Ruby Bridges

“I honestly believe I’m being led by faith,” says Ruby Bridges Hall of her current work. As an adult she travels around the country teaching children and others about the evils of racial prejudice.

She discovered her vocation through prayer. “I went into my prayer closet and asked the Lord, ‘Show me,’ and then things started to fall in place,” she explained to a large crowd of adults, college students, and children gathered one evening last week in the Harvard University Church.

This is the same person who, as a child only six years old, became famous across America when she entered the William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, the first African American child to attend that school.  On that day, November 14, 1960, Ruby Bridges and her mother were escorted by four federal marshals past a crowd of white people shouting angry threats at Ruby, spewing hatred and promising violent death for the child.

Of that experience almost half a century ago, she now says, “No one talked about it,” in the years when she was growing up. Only when she was 19 did she start to realize what her own history meant. After looking at the famous painting of Norman Rockwell that showed her walking toward school she grasped the significance of the events that she had lived through as a child.

Now a woman approaching 50 years of age, she knows herself to be on the right path. “I believe I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing,” she affirms confidently. But it was not easy discovering what to do. “I went through a hard time, trying to figure it out,” she confesses.

A charming woman, her head adorned with a stylish turban, she smiles often as she interacts with the audience. She speaks with simple eloquence, holding listeners rapt in attention as she shares her vision of what the human community should be.

“I never judge anyone by the color of their skin,” this current day prophet proclaims. Despite her childhood experience of hatred, she also received love from a woman crucially important to her. This person was Mrs. Henry, a white woman from Boston, who became her teacher when Ruby was six and received her warmly. Of this formative person in her life, Ruby says: “Mrs. Henry took me into her heart, not just her classroom.”

Ruby Bridges Hall now has four sons, three of them old enough for military service, and she hopes they will be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by their character. “I believe it’s time to get past our individual differences, for our children,” she states. In her view, it is extremely dangerous to teach children to trust only people like them.

Racism is her number one enemy. She calls it a form of hate, a disease. “Let’s stop using our children to spread it,” she pleads.

“Every little baby born in the hospital arrives with a clean heart,” she observes, and a fresh start. But they begin to think they are better than someone else.”

To watch Ruby Bridges Hall answer questions from small children after her talk was affecting indeed. Some of these kids first learned about her from Dr. Robert Coles’ book “The Story of Ruby Bridges” which explains to young readers the heroism of the child and her parents.

Her gentle manner and respectful attention to each questioner commended her message further. She is clearly a person who has developed spiritual depth after being tried in the fire of hatred at a young age.

It remains important for her not to hate those who have hated her; instead she reaches out to them with forgiveness. In response to a question, she told of feeling enmity, in recent years, toward one person. Ruby’s husband noticed the problem and told her: “You really need to pray.” She did so and, finally, she was able to extend her hand in friendship to that person: “I knew then that I was set free.”

That action speaks eloquently about the kind of person Ruby Bridges Hall is. One can only hope that her message of peace and love takes firmer hold in the hearts of her listeners. “It has to come from the inside,” she says of the change necessary to overcome the barriers built up by human prejudice

Richard Griffin

Ruby Bridges, Looking Back

What must it be like to have become an American icon at age six? How does the same person experience life now, more than 40 years later?

From the viewpoint of middle age, as a woman with four children of her own, Ruby Bridges Hall speaks eloquently about both the events that made her famous and her current career. In a talk given at Harvard University’s Memorial Church, to a large audience of adults, college students, and children, this quietly dynamic African American woman brought back an era in American history full of drama and consequence.

It was November 14, 1960 when Ruby Bridges and her mother were escorted by federal marshals through a hateful jeering crowd into the William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. The artist Norman Rockwell later memorialized the scene by showing the little girl dressed in white and preceded by her looming guards against the background of a stone wall defaced with racist graffiti.

Ruby’s parents were sharecroppers who had not gone past the sixth grade but they had the courage to sign up their child for the first step in school integration. “Oh my God, what have I done?” Ruby recalls her mother crying out when she realized that the whole world was watching.

