Teach Retires

A woman close to me (I will call her Nancy) felt an unfamiliar range of emotions on the day after Labor Day this month. It was the first such date in almost forty years that she was not reporting to a classroom ready to teach the latest group of first-graders. This summer Nancy had retired, completing a long and satisfying career as a public school teacher of young children.

To her it felt strange, almost eerie, to have no fixed agenda for this September day that had for so many years meant the demanding work of introducing her students to their new classroom and her expectations for them. This just-retired teacher tasted a freedom never previously known in her adult life. Now she was at liberty to do what she wanted with her time.

Of course, since Nancy had loved teaching it was inevitable that her relish for the new freedom be mixed with some nostalgia for the many rich experiences that were hers through the years. Only a stoic, walled off from tender human emotions, would not miss the children whom she taught and many of the colleagues with whom she worked.

So, like other major human transitions, this one carried with it bright expectations for the future along with memories of much value from the past. I will always remember my own feelings of elation when I retired from a job in city government for a new career as writer and consultant. For the next few days my feet seemed not to touch the ground. Sudden freedom from an imposed daily schedule and the move to an agenda I could shape by myself buoyed me up with pleasure. And I carried with me many cherished memories of the people I had served and those with whom I had worked.

Of course, with the passage of weeks I felt challenged by the need to set my own course instead of being directed by others. The day can seem long when there is nothing you absolutely must do. You have the opportunity to do what you wish but it can be difficult to know what you wish.

After an initial adjustment, most Americans who retire slip easily into a daily regime that brings them that brings them satisfaction. Surveys show that only a relative few fail to make the transition successfully. The horror stories you hear about people taking to drink for failure to adjust may be true, but they apply to a relative few.

Nancy has already set for herself an informal agenda of activities for which she formerly did not have sufficient time. Like many other retired people, she wants to travel and already has plans for a trip to France and Italy this fall. In addition she plans to audit some courses and wants to extend her already wide knowledge of music, especially opera. Given this woman’s varied talents and enthusiasm for living, she can be expected to develop new interests as time goes on.

Perhaps the most important of her current interests, however, is spirituality. For the last several years she has sought out ways of deepening her spiritual life. That includes finding a spiritual director with whom she can confer for guidance in prayer and other spiritual exercises. Some of the courses she plans to audit are focused on theology and can be expected to feed her spiritual life. Being enrolled in these courses will also introduce her into a new community of people interested in things of the spirit.

The leisure that Nancy has now gained can also allow her time for meditation and other forms of prayer and reflection. Freed to pursue work of her own choosing along with leisure, she can perhaps position herself to practice what my friend Bob Atchley calls “everyday mysticism.”

By that he means “direct, nonsensory, nonverbal experience of the transcendent, the ultimate reality, or God.” Professor Atchley says that people gradually become aware of “a new presence in their consciousness, a presence that gives them newfound wisdom and confidence in the face of questions about life’s meaning.”

Many ordinary Americans have tasted this kind of contact with the spirit and it has made their lives immeasurably richer. The transition to retirement can serve as a propelling force for shifting attention to what is most meaningful in human life.

Richard Griffin

She’s Leaving Home

Mine was a situation faced by virtually all parents, sooner or later. This story is probably as old as the human family itself. My daughter, aged 21, and a college graduate since this past June, was about to leave home and begin her first job.

To her mother and me, as apparently to our daughter herself, this end-of-the-summer event was highly desirable and one for which she was well prepared. After all, she had spent considerable time away from home previously. The summer of 2000 saw her in Switzerland working for a student travel publication. And in August of the previous year, she had studied French in the city of Angers. So we were used to her going away for lengthy stays.

But, admittedly, this occasion was different because it seemed definitive. Our only child, now grown up, was leaving the country to serve as a teacher abroad. She would probably never return home again as a resident rather than a visitor. Though her room would always be ready to receive her, from now on she could be only an occasional occupant.

I saw this leaving of home as a dramatic rite of passage in our daughter’s life and in the life of our family and I had remained focused on the opportunities she would enjoy as a result of the move. To me, it was an exciting opportunity for her to taste new experiences and meet the challenges of young adulthood. The transition felt exciting to me and I welcomed its approach.

