2001: A New Beginning

“By 2000, machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy. With Government benefits, even nonworking families will have an annual income of $30,000 to $40,000 (in 1966 dollars). How to use leisure meaningfully will be a major problem, and one expert foresees a pleasure-oriented society full of ‘wholesome degeneracy.’”

This quotation from the February 25, 1966 issue of Time Magazine looks into the future and sees what has not come close to happening. Unless you, unlike me, have become independently wealthy and are overwhelmed with leisure, this prediction has proven spectacularly wrong-headed. Time’s crystal ball thirty-five years ago must have had a few cracks in it.

As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr once wryly observed, “ prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” Throughout history, those who have tried to foresee the next decades or centuries have most often failed to guess right.  I myself used to predict that by this time in history international air travelers would be shot in rockets from continent to continent and arrive in minutes rather than hours.

Still, our arrival at the year 2001 – a new year and, by some reckoning, a new century and a new millennium – almost inevitably stirs thinking about change and renewal. For some of us it is a time for resolutions, for setting right things in our life that need fixing. It is also a time for new hope and starting over.

If we have any spirit at all,  the new year is going to be a time for renewal. Have not people always felt it to be so? There seems to be something built into us human beings that takes the swing of years as an inducement for new beginnings.

In the spiritual life, past failures do not mean we cannot start again. The beauty of living as a searcher is that each day presents new opportunities for  growth and inspiration. If we stay open to being surprised, then moving into a new era can indeed fool us in many welcome ways.

There was a time in my life when I thought I knew exactly what the future held for me. All the years lay ahead in my imagination along a time line that seemed to me perfectly predictable. The initial religious training given me in a Jesuit novitiate amounted to a plan for living the rest of my life; I considered it foolproof. At age 21 I naively wrote in my journal: “I am going to make progress in proportion as I follow the route I have planned for myself.”

As it has turned out, however, my life has become quite different from anything that I imagined. With decade succeeding decade, I entered upon new experiences which surprised all my expectations. New people, new opportunities, new skills – all came tumbling toward me as time moved on. Very little of it could I ever have predicted, nor could anyone else.

I feel glad that life has turned out so differently from expectation. Mind you, there has been a lot of trial and error connected with these changes. More often than is comfortable to think about, I have made mistakes that hurt me and other people. There were times in my life, as in just about everyone’s, when I did not know where I was headed.

And, even now in this new age of 2001, I have no guarantee of safe passage toward the future. Inevitably, things will go wrong for me and I will be entangled in sometimes desperate struggle to find my way.

But is it not good for us that we cannot predict the future, either our own or the world’s? That counts as one of life’s treasures, our being unable to see clearly ahead. Just as utopian visions of the world’s future fail to discern what is really going to happen, so visions of our own future cannot ever be assured of coming true.

The vital need is not to sell ourselves short. As people with spirit inside us, we have a future, whether long or short. That future being unknown is what makes our life an adventure, a high-wire act that can prove worth sticking around for.

Richard Griffin

Harvey’s Gig

Of his role as alto sax player in the big band Soft Touch, Harvey Cox says: “What I do most of the time is very cerebral; to do something that uses another part of my brain, a whole other side of me, is an activity I really enjoy.”

The “very cerebral” job refers to Cox’s position as theology professor at Harvard Divinity School. Now age seventy-one, he has built a fine reputation for teaching both ministerial students and Harvard undergrads. He also is skilled at analyzing trends in religion worldwide, producing books on such subjects as liberation theology and the Pentecostal movement.

Last week Cox took me with him to the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Bedford for Soft Touch’s Christmas gig. Nineteen men strong, with a female vocalist, the band entertained a large audience assembled in a gymnasium on hospital grounds.

In attendance were veterans of World War II and all the other conflicts in which America has been involved since then. I sat among men who fought in Korea, Vietnam and in the Persian Gulf war. But no longer does a veteran of the First World War live at the Bedford institution: the last one died there two years ago aged one-hundred-and-four.

