The Flame and Getting It

Lucy, as I will call her, set down twelve small stones that she had picked up on a beach in Martha’s Vineyard the previous weekend. She arranged these stones on a green cloth that she spread on the floor in front of us. Next to these objects she placed a small vase that held a single rose. Within the circle of stones she put a candle and touched fire to its wick.

This simple but beautiful arrangement amounted to a still life design, suited for contemplation. The flame, however, did not stand still but moved in response to the slight currents of air circulating through the room. That flame is what fixed my attention at certain points during our small group’s discussion and the meditation that followed.

What came to fascinate me is how the flame gives light. As I continued to gaze at it, I moved into a new appreciation of this fire as a source of light. Beautiful as the rose is, that flower cannot give forth light like the flame. This fire, so insubstantial and yet so subtly brilliant, does deserve its choice as symbol of the spirit after all. Light-giving from its depths, the flame suggests the living soul deep down within us.

Another motif for our meditation came from a conversation that took place before we began. Lucy shared with us  memories of her dearest friend, a woman who had died three weeks ago. That death came at the end of a long illness, a time when the friend had shared much with Lucy as she prepared for the final day.

Lucy was not present as her friend died but family members later told Lucy of her last words. Just before she died, the woman’s face changed expression and she was heard to say, “I get it.”  

This phrase says a whole lot and also very little. What does “get” mean? Even more important, what does “it” refer to? Does anyone really know what the woman was saying?

Lucy, of course, does not pretend to know but, like others, feels stirred with wonder. The phrase suggests a sudden insight into reality. It is as if the woman, in her last moments of life on earth, sees a vision of the way everything holds together. A lifetime’s striving for understanding is rewarded at the last. Perhaps she sees the root of reality, the love that gives the world its ultimate meaning, the divine kindness that underlies all of life.

One can only imagine what this revelation would have meant to the dying woman. This vision into what Dante called “the love that moves the sun and the other stars” could have made death, for her,  the doorway into a new and ecstatic way of being.  She was granted a more intense appreciation of the real than she had ever experienced in her life previously.

As we pondered this death, the splendid late October light streamed in from the garden outside filling the room with subdued brilliance. One of our group rang a soft bell several times and we turned to the silence inside us. Most people sat on the floor in the lotus position, eyes closed and body still. A peace descended over us as we opened ourselves to the action of the spirit.

The spirit of the woman who had died remained a motif of the group meditation. Her vision at the last inspired in us a renewed appreciation of the mystery that lies at the heart of all creation and of our own lives. There is more to reality, it said, infinitely more than we can ever plumb.

The flame, in its own mysterious being, continued to feed my soul. So did the continuing courage of Lucy’s husband Ned (again, I have substituted another name for the real one). His serious loss of memory gives a sober dimension to our gatherings but his courage in coping with it inspires us all. On this occasion, referring to his wife, Ned says: “She is my memory.”

And she is. In giving him loving support Lucy helps us all move toward the love that undergirds our hopes. We perceive that love fitfully and need to be supported in our own weakness. As yet, we don’t “get it” but look at the flame and try to remain open to its promise.

Richard Griffin

Bamford

Sharing the experience of his wife’s death two years previously, editor and writer Christopher Bamford speaks of what he has learned. “I have come to understand that life is praise and lamentation, and that these two are very close, perhaps one—and that they are transformative.”

His essay, “In the Presence of Death,” comes first in “The Best Spiritual Writing 2000,” the latest edition in a series begun two years ago. Philip Zaleski, editor of this series, deserves credit for having assembled in this paperback an excellent collection that can nourish the spiritual life of its readers.

Bamford describes the last month of his wife Tadea’s life as a time when everyone else still prayed for her to be healed while she resigned herself to approaching death. Tadea had to show patience with the people who visited because they were not prepared to hear her talk about dying. “So she just sat quietly,” her husband says, “waiting for us to understand that all was as it should be.”

Looking back, what he remembers vividly is the way time and space changed. “Everything slowed down,” he explains, “expanded, became qualititative, rather than quantitative.” Time became like a dream, with every day spread out, and every moment containing other moments, each of them a gift of grace.

