World Enough and Time

This month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of my return to the world. In Feb-ruary 1975, I signed papers by which the pope released me from the priesthood and, at the same time, the Jesuit order allowed me to depart from its ranks. During that month I began living on my own the way I had never done before.

This double departure brought to an end an ecclesiastical career that had also lasted twenty-five years. My Jesuit years featured many experiences still precious to me: the euphoria of discovering a deeper spiritual life in the novitiate; teaching in Jesuit schools and in adult education settings; living in European countries; and, most of all, ordination to the priesthood and the ministry that flowed from it.

On occasion, people still ask me why I left. When they do, I usually give them the short answer – “I changed.” A more satisfying answer takes several hours of conversation or hundreds of pages of memoir. Just tracing the changes in me takes a long time; when you add the startling changes that took place in church and society during my quarter of a century among the Jesuits, the answer becomes much more complicated.

The leaving itself took place in an atmosphere of mutual respect and affection be-tween Jesuit officials and me. I then felt greater respect for the Jesuit society than I ever had before.

My ties to former colleagues remain strong and I count many members of the clergy as good friends. I feel fortunate that the church had changed enough that my de-parture could happen without the animosity and secretiveness of previous practice.

Despite the satisfactions and joys of my first career, I have never regretted leav-ing. Returning to the world has brought me great blessings. Among them, marriage and fatherhood rank highest, but the opportunity to experience life from new angles has con-tinued to feed my soul. Ordinary experiences that have palled by now for some of my college classmates have remained fresh for me, starting late in life as I did. Just being a householder, for instance, is something that I still enjoy.

To have been given world enough and time for multiple careers and a variety of experiences as a lay person gratifies me greatly. That’s why I’m celebrating in my heart this month’s anniversary.

There does remain one catch, however. Despite serious efforts, I have not been able to escape ministry entirely. The Hound of Heaven, it seems, has not yet done chasing me. Last winter in Florida, I returned to the pulpit after a twenty-four year lapse, to preach about the spirituality of aging, an exercise that I am repeating several times this winter.

Still, I welcome the identity of layperson. This vantage point of not being an offi-cial spokesman has given me a freedom to “experiment with truth,” as Gandhi put it, and to take my place as an ordinary member of society. The mystery that characterized my early career has not disappeared, fortunately. But the mystique has, and I feel freer to ex-plore the world anew.

Aging gives a perspective that increasingly seems precious to me. The accumula-tion of years enables me now to see patterns in my life that previously remained obscure. I can discern a providence at work that has guided me toward fulfillments that I had never expected to experience.

Tentatively at least, I have been enabled to answer for myself various questions. One such question that used to trouble me goes this way:  “Was my entering the Jesuit ranks a mistake, one that I should have escaped from much sooner?

This issue now seems to me artificial, one that does not require an answer. That was simply what I did with my life;  this course of action helped make me who I am. My entering was a good, though mixed, thing; so was my leaving.

For me, it is important to cultivate both continuity and discontinuity in life. That’s why, when celebrating my return to the world, I cherish many experiences from the time when I was living outside the world.

But I also place high value on my breaking with the disciplines of my first career. Doing things that I had never done before, starting in middle age, was welcome to me and I am glad that my life course broke into two parts.

Two peak experiences, one from each half, stand out in memory for their iconic character. The first was my ordination to the priesthood in June of 1962. When Cardinal Cushing laid hands on me, I felt ecstatic with a joy that stayed with me for weeks.

Similarly, when I stood nearby at the birth of my daughter in January 1980, I felt a joy that swept over me along with a mix of other emotions so intense as to bring tears to my eyes.

Both events remain vitally important to me. They help define a life lived in two different spheres of being.

Richard Griffin

Illusion and Reality

Last winter, on a visit to Orlando, I traveled by van to a professional meeting at Disneyworld. On the way I admired the brilliant night sky that featured a full, white moon surrounded by bright stars. All of a sudden, however, I was struck by doubt forcing me to turn toward a colleague with a pressing question – “Is it real?”

This question frequently arises for me in Florida. I feel wary about the tricks of the Disney people and their collaborators. They know how to put moons and stars up into the sky and make them look like the real thing.

On my latest foray into Florida last week, I experienced the same blurring between reality and illusion. This time the site was a town called Lady Lake, some sixty miles northwest of Orlando. The place features a giant retirement community now numbering about nineteen thousand people, considerably larger than the surrounding towns. It is called “The Villages” and encompasses half a dozen or so enclaves in the form of gated communities.

The Villages’ Town Square consists of stores, restaurants, theaters, and other establishments, all made to look much older than they actually are. These buildings wear signs identifying the dates when they were supposedly built. The dates, however, turn out not to be real but rather to be invented so as to make everything seem of another era.

The most prominent building is a church, not built by any religious group, but rather by the developers of the Villages. It looms up tall and serves as the focal point of the surrounding area. In passing, the visitor notices “ruins” – low walls that purport to date from the time of the Spanish settlements. These, too, it turns out, cannot be taken seriously except as artifacts playing their part in the ensemble.

