of being dull. She sparkles with feisty and sometimes acerbic wit as she talks about her career and the fascinating people in her long life.

Among these people, Mary Garden looms large. In the first half of the 20th century, to those who knew anything about opera , hers was a household name. After her debut in 1900 at the Opéra-Comique, this Scottish-American soprano enjoyed a smashing career, and had the distinction of pioneering roles in Charpentier’s Louise and Debussey’s  Pelleas et Melisande.

Janet Irving became a close friend of this diva, after first meeting her in 1937. She even sang for Mary Garden, a woman who could be intimidating in her bluntness. After hearing Janet perform, Mary told her: “I hate that song; you need more work.”

Thanks to Janet Irving, this interviewer had the pleasure of handling the rhinestone bracelet that Mary Garden wore when she performed Tosca. For a confirmed opera fan like me, it was stirring to touch a famous diva’s jewelry. Her friend Janet plans to give it to a charitable group hoping this piece of memorabilia will fetch a good price.

After considerable voice training in France and Italy, Janet Irving had the opportunity for a career as a singer but opted instead to join her husband, James Irving, in South Africa. She then decided to become a teacher of singing instead of a performer. This teaching career she continued for 40 years, most of it at the Longy School in Cambridge where she is legend.

Born in New York City on June 22, 1902, Janet Irving takes no great pleasure in having people know her current age. “I wouldn’t mind being 99 or 101,” she says. She did, however, much enjoy the party given her by friends to celebrate her most recent birthday.

Asked if other members of her family were long-lived, she cites her great-aunt Sarah Curtis Hepburn who lived to 101. She once inquired of this venerable relative if she had ever seen President Lincoln. Her aunt’s disappointing answer: “I was never allowed to walk alone in the streets of Washington.”

That memory prompted my asking what Janet Irving remembered of World War I. “We were too far away,” she responded. “It was something that happened way over there; it was something very remote.”

World War II was another story, however. She spent most of it in Capetown, South Africa where she had gone to be with her husband. The latter was a physician and a professor of physiology who taught in South Africa until 1960. But getting to that country in 1939 involved for Janet an interminable  zigzag voyage on a ship fearful of encountering the German battleship Graf Spee.

Turning back to of her childhood memories, Mrs. Irving  recalls  the unconventional debut she made at the Metropolitan Opera at age eight “when I screamed the place down.” It was a performance of Hansel and Gretel which she and five of her friends viewed from a box given by the manager to her father. When the witch was being put in the oven, Janet was horrified and screamed “You can’t burn the witch!” Thereupon an usher came to the box and “lifted me out to the corridor, where you could still hear me screaming.”

Mrs. Irving has many other anecdotes about opera and its often temperamental stars. About my boyhood favorite tenor, Jussi Bjoerling, she recalls his visit to South Africa and his fondness for parties there. She loved hearing the pair of Wagnerian singers, Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior, at the Met and recalls the former’s advice about how best to handle long demanding Wagnerian roles: “Buy a comfortable pair of shoes!”

But music has provided Janet Irving with much more than entertaining anecdotes.  “I’m lucky to have music,” she says. “It’s something you give out to people; it doesn’t pull you in.”  

No one has a surefire formula for living to 100. Although good genes and wise lifestyle habits can prove invaluable, much depends on luck. The philosophy expressed by Janet Irving, however, would seem to serve longevity well.

The passion she feels for what she loves evidently impels her forward. From all appearances, she relishes the persons, places, and things that have loomed large in her life and seems to find in them abundant reasons for continuing to cherish the world.

Richard Griffin

Prayer Groups

“We should not judge the effectiveness of our prayer by how prayerful we think we are. Our very attempt to pray is, in fact, prayer.”

So advises Rev. Paul Witmer,  minister at the Central Presbyterian Church in Des Moines, Iowa. He convenes the prayer group to which my friend, Nick Tormey, belongs. (The latter has shared the pastor’s words with me.)

On a visit to Des Moines last week, I did not have the opportunity to meet with the prayer group because members have taken a recess until August. Nick Tormey misses the meetings during this break. “I like the regularity of knowing that on Friday noon I would be spending some time in silence.”

He expresses appreciation  of the meetings despite experiencing ups and downs in prayer. “Sometimes my mind would shut down,” he explains, “and I would feel at peace, while at other times I would feel distracted but I still value that time apart.”

The peaceful atmosphere of the place where they meet counts a lot. “The quietness of the chapel,” Nick observes, “the picture of Jesus and the rich young man in the fancy hat; the light streaming through the tall rectangular window.”

He also values the bonding with other people. One other participant shares with him the pain he feels as he goes through a divorce.