The vets obviously loved hearing the songs of the big band era along with some tunes appropriate to the Christmas season. Some of them kept returning to the dance floor at the invitation of uniformed girls from the Bedford High School junior ROTC and other guests from outside. Often they swayed very slowly from side to side, obviously working against disabilities.

Currently some five hundred veterans are hospitalized at Bedford, fewer by a half than there used to be. One explanation I heard from a physician with experience in veterans’ hospitals was that, because the United States has not been involved for a generation in wars with heavy  casualties, there are no longer so many vets with service-related injuries.

About a hundred of those at Bedford are men with Alzheimer’s disease. Some of them usually come to the monthly celebration but, for various reasons, they were not there this time. Speaking about the participation of these patients, staff member Jim Cutrumbes told me that “it’s a great therapy.”

The band members themselves turned out to be older than most of the veterans for whom they played. The majority of the band members are aged enough to have danced to the big band tunes they now play.

Murray Sheinfield of Newton, eighty-five, has been playing drums for sixty-five years. I discovered him to be a person who likes a challenge: “Anything that’s new, I like to do,” he told me.

Eighty-year-old Don Gillespie of Lexington, on piano, is himself a veteran of World War II and loves playing in this band “primarily because they play music of my era.”

Roy Fowler, of Waltham, plays the tenor sax, an instrument that he did not start until he was fifty-nine. Previously, he had never played any instrument at all. Now approaching seventy-eight, he served for many years as an Olympic trainer for the American hockey team.

My friend Harvey Cox shows the same spirit of enterprise as his musical colleagues. After many years of playing the tenor sax, often with his own band “the Embraceables,” he recently took up the alto sax.

It’s a whole other instrument and has demanded a lot of effort for him to learn. But he relishes the challenge and works hard at it, as I could tell from observing him in action at Bedford.

From that evening one scene will stay lodged in my memory for a long time. As the last number of the night, the band played a medley of patriotic pieces. One after another, the theme songs of the military branches all came rolling out. The army, the navy, the marines, and other groups had their hymns performed with snappy martial beats.

During this selection, the veterans present gathered in a large circle and marched around the dance floor. Not all really marched – some were pushed in reclining beds, others traversed the circle by wheel chair. All these men, in various states of disrepair (some missing legs), made a spectacle, at once grand and inevitably somewhat distressing.

I admired these veterans of America’s wars and peacetime military service too. They have given so much for their country and are continuing to suffer the isolation of hospital living. No matter how kind the staff and attentive their visitors, it cannot be an easy life for them.

Those who marched, at least, would seem to have remained believers in patriotism. So far as I could tell, most of these veterans still carry, along with their wounds, faith in their country’s causes.

As they finished the evening by singing “God Bless America,” I hoped that divine blessings will fall, not just on the country at large, but upon them in particular.

Richard Griffin

Mary Saving Her Life

A middle-aged woman whom I will call Mary is trying to get her life together. (Besides the name, I have changed other significant details in this true story to preserve confidentiality.)

Many things have gone wrong for her over the years; now she hopes that this long era of misfortune has come to an end. Mary has determined to keep to the straight path that she has finally found.

As she talked with me last week, my heart went out to this woman who has known so much trouble and loss. It is not had to imagine myself in her situation, confronted with the mistakes and afflictions that makes of human life a constant struggle.

A drinking habit has led to much of Mary’s grief. It was a large factor in the break-up of her first marriage. This addiction caused much harm to Mary herself and to the people closest to her.

The worst part of it came when, after her divorce, a judge ruled that Mary’s children could not be entrusted to her custody, because of her drinking. Since her husband was also found to be too unreliable for taking care of the children, they were given over to foster parents.

Another factor in Mary’s troubles had nothing to do with her conduct. In a tragic accident last year, her twenty-year-old son was killed. The loss that Mary and her family suffered then and continues to suffer is too painful for words.

As a mother, she thinks of her son constantly. Not a day goes by without Mary thinking of him, his beauty and the love that they shared. Since his gravesite is far from where she lives, Mary has set up in her own house a memorial to him where she can stop and offer prayers in his memory.