Tadea herself did not allow any sad faces among visitors; she wanted them to appreciate the reality of human life, even though hers was coming to an end. As a result, the atmosphere was filled with prayer and devotion, a kind of informal liturgy that brought everyone into a subtle song of praise.

The author summarizes what this environment can produce: “When life is lived in the continuous presence of death, which is the presence of God, it is as if every moment becomes an offering, a communication, received from and given to the spiritual world.”

In Tadea’s last three days, family members and friends could feel a change. She had entered into the final stage of her struggle. At this time, a priest came to baptize and confirm her as she prepared for departure. “There was a heightened sense of being, an exceptional clarity of perception, an interiority to space and silence I had not suspected before,” recalls her husband.

Soon she died, after  opening her eyes wide and leaning forward as if she was entering her new place. Those in the house felt a sense of  “inbetweenness,” as if suspended between heaven and earth. The presence of the spirit was palpable and made people feel themselves in a kind of trance.

In the succeeding days of mourning and burial, Christopher Bamford felt the gift continuing. He reflects: “It is as if only death reveals the meaning of life. As if in death the whole of life—its task, its meaning, its fruit, above all, its mystery—is laid bare.” He also was given new insight into the meaning of life: “Life was not about getting and doing, but about creating virtue’s in one’s soul.”

This bereaved husband felt deep gratitude for having been part of Tadea’s life. Through her love and devotion, along with her reaching for other virtues, she had taught him about spirituality. At the same time, he remained conscious of his need for forgiveness because of the ways in which he had failed her. Later he became convinced that she was forgiving him.

The author had still to struggle in coming to three realizations. First, though the dead have gone, they are still present to the world—they belong to everyone.

Second, heaven became a “powerful reality” for him. He imagined himself there with Tadea as they floated down a river of liquid light.

Thirdly, the author came to realize that from then on he would have to live in three different spheres and yet make them one. He had to find a middle way between heaven and earth whereby the death of his spouse could become “a bridge to new experience.”

This third discovery actually happened. “I found myself loving the world more than I ever had,” concludes Bamford. He has ultimately learned that “nothing of our experience is lost or worthless in the eyes of life.”

Bamford offers much more than can be summarized here. But perhaps this much will serve to stir reflection about spirituality coming from the so often agonizing experience of a loved one’s death.

Richard Griffin

Wyman Center

If I were suffering from clinical depression and needed in-patient medical treatment for a short time, my choice would be the newly opened Wyman Center, a geriatric psychiatry unit at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge. A visit last week and an extended conversation with three of the unit’s staff members left me with favorable impressions of the mental health services available there to people over age 65.

Advocates for elders have long complained about the way older people are shortchanged by the mental health care system. In my own family, I remember my mother, when she was still in middle age,  reporting how a psychiatrist told her that she was too old for psychotherapy.

The United States Surgeon General, Dr. David Satcher,  recently issued a report with an extensive chapter to the mental health of older adults. He takes note of the way many older people burdened with depressive symptoms are told that these problems “are to be expected at your age.”  But the Surgeon General rejects this pseudo folk wisdom and insists that the symptoms often indicate disease that can be successfully treated by modern medicine.

Entering the Wyman Center, a visitor  finds the physical space brightly painted and decorated with photos and other attractive objects. A large scheduling board posts the events of each week. Rooms of patients are simple but well equipped and another section features common rooms for social activities and dining.

The medical director, Dr. Joseph D’Afflitti, psychiatric nurse and co-director Rose Netzer, and chief social worker Anthony Piro talked with me at length about their work. What I most liked about the new center is the way these professionals work together in attending to the various needs of their patients.

The center’s publicity says it provides “comprehensive medical services that are integrated into each patient’s individualized care plan.”  This means that psychiatrists, nurses, social workers, physical and occupational therapists, and others attend to whatever can improve the patient’s functioning.