On the evening before her departure, I went to bed early expecting to get a good night’s sleep. However, I soon found myself unable to stay asleep because of emotions suddenly stirring in me. Unlike my feelings previously, now in the night I felt sad about the event scheduled to happen on the following day.

Of course on the rational level I still wanted my daughter to follow through on plans to leave on the great adventure. Deciding not to go would not have been thinkable in this situation. But feelings of sadness now prevented me from getting to sleep. Over and over, strong feelings of regret swept through my psyche and roiled my brain.

Despite what reason told me, I felt myself to be losing a daughter. My life would never be the same. Our household would be deprived of a youthful presence that enlarged our living. Without her, things would surely be more quiet and orderly but at a great price.

Inevitably, words of the Beatles’ song “She’s Leaving Home” came to mind. In that ditty, however, the daughter is leaving under a cloud. The key line of the song goes “She’s leaving home where she lived for so many years alone.” She cannot get along with her parents and is departing under some duress, not at all my daughter’s situation. Still, I could identify with the sadness of it all, strongly suggested by the music.

Next morning, the day of departure, I analyzed the situation without the distortions of late night. And I continue to reflect on its significance. To me it is an event filled with spiritual meaning. Both for our daughter and for us, her parents, it requires spiritual reflection to be understood.

The pattern is at least as old as Abraham, the Hebrew patriarch. Thousands of years ago, he left his home in Ur of the Chaldees and set out on a journey to a new land. He did so with incomplete information and, of course, in the conditions of his day, without the comforts of modern travel. But he heard God’s call to leave the familiar setting of home and he listened to that call.

Growing up into adulthood usually involves leaving home. All that is comfortable and familiar must be left behind. The old security must give way to the daring of new challenges. Young people must discover that they can indeed cope with the world.

We parents also must be willing to let our children go. This letting go is a form of self-denial that can prove painful indeed. But it must be faced if we are to fulfill our call as parents. Whatever our feelings, we must release our children with our blessing for them to have the same opportunities for finding themselves as adults that we have had.

Richard Griffin

The Beatles’ Song and Us

In 1969, two of the Beatles, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote a song that came to my mind last week. The sad lyric begins like this: “Wednesday morning at five o'clock as the day begins: Silently closing her bedroom door / Leaving the note that she hoped would say more / She goes downstairs to the kitchen clutching her handkerchief / Quietly turning the backdoor key / Stepping outside she is free.”

The Beatles were singing about a girl who was making a painful break with her parents. She feels the pressing need to get away from them and find a freedom that she cannot have in the home where she grew up. The parents themselves are portrayed as uncomprehending because fixated on themselves.

The line which serves as something of a refrain says it best: “She’s leaving home where she lived for so many years alone.”

The reason why this sad ditty came to my mind recently was a leave-taking in my own home. However, you may be relieved to know that the atmosphere of this leaving was entirely different from that of the girl in the song. For one thing, this leave-taking came after so many years of living in a loving relationship with parents. For another, this departure qualified as a natural rite of passage after graduation from college and being hired in a job that means the beginning of a career.

My daughter left home at the right time in her life with the enthusiastic backing of her parents in anticipation of becoming a teacher. Of course, my wife and I felt some separation pangs but we also felt happy for our now grown-up child that she was going out into the world of work prepared for adventure and the opportunity to do some good.

Of course, this kind of leave-taking is one of the oldest stories in the world and you may wonder why it deserves retelling here. Millions of other parents have experienced the welcome departure from home of their children after the latter have come of age. In fact, for most parents with seniority, that event took place long ago. It has become part of ancient history for them.

But for me, a person who does everything later than normal people, this event has happened in my later years. Only after reaching age 73 am I old enough to see my daughter set out on her first job. It has taken me a long lifetime to arrive at this day so significant in the life of our family.

The major milestones of life can have a different resonance depending on the age at which you come to them. For me, going through the departure of my daughter at 73 hardly feels the same as it would have at age 43, for instance. Inevitably, I both experience it differently at the time and have formed a different set of reflections afterward.