But the most important memorial to her son is the resolution Mary has made not to take another drink. Thus far, she has kept this promise made to herself and her son. She knows that there is no better way in which she can honor her son and the love she feels for him than to preserve her own sobriety.

She knows that the struggle will not be easy. Another addiction shows how vulnerable she is to the grip of destructive habits. Every time she takes a break from her work as a home health aide, she steps outside and lights up a cigarette. But this smoking addiction can only ruin her health and shorten her life; it cannot bring down everything else in her life the way drinking can.

The struggle with the awful urge to drink has become the spiritual center of Mary’s life, as it has with so many other people. If she can cope with this challenge, then she will have passed the supreme test in her life. You can say that, if this happens, her life will have become successful, no matter what her other failures have been.

Let’s hope that she is not carrying on the struggle by herself. Any- one who has known the fearful demon of alcohol addiction needs the help of other people to break its grip. Mary may already belong to an A.A. group made up of other women and men who have learned to cope with the pressures of addiction.

Mary probably does not think of herself as having a spiritual life. She has become so used to failure in her personal and family experience that language about the spirit may seem quite foreign to her. Quite likely, she does not belong to a church or other formal religious community.

But her struggle is basically spiritual and, if indeed she gets her life together again, her triumph will be spiritual. The writer Thomas Lynch describes what happened to change him: “What I’ve learned from my sobriety, from the men and women who keep me sober, is how to pray. Blind drunks who get sober get a kind of blind faith – – not so much a vision of who God is, but who God isn’t, namely me.”

Coming to believe more strongly in her own worth as a person and in the love that supports her life will give Mary the motive force for change. If she pulls it off after so much failure, what a triumph of the human spirit that will be!

Richard Griffin

The Lights Above

One of the advantages of being an early riser, I have discovered, is the sight of the still dark sky. As I walk the streets of the neighborhood on the way to our corner store to buy the newspaper, I look up and gaze in wonder at the brilliant planets and splendid stars that, when clouds do not interfere, burn brightly before the arrival of the day.

At this time of year I look with special attention toward the east where the planet Venus shines. This vision makes me think back to St. Luke’s Gospel and its account of the wise men who “saw the star in the east.” Formed by a lifetime of biblical imagery, I conjure up images of people connected with the birth of Jesus in the little town of Bethlehem. This association of stars and holy happenings sparks in me spiritual reflection about my place in the great universe, and that of my fellow human beings.

The sense of wonder I feel is itself a gift from above. This spiritual gift I hope never to lose – an awareness that at the heart of everything lies mystery, more reality than we can ever lay hold of. In the face of so stupendous a creation, how can we ever stop wondering about it all? And yet, even my astronomer friends confess hardly ever looking at the night sky; instead most of them nowadays focus on print-outs from their computers.

But these scientists do teach that there is much more to the universe than ever appears to us. Beyond our solar system, other systems further away than we can comprehend stretch out almost infinitely. Just hearing about these distances also provokes awe.

Down below, the lights that my neighbors display at this time of year also provide inspiration. The bulbs they string across small trees and bushes invite association with  the ineffable brightness of being. Local residents looking out from their windows and curious passers-by can take heart from this heralding of a sacred season.

Christmas and Hanukkah, coming in the same month, suggest many points of convergence between two great spiritual traditions. Both faiths call people to celebrate events of deep meaning. I recall former neighbors, now moved to Israel, whose weekly observance of the Sabbath and annual celebration of Succoth and other feasts moved me to admiration and reverence.

Other traditions, too, move their adherents to mark this season. Now that Americans find value in a variety of religions, from the Asia and elsewhere, we are learning to respect diverse approaches to the sacred. I recall gathering with Muslims in their local mosque where they shared with me the food and drink that ended their day of fasting during the holy time of Ramadan.

Still others among us gravitate toward new styles of spirituality, creating fresh forms of worship arising from new insights into the holy. They may find inspiration in the world of nature or newly fashioned rites of meditation.

Some people, however, feel no need of the transcendent or, perhaps better, find the transcendent in the merely human. This kind of secular spirituality can also lead to joyous celebration.