To my satisfaction, team members also feel a concern about spiritual issues. Though a chaplain pays special attention to these questions, she can count on the interest of the other team members as well. As Rose Netzer reports, “We treat patients holistically: we dance with our patients, we sing with our patients, we pray with our patients.”

I labeled “justifiable pride” the staff leaders’ confidence about providing top-of-the-line health care. These professionals obviously care a lot about their patients and work hard to respond to a wide range of needs.

At the same time, they are realistic about the work setting. “I think inpatient hospitalization is hard on patients,” Rose Netzer frankly admits. “It’s very debilitating; you have to see to it that people do not become sicker when they come in. We want people back where they belong and treated there.”

The center staff works cooperatively with other institutions. Nursing homes, for example, benefit from consultation whenever a patient is to return to such residences. Also, of course, they keep the patient’s primary care physician informed about the treatments the center has provided.

Staff members confer extensively with the family members of patients. In this way they provide some “case management” enabling the family to support  the patient after discharge from the hospital. This crucial service can give the healing that has taken place in the hospital a chance to take hold. And staff members will be glad to receive follow-up contact from the patients whom they have discharged.

Jeanette Clough, president and CEO of the hospital, conceived the idea of the Wyman Center. She expresses strong support for its work over the past two months and considers it an important addition to Mt. Auburn’s array of services. Of the center she says, “We hope it will be a real bridge among medication, medical, and psychological issues that will help keep elders functional, in their homes, and enjoying their lives.”

To be eligible for admission to the Wyman Center, a person does not have to live in Cambridge or adjoining towns. People can come from outside of Greater Boston. Financing, however, may be a problem for some. Though the basic source of payment is Medicare, not all health care plans do have arrangements with the center.

At the beginning I mentioned depression as a cause for admittance but there are many other reasons why a person would choose this center. There may be some cognitive problems, for example, issues connected with memory. These problems receive thorough evaluation by the staff, in connection with whatever other health issues may be discovered.

The center boasts easy access at (617) 499-5780, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The admissions coordinator promises to return calls within 10 minutes.

One can hope that this new service represents a move toward greater responsiveness of the mental health system to the needs of older people. Perhaps it can become a model for other institutions so that we elders will be better served.

Richard Griffin

A Father’s Story

Andre Dubus, the writer whose death last year at age 63 was much  mourned by his many readers, was born in Louisiana but lived in Haverhill, Massachusetts for much  of his life. Many of his short stories found their setting in this latter region and breathed the distinctive atmosphere of the area. Among these stories is one that I keep returning to for its human pathos and, especially, its bold spirituality.

“A Father’s Story” centers on the life of a middle-aged man named Luke Ripley who owns a stable of thirty horses that he rents to riders. Since the time when his wife left, taking his three sons and one daughter with her, the man suffers from loneliness and a sense of continual unease.

At the same time, what he calls “my real life” brings him into daily contact with God. This contact comes through taking part in the Catholic Mass, along with five or six other people at St. John’s, his local parish. Speaking of the Eucharist that he receives, he describes “a feeling that I am thankful not to have lost in the forty-eight years since my first Communion. At its center is excitement; spreading out from it is the peace of certainty.”

To this character, faith is a vital reality, one that he defines by contrast with belief. “Belief is believing in God; faith is believing that God believes in you.”

Yet he feels his own inability to pay constant attention to God. For that reason he appreciates the liturgy in which he takes part. “Ritual,” he says, “allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.”

Though he cares about his sons, he feels a special love for his twenty-year-old daughter Jennifer. For him, daughters are vulnerable and altogether precious in ways that male children are not. This father worries about her “the way fathers worry about daughters and not sons.”

Luke’s special friend is Father Paul LeBoeuf, his parish priest. The two of them talk together daily and often share meals. Theirs is a spiritual friendship, though it is grounded in manly interests. He can confide his deepest feelings to his priest friend, except the series of event that unfolded when his daughter came to visit.

As she was driving home, returning to her father’s house after a night out with a couple of girlfriends, Jennifer swerved to avoid something in the road. That something turned out to be a human being, though its shape was all a blur to Jennifer as her car hit this person. The car shuddered as she hit him but she continued on her way home, panicked into not stopping.