My main response to this leavetaking is one of thanksgiving for longevity. When my daughter was born on New Year’s Day in 1980, I began to hope and pray for survival until she grew up. Despite being aware that most American men last until their middle seventies, I was painfully aware that many do not. For her sake and my own I wanted to enjoy good enough health to be around at least for the completion of her schooling.

Of course, I also feel thankful that my daughter’s upbringing was so harmonious. Unlike the girl in the Beatles’ song, she prospered at home, loving her neighborhood and making friends with a great many age peers and others. Despite having all of her schooling in the same zip code, she learned to appreciate the larger world and to face it with confidence.

That this has happened I take as a gift, the best I could have received. And for me to have been well in mind and body all during my only child’s development into a young woman gratifies me more than I can easily express. Clearly it was not my own doing; that’s why I call it a gift. The risky ride of my own growing older has carried me to an important destination.

And yet life remains vulnerable. Another of my reflections on my daughter’s departure abroad is that it could be the last time I see her. The longevity tables makes that quite unlikely; still, the thought has often occurred to me and freighted the event with extra meaning. Unlike most forty-year-old fathers, I know that the diseases associated with later life could do me in at any time.

If these latter reflections seem excessively dour, you should know that they do not depress me but rather add to my appreciation for the gift of life. I do value each day as it comes along and welcome whatever good it holds in store. That includes the day my daughter set out for life on her own.

Richard Griffin

Hearing it Now

The headlines and the photo on the front page of the Boston Post for May 7, 1937 have stayed fixed in my memory ever since I saw them. I was then a few months short of my ninth birthday and even then an avid reader of the newspaper that employed my father.

Had I been listening to the radio the evening before, I could presumably have heard a man named Herb Morrison announce the arrival of the Hindenburg at Lakehurst, New Jersey. Standing next to his network’s sound truck in the drizzle, he started to describe the mooring of this great German dirigible, just arrived from a flight across the Atlantic.

Clearly he found the sight awesome but his voice is controlled as he tells how the famous airship was hovering “like some great feather.” This it did as some two hundred handlers prepared to attach the Hindenburg to its mooring post.

Then, all of a sudden, he cries out: “It’s terrible, oh my get out of the way, it’s one of the worst catastrophes in the world.” Without warning the giant ship had burst into flames that were engulfing its entire structure, shooting four or five hundred feet in the air and endangering all the bystanders assembled for its arrival.

Listening to Herb Morrison on the recording, I find it difficult to discern all of his words, so caught up with emotion was he. As he realized what was happening to people around him, he actually began to weep. The broadcast’s original listeners would have had trouble developing a coherent notion of what was happening.

I have been listening to this dramatic spoken history on one of three phonograph records in the Columbia Masterworks album entitled “I Can Hear It Now.” This album was purchased by a member of my family decades ago. I play it on a venerable turntable that still gives good service and vinyl records that have preserved remarkable sound fidelity over so many years.

The segment on the Hindenburg disaster is only one among dozens of events and personalities, with words spoken by the central figures or by  eyewitnesses. Inside the album are comments written by Edward R. Murrow, Fred W. Friendly, and J. G. Gude. These producers say of the era from which I have culled a single incident “The thirteen years from the beginning of 1933 to the end of 1945 was an era for ear. The first and perhaps the last.”

With no little exuberance, they also call those thirteen years “perhaps the most fateful and exciting years in all the recorded story of civilization.” For people of my certain age, the events recorded here stir a rich collection of memories that have played a part in the development of our psyches.

Another of the bands on the record is entitled “Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returns from Munich and tells of his meeting with Hitler.” And a New York Philharmonic broadcast is interrupted for an announcement of the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. This latter announcement I myself heard by reason of having been banished to my room by my parents for bad behavior.

Harry Truman’s first speech to Congress in April of 1945 is included, a speech that produced a rash judgment from me. Not without regional prejudice, I remember feeling that this man from Missouri sounded like someone too unpolished for the job of president.

Another entry, this for August 6, 1945, still provokes in me disturbing thoughts about religion, warfare, and the dropping of the atomic bomb. “Chaplain William Downey, U. S. Army Air Forces, says a prayer at Tinian before takeoff of the Enola Gay, which carried the first atomic bomb used in warfare.”