“We want you to walk straight ahead and not look back,” the marshals told Ruby and her mother. The child concentrated on what her parents had emphasized – – behaving. The street scene was inevitably confusing to her “I knew absolutely nothing else of what was going on,” she says. But she remembers one of the crowd’s chants: “Two, four, six, eight, –  – we don’t want to integrate.” Later that afternoon she went home and jumped rope to this refrain.

Inside the school building Ruby found herself the only child there. No white family would allow their kids to enter. But a white teacher took Ruby “into both her classroom and her heart.” Mrs. Henry had come from Boston and became, in Ruby’s words, “the nicest teacher I ever had.”

Still, she could not get used to being the alone in that school. “I spent the whole time searching for the kids,” she tells her audience. She remembers going into the cafeteria and seeing it empty. For a long time, she thought it was all a dream.

But she confesses now hating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, the lunch that her mother used to make for her to make sure she was not poisoned. This distaste serves as a reminder of what she went through. And she remembers the threatening atmosphere: “Outside the school, there were always people threatening to harm me.”

During the rest of her childhood and adolescence Ruby did not think much about the meaning of her menacing experience. Only when she reached age 19, and looked at Rockwell’s portrayal of the events did she come to see their meaning. Then she began to ask herself the question, “How can we still be dealing with the same problem?”

Since becoming adult, this eloquent woman has devoted herself to the struggle against prejudice based on race. She traces the beginnings of this vocation to religious inspiration: “I went into my prayer closet and asked ‘Lord, show me,’” she told a questioner. “I honestly believe I’m being led by faith,” she stated.

She focuses her educational efforts on children because they offer the hope of a future free of racism. “I never judge anyone by the color of their skin,” Ruby says, and that is her ideal for others. “I learned the lesson of Dr. King at age 6,” that you should judge as person only by their character.

When she looks at infants, Ruby Bridges Hall sees human beings born with a clean heart and a fresh start. Later on, however, the “begin to think they are better than someone else.” And they learn this way of thinking from us adults.

She raises this perception to a theological insight. “Every child comes with a message, that God is not yet discouraged with humanity.” That is a reason why she does not get discouraged by the obstacles that make changing people so difficult. “It has to come from within,” she observes of the rejection of racism.

Ruby is a woman filled with memories of the past, memories at once rich and distressing. She played a part, small but also momentous, the agonizing history of the struggle for civil rights in America. Inevitably, that history will take on different shades of meaning the further she becomes removed from it in time. What she hopes, a hope that will be shared by all people of good will, is that, by the time she reaches old age, her country will have rejected more definitively racism in all of its forms.

Richard Griffin

The Conductor

Ben Zander speaks wittily of his role as orchestra conductor calling it “the last bastion of totalitarianism in the civilized world.” No wonder that in job satisfaction, “orchestra players come just below prison guards.”

Anyone who has shared my experience of watching this flamboyant maestro lead the Boston Philharmonic is likely, in this one instance, to cast a vote for dictatorship.

In the rest of life, however, Zander says he favors a different type of leadership. He recently wowed some 80 Massachusetts Gerontology Association members, at our annual meeting, with a fast two-hour inspirational talk that left most of us dazzled with its freewheeling brilliance.

Among incidental highlights, it featured Zander at the piano playing some Chopin and later running an impromptu master class, with a young cellist performing part of a Bach suite.

For Ben Zander, the true leader must believe in the capacity of the people he or she deals with. Every leader should say “I have a dream,” one that brings out the best in others. Also vital to his approach is something he calls “the secret of life –  –  which is that it is all invented.” If this latter sounds enigmatic, some of its meaning appears in the experiences that Zander talks about.

With his New England Conservatory students, he engages in grade invention. Each September, he has them write a letter: “Dear Mr. Zander, I got my A because .  .  .” This device moves them “to live into” rather than up to a standard they have set for themselves. “I teach only those described in the letter,” says this resourceful instructor.

For him, most education is based on “spiral thinking,” the soul-deadening approach leading to underestimation of other people’s talents. True education, by contrast, requires the opening of new categories. You have to ask what assumptions you are making that you are unaware of. There is no problem that cannot be solved by a new framework, he claims.