Whatever our approach, we can all discover motives for recognizing what is precious in this season. All of us are gifted, not only in qualities of mind and heart, but also in the country where we live.

We live in one of the places on planet Earth that has been most favored. This is a place of abundance, though unfortunately some have been left out and still await their fair share. Still, we are at peace, at least externally – if only that peace can take root in our hearts, then the promise of this season will be realized in our children.

The smallest children in our neighborhood also give me hope. One, named Peter, arrived only last month. What a blessing for us all his presence is! And those others slightly older – –  Georgia, Sam, Heloise, and Hayley – – growing up near people who treasure them, inspire me with what the future can be. Citizens of a new century and a new millennium, they will help shape the decades to come.

So there’s much reason to celebrate our having come into this season of festivity. For our children this means days free from school and freedom to play for hours on end. It may also bring with it the pleasure of unexpected gifts. I hope to see them  outside slid-ing along on new skis or sleds, and wearing bright jackets.

For grown-ups, beyond shopping sprees, may this time bring us fun at parties, reunions with extended family and friends, and (if we’re lucky) some leisure. We may even hope not to let this time speed by without our seizing the opportunity for prayerful reflection on the meaning of it all.

Richard Griffin

How Elders Vote

Garrison Keillor, host of “Prairie Home Companion” on National Public Radio, joked recently about elderly voters in Florida’s Palm Beach County. They can manage fifteen different boards in a beano game, he gibed, but they could not cope with their election ballot.

Like most of Keillor’s quips, this one drew hearty laughter from the audience, but (leaving aside its somewhat ageist tinge) it also prompts serious questions about voting procedures in a society that is aging so dramatically. At a time when so many more of us have  passed age 65, does that mean public authority should make changes in the places where we vote and in the ways by which we indicate our electoral choices?

Surely the answer is yes, but not because we older Americans, having become so numerous, need user-friendly voting methods. Rather, citizens of every age, even those without notable disabilities, when they go to vote need to find places they can enter easily and procedures that are user-friendly. Also, whenever voting problems arise., we need to have help readily available. Younger people may require such assistance as well as their seniors.

As to polling places, a federal law enacted a dozen years ago, the “Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act,” requires them to be accessible to people with disabilities. So such access is, in the words of a lawyer friend who is expert in election issues, “not merely a good idea, but a federal requirement.”

The Secretary of State’s office in Massachusetts in cooperation with the disability commission, has recently surveyed all of the polling places in the Commonwealth to check on their accessibility. Though all the voting sites were found in conformity with regulations on designated election days, some of them are still not accessible at other  times, a situation state authorities regard as less than desirable.

Another problem deserves attention: voters are often not aware of help that is available.  Talking to Teresa Neighbor, the executive director of the Election Commission in Cambridge, I discovered, for example, that each voting site in our city has an area  marked “visual aids.” Voters who have vision problems can use the magnifying rulers and magnifying glasses available there.  But this is a service that I, a veteran voter, had never noticed or heard of.

In Massachusetts, the mechanics of voting are much more easily handled than in Florida and in other states where punch cards are still used. As Brian McNiff, spokesman for Secretary of State William Galvin, informed me, “Massachusetts got rid of punch cards three years ago.”  Some two percent of voters in this state, however, still use cards that are punched with a mechanical lever.

That move away from the old punch cards came as a result of the memorable contest for a congressional seat from the South Shore four years ago. There Philip Johnston had seemingly emerged as the winner in a very close election, only to lose to William Delahunt on the basis of a recount. In this instance the Supreme Judicial Court paved the way to the changed outcome by ruling that “discernable stylus impressions”  could be counted as genuine votes.

Residents of this commonwealth also do not have to cope with “butterfly ballots.” They have never been used here. However, voters here, as in other states, are increasingly confronted by referendum questions. Often these referenda present long and complicated texts for consideration in voting booths where lighting is often what my lawyer friend characterizes as “terrible.”

Secretary Galvin strongly encourages voters to read these questions at home before they come to vote. Otherwise, one may struggle to follow them in the narrow confines of the voting booth, sometimes feeling pressured because other voters may be waiting for their turn.