Summing up the experience, Nick says: “I always feel as if I’ve done something, even if it wasn’t very prayerful.”

What Nick reports of his group sounds much like the spiritual benefits I have derived from the prayer group to which I have belonged over the past three years. It is representative, I suspect, of what people experience in many other such groups across the country.  People in search of spirit come together and find much value even when they encounter distraction, dryness, and only intermittent peace of soul.

Anglican priest and theology professor Sarah Coakley, in the current Harvard Divinity Bulletin, writes about the prayer group that she has run for eight years. Right from the start Prof. Coakley discovered two practical advantages of silence: first, it bridged the sometimes wide religious and political differences among members, and secondly it created “a brief haven of rest from our (often frenzied) intellectual activities.”

After not using rituals in the early days, the group soon discovered the need of at least a few. Now, they begin with the sound of a bell and they light a candle to focus attention. They also instituted  the practice of exchanging the kiss of peace at the end of each session, a gesture that has evolved from a mere handshake to a more emotionally expressive sign of friendship.

In assessing her group’s experience, Prof. Coakley lists five features:

  1. It has led members to adopt other spiritual practices such as liturgical prayer and the prayer of intercession. Thus they have discovered a fuller spiritual life through the habit of praying regularly.
  2. They have found their group to have a life of its own that goes beyond that of individual members. As Prof. Coakley puts it, “Its sum is mysteriously more than its parts,” a reality that produces “a deep sense of communion, trust, and peace between the participants.”
  3. The group has traveled beyond ecumenism and, with the addition of Jews and Buddhists among others, has become inter-religious. This sometimes leads to a “level of mutual regard and trust beyond words.”
  4. Members now welcome requests to pray for certain requests and intentions. Before the bell rings for prayer, these intentions are quietly mentioned.
  5. Some members have carried over their prayer into social action. Thus some students are engaged in work in prisons, hospitals, and other places where people are in dire need of help.

Summing up, Prof. Coakley writes: “I like to think of the group as providing an open-ended invitation to such ‘wasting of time’ before God in a School (and culture) of obsessive busyness.”

One hopes that prayer groups can share this kind of experience with one another. The Des Moines group, at least, will profit from what the Harvard group has learned. Having read Sarah Coakley’s article, my friend Nick plans to ask his fellow members to add two features. “I am going to suggest intentions and the kiss of peace at the end,” he says. “I think this will help solidify the group.”

Richard Griffin

Hob’s Ashes

“It was beautiful; it was just right,” says my friend Olivia about the ceremony she and her family members devised for the ashes of her beloved husband Hob. He died last Thanksgiving Day at age 78, after a life marked by a sustained search for light and truth.

Olivia and her two adult children wanted to commit Hob’s ashes to the world of nature and spirit as he would have wished. They judged it appropriate to do so near the house in Vermont that Hob loved and called his “soul place.” This beautiful setting was clearly the best place for the remains of his body to be absorbed by the physical world.

Hob’family created a simple yet eloquent ceremony in two parts that gave testimony to the kind of person he was.

The first part was oriented to Hob’s and Olivia’s grandchildren, planned so they could have a role in committing their grandfather’s ashes to the earth. One of them said to Olivia: “Baba Hob (the name the grandchilden called him) has gone to heaven.” In response Olivia said their grandfather’s soul had left his body.

The children first picked flowers from the garden nearby and collected them in tribute to Hob. Then his son dug a hole that the children lined with the flowers. Everyone stood around the hole and joined in song.  Asked to choose music they liked, the children chose to sing two verses of the joyful song, “The Lord Is Good To Me.” At this time they dropped fistfuls of ashes into the hole.

In the second part, the adults carried on the rite themselves. The four of them walked to the edge of a spacious meadow adjoining the house. There a ridge borders the meadow and leads to a steep hill. On that hill at the very top is a great maple tree, 100 years old. As it so happened, that tree died the same day as Hob.

This is the focal point of the surrounding area, so the four adults knew that was the place where they wanted to be. They formed a circle. Then they took the ashes by the handful and named Hob’s people and his the impact he had on them.

“And this is for all of his students,” they said, “and this is for those whose lives he touched.” “And this is for Hob’s sense of humor and the laughter he brought to all of us.”

Of this part of the event Olivia recalls: “It was beautiful,”

Then his son Ethan announced, “I need to throw some ashes and make a big noise.” So he tossed ashes into the wind while crying out loudly in a kind of primal scream.

Olivia noticed how the lighter parts made a cloud that was like spirit.

They let her throw the last fistful. There were no words left so she let the ashes go into the wind. Addressing her companion of so many years, Olivia exulted: “Hobbie, we did it.”