Ben Zander believes that modern leaders must discover “new possibilities” that release the potential in oneself and others. Together with his wife, Rosamund Stone Zander, he has marketed this approach in a book entitled “The Art of Possibility,” and in inspirational speeches for businesses and other organizations.

Another requirement for the new leader is what the Zanders call Rule #6: “Don’t Take Yourself So Goddam Seriously.” Instead you should make yourself available to others: “Being available is the single greatest gift we can offer the world.” You should also be a contributor, Ben Zander emphasizes. If they wish a satisfying life, people should be players, rather than winners and losers.

Over against “you need, you must” stands “what if?” Once you allow yourself to find enthusiasm, to discover “shining eyes,” then you discover real power. A pianist, to be really good, has to do “one buttock playing,” sitting on the edge of the chair and feeling the excitement of performance art. Organizations can improve by a similar approach. The speaker quotes approvingly a CEO who boasts: “I transformed my whole company into a one-buttock company.”

These maxims come at you from Ben Zander with such charm and passion as to seduce you into believing life can be different. This 63-year-old spellbinder abounds in energy, his face, his whole body alive with varied expression as he shares his view of the world. The place to stand is in possibility, he urges; “You never know where the treasure is hidden.”

Skeptic as my years have made me, I yet felt disarmed at the power of this man’s spirit. Almost in spite of myself, I found his force of personality sweeping away my long-held convictions that life is more complicated than this inspirer would have it.

He confesses, however, not having been this way in the past. His old approach, he reveals, cost him two marriages.

To finish, Zander tells two stories to illustrate his buoyant approach to life. In the first, a woman runs along a beach picking up stranded starfish and tossing them back into the water. Someone accosts her and asks what possible difference it makes saving a relative few among so many. The woman answers: “It certainly makes a difference to this one.”

And the abbot whose monastery is dying for lack of new recruits goes to see a rabbi nearby to ask how it can be saved. The rabbi answers, “The Messiah is one of you.” After hearing this message from the abbot on his return home, the monks began to treat one another with extraordinary respect. And they also start to regard themselves with greater respect.

Thanks to the rabbi’s apparently irrelevant response, the community of monks changed, people were attracted to visit, and some joined the monastery. Thus the rabbi had answered the abbot’s question and “life is revealed as a place to contribute.”

Perhaps these parables come off corny in the reading. Told by a master of the spoken word, however, they deliver a punch and reveal some of the magic in his personality.

Richard Griffin

Transcendence

What events in your life point beyond themselves? Which happenings, perhaps trivial in appearance, have carried you upward toward higher meaning?

These are questions that remain important for seekers after spirit and light. I met such a seeker last week at a conference in Denver, a woman named Priscilla Ebersole, who is two days older than I and lives in San Bruno, California. There she edits a magazine for nurses and also helps people sift their life experience for meaning.

From her own life, Dr. Ebersole (she has a Ph.D.) recounted two experiences that she called “transcendent.” The first came on a walk that she and her aged mother took some ten years ago through a forest in Oregon. They were looking for her mother’s favorite flower, the extremely rare lady slipper, hoping to find a blossom hardly ever seen.

To their initial disappointment, they never did come upon their precious prize. However, to the delight of Priscilla, they did discover a calypso orchid. This flower itself was of surpassing beauty and she was rapt by its splendor. To her, this discovery became an experience that drew her upward to contemplation of the highest beauty –  – the spirit, supreme reality, God.

The second such event in Priscilla’s life was the discovery, in the basement of her home, of a trunk containing a bundle of letters. These were letters composed between 1929 and 1935 by Priscilla’s grandmother who wrote each week to her daughter, a missionary serving in India. “It was as if I had stepped back in time,” says Priscilla about reading the letters long lost to anyone’s view.

Reading them, Priscilla learned things about her grandmother and other family members that she had ever known before and felt stirred by this new knowledge. She expanded her view of life across the generations and was moved to contemplation of what it means to be human.