Whether or not the ballot is complicated by referenda, difficulties with the mechanics of voting often arise but not just for older people. Some voters in every age bracket have disabilities. Whatever is done to improve conditions at voting sites will benefit not just them but citizens in general. The evidence from Florida and many other places indicates that the need to reform and perhaps standardize American voting procedures has become inescapable.

Last week Secretary of State Galvin announced plans to request funds from the legislature for loans to Massachusetts cities and towns wishing to upgrade their voting systems. Even though none of them reported serious problems this year, many local governments have expressed interest in improving their equipment.

One change, recently proposed as a national model, should not be adopted. Television screens, with ATM-like features, would disadvantage many elders and other people not comfortable with electronic devices. In addition, my lawyer friend points out, “they do not create an audit trail.” Among other things, this means you could not use them for recounts.

Whatever the precise methods chosen, surely this is a favorable time for establishing greater uniformity in  procedures or, at least, making them as user-friendly as possible for everybody. As Teresa Neighbor says, “Florida serves as a good wake-up call.”  

Richard Griffin

Serenity Prayer

“God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. Living one day at a time, accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it, trusting that You will make all things right, if I surrender to your will, so that I may be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with You forever in the next. Amen.”

These words make up the famous Serenity Prayer, used for more than fifty years by many people of faith and, indeed, by seekers of all sorts. Though often attributed to others, this prayer was actually written by the celebrated Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a professor at Union Theological School in New York City and a man much admired for his intellectual and spiritual leadership.

“It was at a service at Heath’s Union Church that my father first spoke his new prayer,” writes his daughter, Elizabeth Niebuhr Sifton.  That was in 1943 when Reinhold Niebuhr was preaching in the small northwestern Massachusetts town of Heath, a place where he owned a house and spent much time.

At first sight the prayer seems quite individualistic. It can be read as if it is a plea for personal peace of soul. Notice, however, that it begins the request by using the plural: “give us.” This implies a community framework and it becomes a plea for a group of people, not just one

Professor Niebuhr’s intention, it seems, was to respond to the desperate situation in Europe then torn apart by World War II. As his daughter explains, “It was a prayer written by a teacher and writer who had spent a decade speaking out against Hitler.”

In a recent talk, Elizabeth Sifton called her father’s words “a prayer for collective action”  and explained that it was indeed a response to the world crisis that preoccupied his thinking.  This places the Serenity Prayer in the setting of social, not merely individual, concern.

Mrs. Sifton, a prominent New York publisher, also recalled a surprising historical fact. The prayer, she said, had been distributed to the United States Army troops who occupied Germany after the war. Some army veterans may remember having received this text and using it when stationed in that country.

Another group of people familiar with the prayer may be members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Reports of AA meetings indicate that Niebuhr’s words are often used to strengthen the resolve to keep sobriety. In that instance, the prayer may take on more of a individual than a social meaning.

In fact, the prayer in situations like AA meetings, usually drops the word “grace” at the beginning. Instead, this altered version begins “give us the serenity.” For Niebuhr the notion of grace was undoubtedly vital and a basic focus in his prayer. After all, he was a theologian who attached indispensable importance to the divine initiative at work in human life.

However, in the altered version, the prayer still holds beauty and power. It becomes the individual person’s cry for balance in the struggle to retain or regain peace of soul. It also emerges as the product of a general spirituality rather than as a specifically Christian statement.

In the context of Christian faith it expresses, not only the need for divine grace, but also the power of Jesus’ example, the value in surrender of self to God, and confidence that there is a life that goes beyond the earthly one. These are the convictions of a Christian believer that find compelling expression here.

Almost everyone can identify with the request for the wisdom to tell the difference between things that one can change and those that one cannot change. However, in practice this distinction can be difficult indeed. Going back to World War II and the prayer’s origins, one can imagine the conflicts felt by Germans who recognized the awful injustices imposed by the Nazis but honestly did not know what to do about the deadly situation.

Some paid the price for speaking out and taking action against the regime but, of course, the majority bent under the totalitarian pressure. The Serenity Prayer can therefore also serve as a reminder of the need sometimes to resist compromise in the face of evil.

