Encounters with three people last week have stirred in me reflections about real-life spiritual issues. They all share a common drive for intellectual achievement that has carried them to positions of eminence in their chosen fields. But each of the men now finds himself facing a turning point in his life that is la-den with challenges and, perhaps, opportunities.

Two of the men I talked with have been friends or colleagues of mine for several years; the third I have known for much longer. And yet, despite much per-sonal contact, it is not easy to write about them because the spiritual depths of a person always remain so mysterious and inaccessible.

Much of what you find here therefore is guesswork, rather than precise knowledge. After all, if we can arrive at knowledge of ourselves only with great difficulty, how can we know other persons with confidence? Who can ever read the inmost depths of a fellow human being, with the secret desires and hopes that the human heart may cherish?

The first man has recently returned to work after a year’s leave of absence. He formerly was the equivalent of chief operating officer of his organization but was forced to resign that position. The president of the agency acted to remove him because the official had been discovered downloading dubious images on a computer that belonged, not to him, but to the organization. Much discussion fol-lowed upon the president’s action, with commentators split about whether it was justified or, perhaps, overly harsh.

In returning to work, this man has presumably had to swallow his pride and win back his standing in the community where he is still employed. It must be difficult for him to face his colleagues again, this time from a position of reduced power and carrying the humiliation of having been in effect fired.

The spiritual challenge facing this middle-aged man must be to accept what has happened and to turn his new status to advantage. Perhaps he has learned greater humility and self-knowledge; he may have become more open to the presence of grace. As a person of faith, he may believe that good may come out of highly undesirable situations; he may see in what has happened a call to greater devotion to God and community.

The second gentleman has passed his ninetieth birthday and is in obvious physical decline. Visiting him in his stately old urban residence, another friend and I talked with this retired professor about his delicate health and about the many friends we hold in common. The young woman who serves as his caretaker confirmed our view that, overall, he was doing better than previously.  

At one point, my companion said to the person we were visiting: “You are the greatest philosopher in the world,” a compliment not without credibility. After pondering this statement with some degree of embarrassment, the old philosopher replied, “Maybe that will help me in my gloomy moments.”

The philosopher does not believe in God, not does he seem to attach much reality to the spiritual life. Over the course of many conversations with him, I have never detected in him an interest in any kind of spirituality unless it be intellectual activity. The philosophy for which he is widely recognized is closer to language analysis and logic than to metaphysics.

The third man is another person for whom reputation looms large. In the course of an extended conversation last week, he made two statements that stick in my memory: “I am very important” and “I am world famous.” Though he was talking with me, an old friend, he oriented much of the conversation around this theme of his own self-importance.

Can this friend now experience peace of soul or any real happiness? His achievements are certainly solid but he seems dissatisfied unless everyone recognizes in him a preeminence that he apparently craves. And what about the future, what will come when he retires and has to face decline?

Again, no one can say with confidence what the interior life of these three men is like; only God can do that. Perhaps the best approach is to trust the resourcefulness of their secret hearts and the incalculable power of grace.

Richard Griffin

Almost one-half of Americans under age thirty (46%) believe that “the best religion would be one that borrowed from all religions.” By contrast, only about one-third of people over seventy (31%) think so.

These figures emerge from a new survey of Americans’ attitudes about spirituality sponsored by the New York Times. The Times reported these figures in its Sunday magazine of May 7th.

Given attitudes distrustful of institutions among younger people, their opting for a religion made up of borrowings from all does not come as a great surprise. In fact, many people of all ages seem already to have crossed boundary lines and have adopted practices from religious traditions not their own.

In doing so, some Christians, for example, may have been inspired by spiritual leaders such as the Catholic monk Thomas Merton who journeyed to Asia in order to learn more for his spiritual life from Buddhist monks.

This new openness to different practices and beliefs different from the ones familiar from childhood must be judged admirable. Clearly, it can enrich the lives of individuals and communities of spiritual seekers. It might even promote prospects for peace among nations, at least if you believe that spirituality can influence world politics.