When she got home and talked with her father through her tears, she told him the horrible details as best she could remember. Later, Luke drove to the place of the accident himself and found the body of a young man in a ditch by the side of the road. He was dead, but it remained unclear whether death had come instantly from the impact.

The discovery plunged the father into a crisis of conscience. Should he, can he call the authorities and report what his daughter has done? After a sleepless night, he takes the keys to his daughter’s car, drives to church, and talks to Father Paul. The priest senses that something is wrong but Luke cannot tell him the secret. “To confess now would be unfair,” he tells himself. “It is a world of secrets, and now I have one from my from my best, in truth my only friend.”

Still, he receives the Eucharist and talks with God as before. However, now he has said good-bye to the peace that used to be his. Knowing that he would do it again, Luke tells himself that he acted as the father of a girl.

When God tells him that He is a father, too, Luke replies that God is not the father of a daughter but of a son. Then his poignant conversation with God ends this way:

“But you never had a daughter, and if You had, You could not have borne her passion.

“So, He says, you love her more than you love Me.

“I love her more than I love truth.

“Then you love in weakness, He says.

“‘As you love me,’ I say, and I go with an apple or carrot out to the barn.”

Richard Griffin

Saburo Sakai

Last month in Tokyo, Saburo Sakai died at age 84. He suffered a fatal heart attack as he reached across a dining room table to shake the hand of an American military officer. This event marked the end of a life spanning most of the twentieth century and one marked by both extraordinary exploits and a later dramatic change of direction.

News reports about Sakai caught my attention because World War II still retains a strong hold on my imagination. Though not a war veteran myself, I followed the battles of WWII with rabid interest as I entered into my teenage years. Like many other Americans of that time, I internalized the negative images of both German and Japanese warriors, especially as they were presented in Hollywood films.

Images of Japanese fighter pilots in particular fascinated me because of their skills and their evil intentions against our military forces. I remember seeing actors portraying them sitting in their Zeros grinning malevolently as they dove on American ships and planes. They did not seem like human beings but rather instruments of the devil and of the evil Japanese emperor.

Sakai was one of those pilots but one whose aerial warfare skills surpassed almost everyone else’s. According to the New York Times obituary to which I am indebted for the information here, he claimed to have shot down 64 planes, starting with aircraft from the Chinese Air Force. On the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he shot down an American P-40 over the Philippines and, in the following month, a B-17, the first American bomber to be downed in the Pacific.

He himself took a bullet in the face from an American torpedo bomber in August of 1942 but he managed to get back to his base in New Guinea, some 500 nautical miles away. In 1983, Sakai met the gunner who hit him, a man named Harry Jones from Nevada. The two of them enjoyed talking with one another, according to a newspaper account of their meeting.

This meeting was one of many he had with his former adversaries. He visited the United States a dozen times and met people with whom he been locked in deadly combat. In doing so, he showed extraordinary flexibility of character, especially considering his upbringing and education.

His family, though poor farmers, claimed kinship with the Samurais, Japan’s warrior class. Sakai was taught a code of conduct called Bushido whereby one learns to live prepared to die. This ideology gave him unyielding motivation in his wartime exploits. It makes more amazing his ability after the war to change his values so sharply. According to a web site article about him, Sakai said that he had not killed any creature, “not even a mosquito,” since stepping out of his Zero at the time of Japan’s surrender.

Religion made a difference for him: the same web site reports that Sakai became a Buddhist acolyte and practiced atonement. He came to see that Japanese leaders, especially the Emperor, had betrayed their trust and he felt that they avoided taking responsibility for their actions.

The transition of the Japanese nation from an enemy country toward close friendship with our country ranks as one of the greatest historical changes in my lifetime. The extent of this change can be gauged from what I confess to be vestigial feelings about Japanese people that I still experience. These feelings never influence my actions; they are purely relics of deep emotions that touched me in those teenage years.