Richard Griffin

Two Doctors on their Profession

“It’s so infantilizing to be sick,” says Jerome Groopman. He speaks with authority, having been a hospital patient himself, and also a doctor who treats people with life-threatening diseases.

Of the patient’s attitude, he observes: “You look for a parent to sweep you up and make it all better.” But your physician cannot be that parent, he would add, if only because the doctor is not infallible.

Dr. Groopman recently spoke at a symposium in a new series co-sponsored by Boston College and the Atlantic Monthly. This first forum bore the title “The Challenge of Medical Knowledge” and also featured Sherwin Nuland, a surgeon from Yale University and author of “How We Die,” among other publications.

This initiative of the Jesuit university and the Boston-based periodical has taken its inspiration from Cardinal Carlo Martini, the archbishop of Milan. His public discussions in the cathedral of that city have attracted thousands of people, especially the young. Following that lead, the Boston symposium has taken the overall title, “Belief and Non-Belief in Modern American Culture.”

Here, rather than focusing on the faith issues directly, I will emphasize what these two well-known physicians said about the practice of medicine. Both were insistent on the need to change attitudes both in doctors themselves and in the patients who approach them.

“As a patient, it’s critical to understand the fallibility of the doctor,” Groopman said. Nuland want even further: “Doctors are not godlike; they require constant affirmation.” He confessed to feeling responsible when patients die: “I always think it’s my fault.”

Dr. Groopman sees the root cause of physician self-worship as what he called “this tremendous intoxication with power.”

To illustrate this mind-set he told an old joke that goes somewhat like this: The place is heaven’s gate where a lot of saintly people are waiting to get in. St. Peter is checking credentials. Then a guy with a white coat and a stethoscope walks right by and passes through the gate. “What gives?” asks someone disturbed at this sight. St. Peter answers, “Don’t worry, that’s God. He thinks he’s a doctor.”

Dr. Nuland uses a World War II reference to talk about the same phenomenon, calling it “the Spitfire pilot model,” a set of prideful attitudes that take hold even before a student enters medical school and continues, unless corrected. “We have to fight our own instincts,” he says.

Physicians need more introspection, he adds, quoting the poet Auden who said that doctors are the least introspective of professionals. Nuland says that they need to look themselves square in the eye and ask themselves what their motives really are.

Nuland also sees physician attitudes as rooted in their privileged place in society. About this he does not mince words: “We become much more conservative once we become doctors. We become narrowed. Most people in my generation were brought up to be bigots.”

On this last point, he advises doctors, “Recognize the bigot in yourself.”

If all of this sounds ominous, both physicians agree that things are getting better. Nuland attributes much of this change to the benefits of the women’s movement. “There isn’t a doctor who hasn’t learned from patients,” he observes.

And Groopman, drawing inspiration from his Jewish tradition, finds reinforcement from what that tradition says about idolatry as the worship of self.  The dangers of egoism loom large in some of the rabbinic literature.

These two prominent doctors convincingly make the case for continued change in their profession , making it more responsive to patient needs. Much of what they say clearly has the ring of truth.

However, it may be important to place their opinions in context. Both these doctors work in academic medical settings where they can presumably choose their own patients and find time for reflection. As writers, they also know how to use words effectively, a skill that sometimes leads them into rhetoric that does not ring true. What they say sounds awfully good, but does it express reality?

If you asked my primary care physician if she feels like God, I suspect her response would be laughter. Instead, working for an HMO and keeping up with a heavy patient load, she is too busy to act divine. The press of her daily schedule, the need to keep track of patient records, and the effort to stay in touch with new knowledge and other professional requirements must constantly remind her that she is no more than human.

Yes, physicians still rank among the most privileged people in American society. But they are often deeply disturbed about their own profession. Many of them chafe at  the red tape and bureaucratic interference which they have to endure these days. They often need and deserve more moral support than the system will ever give them.

These constraints, along with the awareness of limits in their ability to heal, make many doctors, if not most, only too conscious that they are not God.

Richard Griffin