Sprinkled among these events, some of them literally earth-shaking, are others that simply give the flavor of the times. The Yankee Stadium heavyweight bout between Max Schmeling and Joe Louis suggests the part that championship boxing then played in national life. And Mayor Fiorello La Guardia reading the comic strips to children during the New York City newspaper delivery strike of 1945 provides comic relief.

For fear this all seem mere nostalgia, it bears repeating that the events and personalities recalled here form part of who we are as a people.

To a greater or lesser extent, these happenings were shared by all of us alive then. And for those who have come long after, the material transcribed into “I Can Hear It Now” has some place in their heritage also. Our society was shaped by what you can hear on these records and it was affected by the people, good and bad, who figured in the events.

Listening to the story of the Hindenburg disaster also brings me back to my boyhood with its still unknown potential. Soon, the events of World War II would fill my imagination and made me feel part of a cause much larger than myself.

Richard Griffin

Beating It Down

The first time I whipped myself it seemed bizarre. But over the months doing so became routine, a ritual performed three times a week by all the novice candidates for admission to the religious order we had chosen.

Before going to bed, we would assemble in our dormitory, take off our shirts and, when the bell rang, beat ourselves with a small whip for a minute or two. No one drew blood but it did hurt as it was supposed to. It was our way of disciplining the body so that it would become more obedient to the soul.

Looking back on this practice from the vantage point of many years, I still feel amazement about its easy acceptance. Everyone did it, no one questioned its value, some zealots presumably looked forward to the nights when this flagellation was scheduled

On the two other days of the week, we wore small chains around the upper part of one leg for three hours in the early morning until after breakfast. The flage and the chain, as they were familiarly called, were the most bodily forms of the asceticism that was standard in the life of novices.

These practices, however, were only two among many intended to purify the soul. We also learned to acknowledge our faults while kneeling before our brothers assembled for dinner. Occasionally, our fellow novices would gather under the novice master’s guidance to take turns pointing out our faults.

If all of this now sounds cultish, extreme, and even inhuman, it must be understood as part of a long monastic tradition. This way of life was seen a way of approaching perfection, an asceticism that had been hallowed by centuries of holy people both in the Christian tradition and in others as well.

And this asceticism, or spiritual discipline, aimed at the growth of love both of God and of neighbor. At its best, this kind of rigorous putting down of self was adopted, not for its own sake, but rather to make us better human beings. If the body was to be beaten down, it was for the soul to rise.

In time I came to reject this approach to the spiritual life. To its credit, so did the religious order to which I belonged. Starting in the 1960s, most people came to see that the concepts of being human that lay underneath this kind of asceticism were deeply flawed. We discovered that soul and body were not stand- alone parts of ourselves but rather one being, an enfleshed spirit or spirited flesh.

However, despite this rejection of the old asceticism, discipline in my view remains an integral part of any true spirituality. To me this holds true in the face of what one scholar calls “a widely held cultural bias against, even contempt for, the ascetic.” Consumerist American culture, in particular, exalts self-indulgence and the gratification of the senses.

Still, anyone wishing to grow in spiritual life must resist this bias and contempt. Inevitably, there are times when we must go against ourselves if we are serious about spirit. To her credit Elizabeth Lesser, in her focal book “The New American Spirituality,” has a great deal to say about self-discipline, despite the word’s absence from the index. Often in its pages she criticizes supposed spiritual leaders who offer the easy way without requiring any managing of the self.

Lesser writes: “Inviting spirituality into your life is like packing for a long journey.” When you pick and choose the things to put in your suitcase, you discover that you must discipline yourself and not take too much. And yet you have to choose the right objects; otherwise you arrive at your destination and find that you are bereft.

The best spiritual discipline, I believe, is the patient, courageous, and gracious acceptance of the suffering built into our lives, afflictions that we can do nothing about. This kind of asceticism is best seen perhaps in those older people whose lives are marked by serious loss – of people dear to them, of abilities that came easily to them when younger, of important roles in the world of work. Accepting difficult changes like these requires qualities of soul that put us to the ultimate test.