However, this approach runs the risk of watering down religion, of making it a grab-bag of beliefs and practices. Forming a deeply held religion cannot be the same as walking down a cafeteria line and choosing the foods that most make your taste buds salivate.

Borrowing from religions in this way could easily leave a person spiritually superficial. Instead of plumbing the depths of any one heritage, seekers of truth might end up forever roaming about in the world of religious thought and practice without coming to grips with the full richness of any single tradition.

Most masters of the spiritual life, even those sympathetic to a radical openness to the traditions of others, urge us to concentrate on one. The Muslim theologian Seyyed Hossein Nasr, for instance, says: “To cling to one’s own religion – this is the normal situation of humanity.” This he says while at the same time believing that “all religions are true.”

Of course, it would be a mistake to exclude the possibility of conversion from one faith to another. This experience usually results from a long spiritual search and often encourages us to keep searching even more ardently.

This past Easter I took part in celebrating the baptism of a dear friend, Madeline, as she became a Christian. She did so, after much prayer and some agonizing experiences of death among people closest to her. Through a long heal-ing process she discovered Jesus as her main source of spiritual enlightenment.

Her decision to be baptized did not, however, make her think that she was giving up her own Jewish heritage. Rather she felt herself to be bringing to her baptism all that she had learned growing up Jewish.

At the same time, in an intriguing twist, one of her daughters who was brought up Christian was embracing the Jewish faith. Friends and family members joined together in wishing for both mother and daughter inspiration and joy in their new-found faiths.

So, at the risk of appearing unsympathetic toward the majority of young people who favor a religion made up of borrowings, I choose a middle ground. Yes, I would say to youthful seekers, avail yourself of precious elements from traditions not your own. But do not believe that the “à la carte” approach to religion will satisfy your deepest desires.

I myself have profited much from other traditions. But my experience is that, while I come away from experience of other faiths with a broader vision, I feel strengthened in my own faith.

For many years I have felt free to incorporate into my religious practice prayer methods of the Asian religions and American Quakers, for instance, to my own spiritual profit. At the same time, I hold on to the meditation learned from teachers nurtured in my own tradition.

Of course, if you grown up without being gifted with a religious tradition at all, your situation is different and perhaps more complicated. You may then need to explore world religions for yourself. Even there, however, it makes more sense to plumb the depths of one religion rather than rely on mere borrowings.

Richard Griffin

Two weeks ago my brother-in-law Tom Keane received the Lavoisier Medal for Technical Achievement, the highest honor the DuPont company gives to its scientists and engineers. Close family members were invited by the company to Wilmington, Delaware for several days where we celebrated the recognition received by Tom and five other long-time fellow achievers.

Amid all the hoopla of a professional high-tech award ceremony before a large audience,  the six received medals from the CEO. The next day, in another ceremony, the company unveiled plaques engraved with the faces of the honorees. It seemed the private industry equivalent of adding their images to the side of Mount Rushmore.

Tom received all these honors with modesty. In his acceptance speech after being given the medal, he told the audience that what counted for him most was his family. And he acknowledged that he could not have accomplished anything, during his forty-six year career, without the collaboration of many colleagues.

Success like this comes to relatively few people. Most of us never achieve so much or receive recognition of this sort during long years of work. Instead, we may be  tempted  to envy the success of others. “Could I but achieve something worthy of wide recognition,” this subtle temptation suggests, “then that success would heal whatever is lacking in me.”

We live in a culture that is notoriously success-driven. People everywhere in America crave becoming wealthy and recognized. Nowadays dot-com millionaires are envied for having scored brilliant successes so quickly.

The myth of the self-made man still holds its grip on our society. “Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps” and other such clichés retain their power to influence our imaginations when we think of what success means.

Success in itself is something good. Whenever we manage to accomplish some-thing significant, our strong impulse is to feel good about it. If  others recognize what we have done and honor us for it, so much the better. An accomplished life, an honored life is much to be desired.

At the same time, success can be spiritually dangerous. It can close us off to what is most important in life and make us think of ourselves as self-sufficient. The person whose success has gone to his head has fallen victim to illusion and may have damaged his soul.