These two incidents have in common the element of surprise. Priscilla did not know in advance what she would come upon. They were eureka experiences, events that drew “ahas” from the woman. They brought with them a rush of welcome emotion that swept her up into a higher universe.

The experiences have also proven to have lasting power in one woman’s life. They are events that at first looked unimportant but have had astonishing legs, to use a word favored by some show biz types. Priscilla has remembered them for years now and they continue to feed her soul. They serve her as fulcrums on which her interpretation of her whole life is balanced.

Priscilla Ebersole also believes that “transcendence teaches us compassion.” For me, this connection remains mysterious but I regard it as worth thinking about. I also hold to the connection between things. Dr. Ebersole quotes approvingly a woman 102 years old who, not long before her death, said, “I just have the feeling that I’m connected to everything.”

Every human being must have had experiences that reveal extra dimensions of reality, at least potentially. But we can blunt their edge by not being attentive to them. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, but often we remain indifferent to grandeur. Hopkins also wrote “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” but most of us cannot appreciate that much reality very often.

Another poet, William Blake, suggested seeing “a world in a grain of sand/ And a heaven in a wild flower.” Doing so, however, requires a disposition of soul that holds us ready to see beyond surface reality. We must, at least occasionally, be poised to grasp the precious opportunities for seeing beyond.

At the funeral of a man of letters recently, his son stood up to read one of his father’s poems. Before doing so, however, he made a few remarks about growing up in his father’s household. He spoke movingly about his father’s love and kindness for him and his two sisters.

The only occasions in which his father became impatient with his children, the son recounted, came when they showed themselves lacking in a sense of wonder. His father called this defect “sloth” and warned his children to resist it steadfastly. He wanted them to remain alive to the wonders of the world, the way he was himself, and not to yield to the temptation of staying on the surface of things.

Richard Griffin

Dychtwald

Listening to a man with a reputation for describing the future inspires in me a mixture of awe and skepticism. I felt both last week while interviewing Ken Dychtwald, a west coast guru celebrated for his prognostications about the shape of America some decades from now.

It takes a lot more chutzpah than I possess to outline the future with the confidence wielded by this dynamic visionary.

We talked in Denver at a national meeting of the American Society on Aging, a six-thousand member organization known for its varied interests and lively spirit. Dychtwald has star quality charisma: his talk, billed as “Not Like Their Parents: The Ten Ways That Boomers Will Age Differently Than Previous Generations,” presented with the latest high tech audio-visual devices, drew a large and enthusiastic audience.

The boomers, Americans born between 1946 and 1964, have fascinated Dychtwald throughout his career. This 52-year-old consultant belongs to this group himself, a fact that gives energy to his view of the future. Some of his ten visions have already begun to take hold; others require this prophet to stick his neck out.

Here is the future according to Dychtwald:

  1. Greater Longevity: length of life for both men and women will increase further, as it did in the twentieth century.
  2. More Comprehension of Life Course Navigation: people will learn better how to find their way through the various stages that come with long life.
  3. Growing Old Later: Americans will retain youthfulness longer than in earlier times.
  4. Absence of Security: Entitlements of all sorts will come to an end and people will become accustomed to living at risk.
  5. Cyclic Life Plan: instead of using the linear model, we will become used to thinking of our lives as being shaped by a series of returns.
  6. Empowerment: not expecting to be handed influence, citizens will grow accustomed to seizing it for themselves.
  7. Female Power: Women will take their rightful place in every field of professional activity and exercise more influence.
  8. Supportive Marketplace: Choices will become much more abundant for those buying goods and services.
  9. Greater Respect for Diversity: Americans will cease to assign people to categories by color, religion, or ethnic origin but at the same time retain interest in human differences for themselves.
  10. Increased Liberation: we will become less traditional  –  – sexually, spiritually, intellectually, and socially.

As for himself, Dychtwald wants “not only to understand the future but to have a role in shaping it.” If he lives to the 120 – 140 year range that he foresees for some people, he will have a lot of time to do it.

The skepticism I always feel about prophets lost some of its edge when Dychtwald shared with me other, more sobering views. It may sound strange but I found reassuring his recognition that “there are some really horrible things that happen: poverty, disease, loss of sense of self-worth.”