Richard Griffin

The Internet

In a first draft for this column I wrote effusively in praise of the Internet and confessed awe for what I judged one of the greatest inventions in my lifetime. That initial version also recounted with admiration the history of the Internet and its child, the World Wide Web. Admittedly speaking from a deep ignorance of science and technology, I found something spiritual in the exchange of electronic impulses that fly through the air and through wires.

This early version assumed that many people my age and older actually use the Internet and find it as valuable as I do. Perhaps I was seduced by occasional publicity that claims older people are getting online at a rapid rate. Also I have met quite a few elders who feel very enthusiastic about email.

However, at the time of my first draft, I had not been able to locate any research that indicates how many older people actually use the Internet. It proved much more difficult than expected to locate solid data on this question and I was prepared simply to assume that the number of older users was substantial and growing larger day by day.

By now, however, I have located two pieces of research from respected sources that tell something about the numbers. To cite one here, the Pew Research Center in Philadelphia released a study in September 2000 with information that astonishes me. Pew reported that 87 percent of Americans over age sixty-five do not have access to the Internet.

Moreover, of people between ages fifty and sixty-four, 59 percent are not online. By contrast, 65 percent of those under thirty have such access.

More than half of people not on line are not even interested in getting there. The same percentage believe that they are not missing anything by passing up the Internet. In the words of the survey report, “the strongest Internet holdouts are older Americans, who are fretful about the online world and often don’t believe it can bring them any benefits.”

Some other reasons for what the Pew study terms the “gray gap” are also significant. Though most older people do not believe that Internet access is too expensive, about a third do. Of the seventy million “TechNos,” Americans who do not use computers at all, many live in low-income households.

Many others feel intimidated, though they may not wish to admit it. They bring to mind a college classmate of mine and his wife whom I encountered one day in passing. Charley confessed to me that they had bought a Macintosh some weeks before but had still not overcome their fear of unpacking it for use.

Others have little confidence about safety in the use of online services. A recent study sponsored by AARP found anxiety even among older people currently online. “Confidentiality of personal financial information is of utmost concern to this population. Virtually all those surveyed believe that any personal information given to a business during a financial transaction remains the property of the consumer. They express resounding opposition to unrestricted sharing of personal financial information among businesses.”

I confess never having made a purchase online myself. However, my reasons for not buying over the Web do not spring from fear of credit card theft but rather from my pleasure in dealing face to face with familiar local merchants. This holds true especially of the independent bookstore where I often buy books from people whom I know and want to prosper.

Others object to what they consider an overload of information. A woman whom I ran into while writing this told me that she disapproves of a system that releases so much data, with its likelihood of violating the privacy of individuals. She has absolutely no interest in getting mixed up with devices that go against her values.

I feel some sympathy for the problems older people have with the Internet. Yes, computers remain too complicated and expensive. They should be easier to use, like the television set. And they do have the potential for exposing elders to fraud and other abuse.

However I do not agree that those who eschew communication by computer aren’t missing anything. Some of the benefits are summarized in a new research report made available to me by Roger Morrell of GeroTech, a Washington area company: “older adults can use computers to improve their work productivity, entertain themselves, enhance education and daily functioning, and maintain independence.”

I will never forget the day in 1984 when my television screen first flickered with a program imported from my small Commodore 64 computer. I recognized that moment as historic in my life because it gave me access to a newly invented tool of huge potential, a potential that continues to give me solid benefits.

The Internet remains a tool that can hold solid value for many more elders than are currently using it. If only for giving us access to email, getting online can enrich our lives and help overcome the isolation that our society visits on so many of its older members.

Richard Griffin

 

Web-Exclusive – First Draft
 

In 1984, the U.S. Bureau of Census documented that only one percent of older adults (65+) reported using a computer anywhere.  By 1997, 10% of older adults reported that they were using computers and 7% of them stated that they were online.

This column has come to you on the electronic wings of email. It does each week, much to my own continuing amazement. Only once have I ever visited the Community News Company office, the organization that publishes this paper. Instead, I send my words to CNC through the Internet, one of the great inventions of the twentieth century. From the central office, local editors then download the column for insertion into publications like this one.