Of course, failure has its dangers as well. Repeated failing can make us lose heart. It can cause us to give up confidence that anyone, human or divine, really cares about us. Ultimately, it can drive us toward despair.

Let me suggest here an approach to success that can satisfy both our natural craving for achievement/personal recognition and the deeper demands of the spirit.    

Perhaps the answer is to be prepared to accept as gift whatever success may come our way. After all, there is no such thing as the self-made person, man or woman. We all get somewhere only through God-given talents and by the help of countless other people. Seeing success from this angle can enrich our spiritual life.

Besides recognizing success as a gift we also need to redefine it. Seen spiritually, success cannot be identified only with material achievement or reputation or power, but must include fidelity and self-knowledge and the ability to love. Devoted spouses, parents who truly cherish their children, and people of spirit who reverence all life and show compassion for other human beings – all these people must be recognized as truly successful.

Public television this week featured the life of Joe DiMaggio, the storied Yankee center fielder. According to the program, DiMaggio, when off the baseball field, was a painful failure as a husband, a father, and a human being. He seems never to have had the spiritual values necessary for success in these roles. On the diamond, he set a consecutive game hitting streak that has lasted almost sixty years. But in real life, he failed miserably at roles infinitely more important than hitting.

I feel happy for my brother-in-law that he has achieved so much and has been accorded such honor. But I feel even happier that he has the spiritual vision not to be seduced by the sweet-smelling incense that has wafted his way. He has clearly shown him-self a man of spiritual values who knows what is truly important in life.

Richard Griffin

Seyyed Hossein Nasr may not be a household name in the United States but he has rightly been described as “one of the world’s leading Islamic thinkers.” Currently Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University, he brings to spiritual is-sues wide knowledge and profound insight. I had the privilege of hearing him lecture recently and came away with much to think about.

A native of Iran, this distinguished scholar came to the United States for advanced study at M.I.T. and Harvard receiving his doctorate from the latter. Before taking his present position, he was professor at the University of Tehran and founder of the Iranian Academy of Philosophy.

Warm and personal, Professor Nasr is a pleasure to talk with and his common touch belies the stereotype of the highly accomplished but distant academic. I valued the chance to listen to him and to ask him a question about the effect of secularization on Is-lam.

Taking as his theme the crossing of the frontiers that divide the religions of the world, the Muslim scholar calls such crossing “a journey in spiritual space more exciting than space travel.”

The relationship between human beings and nature looms large in every religion at its best. However, Professor Nasr feels that something has gone awry in the modern world, upsetting the healthy balance between us people and the world around us. One large reason for this imbalance is the havoc that secularism has worked on religion, especially Christianity.

For most modern Christians, the world has lost its sacred character leading us to abuse the beautiful creation that God has given us. The effort to understand the other religions of the world can help us to restore that sacredness of nature.

Dr. Nasr believes that “there is no possibility of peace among nations without peace among religions,” a fact that secularism denies. He regrets that UNESCO, the United Nations Economic, Scientific, and Cultural Organization based in Geneva, does not have religion as a defining category.

To appreciate a religion, ;you cannot study merely its history, as some scholars do. To focus exclusively on history  would be to ignore the qualities – changeless truth and transcendence – that make a religion what it is. Rather, you must enter into its truth and appreciate its vision of God.

This scholar holds that every religion is complete in itself. “Religion must en-compass all that we are,” he says, “or it is not religion.”  Also, every religion is true and those unfamiliar with traditions other than their own must often struggle if they wish to understand the way another religion works for its adherents.

In every religious tradition there are many people who stand opposed to crossing over the frontiers of religion. They fear that this spiritual travel will destroy their own faith. Professor Nasr, however, believes that in the modern world we have no choice, Either we try to understand the faith of others or our world falls into chaos and armed struggle.

But to cross over and understand, we must deny false absolutes. Only God is ab-solute. If you make anything else absolute, you make it impossible to cross over.

“You should not ask religions other than your own: ‘What is your concept of God?’” The question is too abstract and does not suggest the rich spiritual life and practice of each tradition.