“If we live long in states of dementia and poverty,” he warns, “that’s like winding up at a bad party and having to stay all week.”

In his writings, Dychtwald has expressed fear about huge numbers of elderly Americans spending their last decades doing little more than watching television. Even now, he reminds us, “forty million retirees average 43 hours a week of TV!”

Ken also worries about our democracy. After disavowing expertise in political science, he nevertheless doubts that our system was constructed for a population with 70 million citizens over age 65. That is the number of elder citizens the united States will have in 2030.

This swollen percentage of older people, he fear, may unbalance our system, perhaps leading to a power struggle between young and old. In that event, the old will dominate in a way destructive to our society.

The global situation also gives him pause. Already we have two groups, the developed world where the population is aging rapidly with dramatically falling birth rates, and the third world where young people are in the great majority. Will the United States find itself soon unable to manufacture goods and thus be forced to rely on countries overseas for its products?

Again, I found conversation with this futurist stimulating and also sometimes disquieting. I take issue with predictions about “dramatic anti-aging breakthroughs” any time in this century. The scientific basis for projections that have humans living to 140 in this century still seem extremely shaky to me. Moreover, if these increases were, in fact, to happen, they can bring with them much grief, given our society’s widespread inadequacies in coping with the needs of old people now.

Current world struggles also threaten to undermine rosy thinking about the future. Unless the great disparity between the haves and have-nots among the nations can be significantly reduced, the decades ahead may be marked by continued conflict and lethal terrorism. The effects of such violence would severely narrow the chances for a boomer paradise in America.

Richard Griffin

The Going Out

The story of the Buddha and the way he discovered enlightenment is an ancient one, told countless times over many centuries. But when David Chernikoff narrates it, the story takes on new life.

I heard this deeply spiritual teacher speak in Denver at a conference devoted to the subject of aging. He is a psychotherapist based in Boulder, Colorado where he is connected with an organization called the Spiritual Eldering Institute.

Of medium height physically, this man has stature psychically, as his moving presentation proved. I found myself gently drawn to this person who clearly lives out his own teaching.

The workshop in which I took part aimed at transforming growing older into an experience filled with meaning. Too often older people are tempted to think of their own progress in years as a time without much positive significance. David Chernikoff is convinced that growing older can be a journey leading to enlightenment instead of a path to darkness and despair.

According to tradition, the prince Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha, was brought up in great wealth and comfort. The boy had servants waiting on him hand and foot, ready to do whatever he wished. Forty thousand dancing girls entertained him, his legend says, a sign of the opulence in which he lived.

His father, the king, was determined to protect his son from anything that would upset him. The evils of the world were banished from the boy’s sight; all he knew was upbeat, with nothing negative allowed to come to his attention.

The time came, however, when the young man wanted to see something of the world outside. His father reluctantly allowed him to go for a ride into the countryside but first sent servants out to prepare the way. They strewed flower petals along the paths the boy would follow and tried to make sure that his chariot would not come near any disturbing sights.

Despite these careful precautions, however, the young prince encountered four sights that were completely new to him and deeply unsettling. The first messenger was an old man, stooped over with age and moving with difficulty.

Next, Gautama saw another man, this one not old but afflicted with disease. This, too, came as a shock to the prince because no one like this had ever been admitted to the palace precincts.

Third, the young man came upon a corpse being carried to cremation, a new sight to a person never before acquainted with death.

Finally, the chariot carrying the prince encountered a monk who was begging his way across the landscape. That anyone would walk around with only the bare necessities was yet another new sight, another step in the prince’s education.

After this, Gautama’s life could never be the same. He soon left the palace and sat beneath a tree meditating upon the great truths that he had seen embodied. Never again could he live ignorant of old age, sickness, death, and poverty.

He went on to achieve enlightenment or what the Buddhists call nirvana, contact with the deepest reality. By contemplating the four messengers he learned who he himself was, and established contact with his own soul. In time, many people would become his disciples, these others also in search of their true identity.