This fall will mark the thirty-second birthday of the Internet, though people differ on whether September or October 1969 deserves to be called the founding month. The impulse that led to this invention came from the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union and was intended to improve the American military’s use of computer technology. In time, university-based researchers took the lead and collaborated to link computer resources around the country.

According to the latest figures, 58 percent of Americans now have access to the Internet in their homes, up from only 39 percent in 1999. And, of course, many of us use the Internet in our workplaces.

The World Wide Web, a child of the Internet, forms part of this explosion in communications that has further extended our electronic reach. The Web enables users to draw on a huge reservoir of information of all sorts available across the globe.

It was developed, starting in 1989, by a British computer whiz named Tim Berners-Lee who is currently based at M.I.T. Incidentally, I once heard him lecture and on that occasion walked away wondering how a man of such genius could be such a dull speaker.

Who among us, now of advanced years, would ever have predicted the birth of this system that has so revolutionized the lives of Americans? It surely deserves to rank among the greatest inventions of our lifetime.

I will never forget the day in 1984 when my television screen first flickered with a program imported from my small Commodore 64 computer. I recognized that moment as historic in my life because it gave me access to a newly invented tool of huge potential.

The Commodore seems primitive now in the light of high-powered Macs and PCs that have come into my possession since then but it ushered in the beginning of a previously unimaginable transformation in work and social life.

Though Internet use has become routine for me as for many other older people, I hope never to lose a sense of wonder about it all. There is something spiritual about this device that relies on electronic impulses that fly through the air and through wires. (If this sounds naïve, it testifies to my far-reaching ignorance of science and technology.)

You cannot see the flight but can only admire the almost instantaneous arrival of your messages sometimes over a distance of thousands of miles. The telephone has accustomed us to contacts of this sort but email has extended the ways in which we can share ourselves with others.

Now, as with so many people older and younger, Internet use has become part of my daily life. In addition to email, I also make extensive forays into the Web as a convenient way of researching the subjects of columns. Sometimes I also follow up news items published in newspapers and occasionally I look for sports information.

However, I confess never having made a purchase online. A recent study sponsored by AARP suggests that in this respect I am typical of older users. We elders are supposedly afraid of how our credit card numbers can be stolen or, less drastically, about online merchants who might give financial information about us to other companies.

On the basis of a recent study, AARP worries about us older users fearing that we are generally less proficient and less confident than those who are younger, more affluent, and more educated. We remain “at risk in an increasingly technology-driven commercial environment.”

I have other reasons for not buying online, especially my desire to deal face to face with familiar local merchants. This is especially true of the independent bookstore where I often buy books from people that I know and want to prosper.

Those older people who use the Internet only for email have discovered a precious resource. Even though they may never take advantage of the information, games, chat rooms, and other services available on the net, they have made themselves rich in establishing contact with family members, friends, and others through the exchange of messages across the airwaves.

I remember talking with a boy from an immigrant family living in Boston. When I asked him about email, he told me that his grandmother sends him frequent messages. The grandmother, it turned out, lives in Saudi Arabia and corresponds with her grandson, presumably in Arabic.

I like to think of this enterprising woman as representative of millions of us who have entered bravely into the new world of far-flung communication.

Richard Griffin

Atheism

During the last several years of his long life, a man widely regarded as the most influential philosopher in the world became one of my frequent associates. That does not mean that we were intimate friends but we did talk frequently, usually over lunch with other people. I came to feel much affection for him, even though we agreed on very few of the most important questions of life.

In particular, this eminent philosopher whom I called Van made clear to me that he did not at all share my faith in a personal God who created the world and cares for human beings. In fact, he did not even think that the question of God’s existence has any meaning.

At first, it came as something of a shock to discover that a person with whom I had a fine relationship held an outlook on reality so radically different from mine. In time, however, this contact has helped me appreciate my own faith anew.

Though I recognized that Van was incomparably more brilliant and intellectually accomplished than I, his views did not seriously tempt me to undervalue my own. After all, my faith has been carefully nurtured over a lifetime and has become part of my personal identity.

In any event, faith, as understood in the Judeo-Christian tradition in which I am steeped and confirmed by long experience, does not depend on the power of intellect but rather is received as a gift. Besides, this faith is not so much an assent of the mind to a set of statements but comes much closer to a loving trust in God.