When I encounter Japanese tourists visiting my hometown, I am of course polite to them and reach out to them in welcoming friendship. Enmity toward them left over from the war is not something that I have to struggle against.

And yet, I sometimes spontaneously fantasize about them as adult children and grandchildren of men who savagely warred against Americans and the people of other nations as well. The memory of crimes that Japanese forces committed against others is lodged deeply within me, having fed my young imagination.

But I do not have to be defensive about these imaginings; rather they witness to how far we have come to our friendship. The passage was from acute resentment to one of mutual respect and harmony. It ranks as a triumph of human capacity for change for the values that dignify us all.

By his extraordinary ability to change radically, Saburo Sakai is representative of many more citizens of his nation who were able, in middle age and later, to turn from warmaking to peacemaking. From having been military heroes, some of them, they led the way toward becoming heroes of peace.

And so are Americans veterans of WWII who long ago also changed into exemplars of peace and reconciliation. They too deserve widespread appreciation for having accepted former enemies as fellow citizens of the world and even friends.

Richard Griffin

Bobby Kennedy

On the morning of June 7, 1968, I heard the shocking news. For the third time in the same decade, a national leader had been shot and killed. Only two months previously, Martin Luther King had been assassinated; that killing had come but five years after the shooting of the president, John F. Kennedy.

To me it came as a blow to discover that Bobby Kennedy was the victim this time, felled in the basement of a Los Angeles hotel by a gunman who had an odd, repetitious name. The murder of this 42-year-old leader struck me, and everyone else I knew, as a blow not only against us but against the nation itself.

I remember feeling a vivid sense of dislocation, a deep uneasiness about the future of our country. American society seemed to be coming apart, rent by violence and unsure of its destiny. Never before had I experienced such widely shared feelings of disorientation.

To me, by the late 1960s, Robert Kennedy carried the hope of bringing the Vietnam War to an end and, at home, furthering the struggle for justice and peace, on behalf of minority citizens. His evident zeal for such values made me root for the success of his presidential campaign that had just scored an impressive victory in the California Democratic primary.

All of this public and private history came rushing back recently when I heard a talk by Evan Thomas, the author of a new book rather prosaically entitled “Robert Kennedy: His Life.” Thomas, an editor at Newsweek,  began by saying that anyone who writes about RFK must deal with two myths: the “good Bobby” and the “bad Bobby.” About these myths Thomas said, “Both are true, often at the same time.”

Bobby was a very different type from his brother Jack, the author emphasized. He had a strong streak of Puritanism in him and he was “a striver, a fighter, a digger.” In the Kennedy family, Bobby ranked far below the golden trio of Joe, Kathleen, and Jack. Even by the time  Jack became president, the two brothers were not close friends: only once during this period did Jack come to visit at Hickory Hill, Bobby’s home. Only after the Cuban Missile Crisis did a strong bond develop between them.

RFK felt crushed by Jack’s death, especially because he suspected that he had caused it by antagonizing the Mob and Castro. Never did he believe the findings of the Warren Commission that a single gunman acting on his own had done the horrible deed.

He also experienced a crisis in his faith: how could God allow this to happen? The search for answers drove him to read the classical Greek philosophers and dramatists and he became fascinated with the notion of  “hubris,” the pride that drives human beings to often fatal achievement.

An important point in RFK’s career came when he visited South Africa in 1966. At that time, it was dangerous for a foreign politician to go there but Bobby ignored the danger and gave hope to the oppressed black people of that country. They surged around him as he stood on top of cars to speak. Thomas quotes Margaret Marshall, then a white lawyer in South Africa,  now Chief Justice of  Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court: “He reminded me that we were not alone; he put us back into the great sweep of history.”

Evan Thomas admits to admiring Bobby. In reviewing his life, the author was most surprised by RFK’s courage. He was driven, his hands shook, he was often afraid but nonetheless he dared face the worst. Many advisors told him not to run for president, partly because of the danger of getting shot, but he was a fatalist about that peril.

Though I never met the man, I do remember seeing him play football for Harvard. Noting how small he was, I saw his courage then, in putting on a uniform and competing against players much bigger and stronger.