In telling the classic story of the Buddha, David Chernikoff was suggesting that contemplation of these themes can “radically transform our experience of growing older.” At the same time, he helped us “to explore the nature of that which grows old and the nature of that which is timeless.”

This teacher spoke simply and, it seemed, directly from the heart. Basically serious, he nevertheless brought to his presentation a lively sense of the comic and sometimes evoked laughter from us in attendance.

At the same time, he urged us to apply the truths about the messengers to our own lives. “There is a time in our lives when we are visited by these heavenly messengers,” he asserted. Then he led us in an exercise by which we reflected on those crucial occasions.

He suggested that we ask two questions: “How did your experience of yourself change? “What did you learn about yourself and the world?”

Confronting openly the various messengers that come into our life, he suggested, is the best way to approach enlightenment,.

Richard Griffin

In The Bedroom

Among the films nominated for this year’s Academy Award for Best Picture, my choice would have been “In the Bedroom.” It ultimately lost out to “A Beautiful Mind” but I still prefer this film. Incidentally, the title refers, not to human sleeping quarters, but rather to the compartment on a fishing boat in which lobsters are placed before being sold.

My reason for favoring “In the Bedroom” was not only the memorable performances of Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson as parents of the young man who is murdered, nor the film’s engrossing plot with its suspense and surprising conclusion. Nor did I favor it because of its New England setting – – a small coastal town in Maine. To me it was the spiritual themes raised by this movie that made it altogether special.

Such themes would not surprise anyone familiar with the stories of the late Andre Dubus. This Haverhill-based writer often dealt with the spiritual implications of human predicaments, memorably so because he was such a skilled artist. As the Atlantic Monthly once said of him, “Dubus is the sort of writer who instructs the heart.”

One of his stories, called “Killings,” provided the inspiration of this fine film. This story does not rank as one of Dubus’s major narratives, but it contains the seed of good art transferable to another medium.

For identifying and analyzing two of the spiritual themes I am indebted to the film critic of Commonweal, Rand Richards Cooper. His excellent review of “In the Bedroom” appeared in January and stimulated me to reflect on the film’s meaning.

The first theme that Cooper helped me appreciate is related to the comfortable atmosphere in which the parents live. They are good people who live a life marked by “the comfortable harmonies of happy middle age.” Their work – – he is a doctor, she is a school choir director – – satisfies them and makes them revered in their small-town Maine community.

The violence that soon breaks out destroys this idyllic harmony and  shatters an illusion. That illusion, in the words of the critic, is “that we can indeed earn happiness.” Instead of counting happiness a gift, the parents, Matt and Ruth Fowler, think it the product of their own efforts.

Who does not welcome the idea that we deserve the happiness we work to achieve? This is an illusion that comforts everyone who experiences it. But spirituality would suggest otherwise, that happiness is surprisingly rare and, again, arrived at by gift rather than by personal achievement.

In time, things fall apart, much to the anguish of Ruth and Matt. In superbly acted scenes, they bitterly accuse one another of negligence in the death of their son. It is painful to watch a couple, formerly so close, become vindictive against each other, making their horrendous loss even worse.

Analyzing this sequence, the critic Cooper points out how grief such as the parents’ over the loss of their son can distort everything. The ordinary ways in which they have related to one another over many years of marriage are suddenly painfully twisted out of shape. We learn how destructively people can act toward one another, what terrible accusations they can make against loved ones when they are overwhelmed by grief.

Part of the power in this section of the film comes from the realization of us viewers that grief in those circumstances could do the same thing to us. As Cooper says: “‘In the Bedroom’ does what good art always does with awful predicaments: You feel the dread of knowing not only that this could be you, but that it would be.”

Without giving away the ending of the film, I can identify yet another powerful spiritual theme. Violence does not solve anything. Revenge leaves the avenger where he was before except that it makes things worse. Whatever the provocation, one cannot bring back victims of violence by murdering murderers. Vengeance cannot restore things to what they once were.

This film is surely not for everyone; most of us have to be in a special mood to confront such hard truths. But marvelous acting and skilled direction have made this a movie you can feel passionate about and at the same time prize for what it says about human life.

Richard Griffin