On the way down the hill, Olivia recalls, “we noticed a beautiful large marble rock. We plan to bring it up to the hilltop and install it there as a memorial to Hob.”

Then, after it was all over, they went into the village for tea and croissants, another activity that felt “just right.”

Reflecting afterward, Olivia says: “The overarching point for me was that ceremony and ritual hold the tremendous intensity of times like this.” She added: “Having children take part in it was vital,”

About formulating the ritual, Olivia observes, “The land almost told us what to do.”

Such was the ceremony carried out by one family as they committed the last remains of their loved member to the world of nature and spirit. With this heartfelt rite, they paid loving tribute to a man of soul who had inspired them with love and his striving to find the deepest meaning in life. Theirs is the joy of knowing how Hob will be forever associated with his beloved land as well as with those in whose life he made a difference.

How Olivia and her family members bid final farewell to their beloved Hob was only one way of doing it, of course, but their story can serve as inspiration for the rest of us. In their depth and beauty their simple rituals give eloquent recognition to the dignity of the human spirit.

Richard Griffin

Forgetting

Last weekend at a church coffee hour I introduced a visitor to a couple of my good friends. Unfortunately, however, I could not at that moment remember the last name of either friend, despite having frequent association with them. So I mumbled their first names while trying desperately to summon up their last ones.

Many would call this a “senior moment.” For reasons explained in another column I would never use such a negative term to typify the inner experience of growing older. Instead, I think of it as a memory lapse that happens at every age, though admittedly it occurs more often in later years.

Memory lapses of this sort I take as signs of our having done a lot of living. As the son of New York Times health columnist Jane Brody told her: “What do you expect? With all you've stuffed into your head all these years, something is bound to fall out.”

And some inability to remember is positively a blessing. Recently I heard tell of a man who could not forget anything; his slightest actions and his every thought engraved itself on his memory. This can only be thought of as a disease, a terrible affliction.

However, not being able to remember facts is undeniably worrisome to most older people. Often it makes us fear something may be radically wrong with us. All too readily we jump to the conclusion that we are “losing it.”

When such instances of memory loss multiply, many older people become convinced they have started on the downward path to Alzheimer’s disease. Such an assumption is often rash and without foundation but causes suffering nonetheless.

Many causes other than dementia can be at work making us lose the ability to come up with the right name or fact. Depression, inadequate nourishment, side effects of medication –  –  these can be hidden thieves of memory. Regrettably, too many people do not get skilled medical treatment directed at finding the reason for memory loss.

Many scientists are studying the human brain intensively and can provide some answers. For a summary of current knowledge on this subject, I recommend a brochure published by the AARP Andrus Foundation and The Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives.

Entitled “Memory Loss and Aging,” it is part of a series called “Staying Sharp: Current Advances in Brain Research.” This brochure is available at AARP, (800) 424-3410.

(You can also request three other brochures in the Staying Sharp series. To make sure of their availability free of charge, I have called the number myself.)

“Memory is not a single process,” say the authors of the brochure, and they distinguish two different kinds of memory. The first focuses on daily facts such as the names of friends. The second contains skills and procedures, such as how to kick a soccer ball or cook a chicken.

These two kinds of memory depend on different structures inside the brain so a person, for example, might remember how to drive a car but not how to find the way back to his own neighborhood.

Researchers believe we can keep memory sharp by cultivating certain skills. The brochure mentioned above lists eight pieces of advice: relax, concentrate, focus, slow down, organize, write it down, repeat it, visualize it.

Besides those already mentioned, some other activities may also help keep brains vigorous. Physical exercise surely does; so does good nutrition. I love doing crossword puzzles anyway but I also believe they rev up my brain power.

The brochure also offers helpful information about the current state of research into Alzheimer’s disease. Hopes for delaying, preventing, or reversing this illness depend on future research breakthroughs. But currently three new medications have been “modestly successful” in providing some help to people in the early stages of the disease.

However, researchers freely admit being unable to answer many questions of crucial importance to older people. If, for instance, they could pinpoint the differences between garden variety memory loss and the kind that leads toward devastating illness, we would all breathe easier.

Jane Brody, the columnist mentioned above, recently alerted her readers to some of the rackets connected with this issue that flourish in the land. “Memory pills,” for example, are on the market but no one can attest to their value. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has reviewed the alleged research behind such medication and found the claims worthless, except for those behind one very expensive product “Don’t waste your money,” Brody advises readers, advice that I endorse.

Incidentally, about the last names of my two dear friends: I thought of hers as I woke up at dawn the next day; his came to me halfway through the morning. Something mysterious must be at work in the recesses of my memory dredging up the forgotten, often taking its own sweet time to do it.

Richard Griffin