Other reasons for the author’s admiration are RFK’s achievements. During the thirteen fateful days of  the Cuban missile crisis, Bobby had a major influence on his brother’s decisions. “His initial impulses were terrible, he wanted to stage a provocation,” Thomas said, “but then he best captured a balanced response.” That meant keeping the pressure on the Soviets but giving them the chance to back out.

The other area of RFK’s accomplishment was the civil rights struggle. According to the author, for RFK to oppose segregation “took political guts” because the south was the backbone of the Democratic party.

Such achievements serve to keep alive the might-have-beens that many Americans of my age still fantasize about. If he had been spared deadly violence himself, could RFK have led the nation toward a resolution of the ugly mess in Vietnam a lot sooner than his successor leaders did? Could he have brought his idealism and spiritual vision to bear on our society to the benefit of all?

Richard Griffin

Athanasius

This story comes from the Desert Fathers, ascetics of the first centuries of the Christian Church. As retold by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham in their 1992 book, “The Spirituality of Imperfection,” it goes like this:

Abbot Athanasius had a book of very fine parchment which was worth twenty shekels. It contained both the Old and New Testaments in full and Athanasius read from it daily as he meditated.

Once a certain monk came to visit him and, seeing the book, made off with it. The next day, when Athanasius went to his Scripture reading and found that it was missing, he knew at once that the monk had taken it. Yet he did not send after him, for fear that he might add the sin of perjury to that of theft.

Now the monk went into the city to sell the book. He wanted eighteen shekels for it. The buyer said, “Give me the book so that I may find out if it is worth that much money.”

With that, he took the book to the holy Athanasius and said, “Father, take a look at this and tell me if you think it is worth as much as eighteen shekels.” Athanasius said, “Yes, it is a fine book. And at eighteen shekels it is a bargain.”

So the buyer went back to the monk and said, “Here is your money. I showed the book to Father Athanasius and he said it was worth eighteen shekels.”

The monk was stunned. “Was that all he said? Did he say nothing else?”

“No, he did not say a word more than that.”

“Well, I have changed my mind and don’t want to sell the book after all.”

Then he want back to Athanasius and begged him with many tears to take the book back, but Athanasius said gently, “No, brother, keep it. It is my present to you.”

But the monk said, “If you do not take it back, I shall have no peace.”

After that, the monk dwelt with Athanasius for the rest of his life.

This story has all the charm of a narrative set in a simpler time than our own and in a setting very different from that in which we live. Yet, it carries basic spiritual values that can apply to people who live in modern society.

Athanasius is a great-souled person who has advanced to an enlightenment that allows him to love other people more than his own possessions, no matter how precious. Even though his Bible provides Athanasius with daily reading that nourishes his spiritual life, this holy man shows himself willing to part with it for the welfare of another person.

Athanasius refuses to send after the monk who stole his Bible because he does not want to worsen the monk’s spiritual condition. Putting the monk in a position in which he would almost surely tell a lie would make him commit a second sin. So, at some cost to himself,  the holy father refuses to endanger the monk’s soul.

Even when the potential buyer of the book comes to him for an appraisal of its worth, Athanasius does not reveal that it is stolen property. Similarly when the monk comes to him, stricken in heart and repentant, Athanasius does not demand the return of his Bible.

In a world where people kill other human beings in order to take their jewelry or clothing or a few dollars, Athanasius’ attitude toward material possessions remains a model. The spiritual traditions of the world call his stance toward things “detachment.” He will not allow his possessions to get the better of him but remains willing to give them up for a greater good.

The beauty of Athanasius’ state of soul is that he goes beyond detachment to something greater. His not being attached to his possessions frees him to be compassionate toward his fellow human beings, even when they have offended him. He has the spiritual freedom to love other people and put their interests before his own.

In being compassionate and loving, this spiritual father shows the power of a great-souled person. That is why the monk returns to him and decides to remain there for the rest of his life. The way Athanasius lives is spiritually infectious and attracts others to him because they see in his life a compelling spiritual ideal.

Richard Griffin