That is the kind of faith that impelled Blaise Pascal, the great French thinker of the seventeenth century, to write these words, found hidden in the lining of his coat after his death: “Fire: God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and thinkers. Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.”

So Van and I remained friends who could talk about all sorts of subjects with an unspoken agreement not to discuss those vital matters on which we differed. Incidentally, the topics outside discussion included politics in which his surprisingly conservative views were in sharp contrast to my own.

For many reasons this personal contact with unbelief was valuable for me. My friend’s view of the world allowed me to see what it might be like not to believe in God. In the United States it’s not easy to meet atheists or agnostics. National polls consistently show that Americans who profess belief in God or a universal spirit has consistently remained in the mid-ninety percent range over the last six decades.

Entering into my friend’s mentality, I imagined what would be for me a terrible void. If you do not see God as the supreme reality, then you are left with a world that, to my mind, lacks explanation. And your own life can easily seem meaningless, especially after you suffer the loss of people important to you.

When my friend’s wife died, he himself was ninety years old. Her loss left him obviously bereft and, it seemed, disoriented. This event made me fantasize about what it would be like to undergo such a trial without faith in God. In writing my friend a note of condolence, I found it difficult to know what to say.

The one temptation I did not experience was superiority or smugness. I was aware of the truth in what Carlo Martini, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Milan has written: “There is in each of us – whatever our religion, even in a bishop – a believer and a non-believer.” These words suggest that atheism is often not far removed from people of faith. The line between faith and unbelief can be thin indeed.

Personal contact with someone for whom belief in God had no meaning has served to remind me that God goes beyond mere human ideas. God can never be captured by our concepts. Whatever can be said of God has to be qualified to make sure that we do not make of him a mere superhuman being.

Part of the Christian tradition reminds believers that God cannot be defined. As the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco observes, that tradition has a concept of God who “cannot be named because he cannot be described with any of the categories we use to designate the things that are.”

Richard Griffin

—

Many people whose faith has been lifelong enter into crises of belief. They can experience times of severe trial when their certainties are shaken. When this kind of dark night envelops them, they can feel a kind of atheism that may show them how faith in God may become different from what they have known previously.

This experience can also purify their faith, free it from some of the merely human factors that sometimes masquerade as true faith in God. A person can emerge from this kind of crisis spiritually renewed and enriched in mind and heart.

So if there is a thin line separating faith and atheism, that is a tribute to the quality of faith. It may be experienced as frightening and this entering into fear and trembling may shake us to our roots. But this is spiritual experience at its deepest and most valuable. Doubt can live with a lively faith and can even make that faith more dynamic.  

Of course, the dominant role of science and technology in modern times has put traditional faith on the defensive because the scientific viewpoint can sometimes seem the only valid way of looking at life. The other kind of atheism that looms large in modern life is Marxism, Fascisim, and other ideologies that have done so much damage to the world.

It remains a striking fact that some of the world’s great religions do not believe in God. In fact, Hindus and Buddhists, if they are orthodox, should not be believers in the God that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam profess.

What I have discovered, among other findings, is that the arguments for their position make some sense, if you accept their ideas about human life and the world.

However, considerably fewer (eight in 10) believe in a personal God, that is, a God who watches over humankind and answers prayers. And even fewer of these believers, six in 10, express complete trust in God.
 
Faith, however, does not come from intellectual argument. Rather, at least three of the great spiritual traditions of the world see faith as a gift from God that goes beyond human thinking. Faith is God revealing himself to us, a self-disclosure that enables us to grasp a reality that goes far beyond anything we can achieve on our own.

Many people in these three traditions remain comfortable with a belief in God acquired in childhood and retained at each succeeding stage of life. Of course, that faith changes and develops as the person grows in years and adapts to different circumstances. But some retain a simple almost childlike faith that continues to serve them well.

Since going through a test of this sort can be so difficult for a spiritual seeker, it seems best to have a guide for the time of trial at least. A spiritual director can provide assurance when everything seems threatening. A wise and understanding counselor can help stir us through these perilous passages.

Richard Griffin