Every religion offers salvation and, to do so, uses various rites. It is the inner meaning of these rites that can bring religions together.

In summary, Professor Nasr lists five positive consequences of crossing over:

1. Seeing our own religion in the light of another one brings us to know ourselves better.
2. We can remember things that have been largely forgotten in our own tradition, for example, the mystical tradition  in Christianity.
3. We can be motivated to reexamine secularism, the philosophy that denies the reality of religion.  In studying Islam, for example, Christians can recognize more clearly the negative impact of secularism on their own tradition.
4. We can develop a spiritual and theological understanding of the other faces of God that our own tradition may not have shown us.
5. We can find common ground in the determination to protect the world of nature.

Richard Griffin

“Does God have a future?” This is the question asked by the celebrated British theologian Karen Armstrong. “In my country, God is in trouble,” she says, by way of answering her own question. In England, only a reported six percent of the population still goes to church regularly. Church buildings are being converted to other uses and there is a widespread malaise with institutional religion.

However, she hastens to modify the meaning of this situation. “I am not troubled by the atheism in my country,” she explains. It is not really directed against God, but rather against “a particular idea of God.” Remember, she observes, Jews, Christians, and Muslims were all once regarded as atheists. The Europeans may need the moral equivalent of a “sorbet” to cleanse their palate of false theology before they can find the true God.

Karen Armstrong stopped in the Boston area recently on a nation-wide tour promoting her new book, The Battle for God. In a lecture to students and others at the Episcopal Divinity School, she laid out her views of the current struggle over religious issues. Author of several previous influential books, notably The History of God, Professor Arm-strong displays an amazingly wide knowledge of world religion and knows how to talk brilliantly about the subject.

In an interview with me, she described herself as a “freelance monotheist.” She now feels very critical of the Catholic Church which she formerly served as a nun. In fact, she confesses that she is currently “quite exhausted by religion” and feels the need of a break from it all. However, when asked about the need for a community of faith, she readily admits that the lack of such a community is “the weakness of my position.”

The crisis of modern belief, as Professor Armstrong sees it, arises from the conflict between mythos and logos, two Greek words that can be roughly translated as reli-gious imagination and hardheaded reason. The history of the West over the last 400 years should be seen as the triumph of logos. Science and technology have proven so spectacularly successful that thinkers anxious to preserve faith misguidedly let reason displace religious imagination altogether.

The result of this surrender to rationalism was that church doctrine came to be understood more as scientific statements rather than poetry. And what Gregory of Nyssa and other Fathers of the Church had taught was forgotten. They had insisted that doctrine can be understood only through prayer and contemplation.

Ultimately the first world war was to show the emptiness of the narrow scientific approach. Some thirty years after that catastrophic event, Auschwitz even more appall-ingly demonstrated what can happen when God is lost. In the face of such evil, human beings are defenceless against the threat of despair.

The answer to this situation, Professor Armstrong holds, is not to create a  new definition of God but rather to cultivate spirituality. That is the way to get beyond the selfish, grasping self. This scholar quotes approvingly what she understands religion to be saying at its best: “We are most fully ourselves when we give ourselves away.”

Theology, being like poetry, is always an attempt to express the inexpressible. We must enter the darkness that covers God, the cloud of unknowing in which the divine dwells. For entering, two approaches are necessary: first, prayer because it teaches us to express ourselves in an unselfish way.

Secondly, we must undertake the discipline of compassion, something that enables us to rise above ourselves. That means living the Golden Rule of loving others as ourselves, as Rabbi Hillel taught. Jesus also urges love for people who do not love us. And the poet Auden says: “Where equal affection cannot be /  Let the loving one be me.”

Our age has become weary of too many definitions and too much dogmatism. Prayer and contemplation can help us to overcome the limitations of our theology. We can become like the patriarch Abraham who entertained three strangers outside his tent at noontime in the desert, not knowing that one of them was his God. 

In practicing compassion toward those they did not know Abraham and his wife Sarah encountered the holy.  By receiving the unknown visitors and preparing a meal for them, they experienced something about the otherness of God and thus touched the great mystery.

Richard Griffin