Village residents also make use of paper bills that look like the real thing except that they carry pictures of Mr. Schwartz, the patriarch who founded the Villages, on the twenty and his son on the ten. Everybody calls this “funny money” but it can be used as cash for purchases.

The powerful Schwartz family that developed  the Villages plans to extend them across what are now neighboring fields. They will build many more houses and villas for the crowd of future retired people expected to pour into central Florida.

As must show in these words, I have trouble with the concept behind all of this illusion. Out of sympathy with the developers, I like to take my reality straight, without the sleight of hand that so much of Florida features. Please allow me to live with things as they are, rather than in a reality that has been engineered out of shape.

What I did find real, however, are the people who live in this retirement haven – at least those who come to St. Timothy’s Church where I had the pleasure to giving talks on aging and spirituality. The men and women who take part in the life of that church turned out to be vital and stimulating. My discussions with them renewed my hope for the future of our country, where aging will help shape the coming decades.

St. Timothy’s parish has enrolled an astonishing six hundred people as volunteers in some fifty ministries. They visit the sick, feed the hungry, bring holy communion to shut-ins, and work on social issues. As the woman who serves as a professional coordinator of the volunteers told me, “People here are very giving, they’ll do anything for anyone.”

Sitting down for an hour and a half with a group of six of these people, I discovered a lively sense of their group resources. As Milton, a retired marketing manager, says: “The one thing I love is there is someone here who has been there and done that, anything  you want to talk about from jet engines to the stock market to putting in telephone wires. The amount of knowledge is staggering.”

So, I would add, is a spiritual resource – the will to serve. These volunteers identify strongly with their role as church ministers. They think of themselves as on the edge of a new church, one in which the ordained priest feels happy to acknowledge the lay priesthood of members. These people are unanimous in crediting their pastor for recognizing their role, as not simply supplementary, but as at the heart of what it means to be a church member.

And the volunteers feel rewarded in this ministry. “There is always someone to pat you on the back and say you did a good job,” enthuses one woman among them. Another says, “How much more I gain from this experience than I ever give!”

So in a land where illusion plays a large role, it is gratifying to find so many people for whom the reality of service to their fellow human beings looms so large.

Richard Griffin

Does Spirituality Need Religion?

“Janet Taylor” is an admirable person who wants to become what she calls “a self-actualized human being.” By that term she means a person who takes spirituality seriously and relies on herself to achieve growth in spirit. The religious tradition of her upbringing was vague and inadequate and in the effort to find herself, during her years in college, she read widely and experimented with various spiritual disciplines

Janet’s fictitious name stands for a real person described in a new book “Finding Your Religion”  by Rev. Scotty McLennan, Tufts University chaplain. He owes some of his reputation to the comic strip “Doonesbury” drawn by Scotty McLennan’s college roomate, Gary Trudeau.

The Doonesbury character, Rev. Scott Sloan, gently parodies the real-life minister. As Rev. McLennan humorously complains, “Gary’s helped me become a living joke.”

Recently, at Harvard Divinity School, McLennan was joined by three others in a panel discussion centered on his new book.  The discussion focused on the topic “Why Spirituality Needs Religion,” a view that the author presents strongly in the book.

With some variations, the theologian Harvey Cox also agreed with this position. Writer James Carroll, however, first argued that spirituality does not in fact need religion before tempering this view with reasons for mutual support between the two.

Rev. McLennan stressed three reasons for the interdependence of the spirituality and religion. First, in the spiritual quest, everyone needs travelling companions. The search for truth is so difficult that you require the support of other people.

Secondly, you also need discipline, and that comes from the religious traditions of the world. Without discipline, you tend to go from one thing to another, the way “Janet Taylor” has done.

And thirdly, commitment to a social ideal also requires the support of a religious community. McLennan cited Martin Luther King, Ghandi, the Dalai Lama, and asked how far they could have got without that support. Yes, we must always work against “the dark side of religion,” he conceded, but religion has always been the breeding ground of great-souled leaders.

Then Rev. McLennan also argued that faith is not something that comes to a per-son neatly packaged, once and for all. Rather it develops through various stages, from childish dependence through independence until one arrives at the interdependence of maturity. The support of religion is needed at each stage.

Religion is also needed to support prophets such as the leaders mentioned earlier. They must rely on the resources supplied by religion, such as sacred texts, methods of prayer, and communal worship. Without these, the prophet would be left entirely on his or her own and become ineffective.

Novelist, columnist and memoirist James Carroll has been much influenced, he said, by the experience of his children who show little interest in organized religion but are clearly spiritual people. Though he himself says “I regard my faith as a Christian as the greatest gift of my life,” he recognizes that you don’t need religion to beloved by God. Nor do you need it to love your neighbor or to work for justice.

This being said, however, Mr. Carroll then acknowledges the advantages of religion. It gives us a language that is important in the search for God. Beyond that, it provides a culture for that same search. And it offers access to a community of faith that transcends place and time. It also gives us a way to think about sin, he added.

In support of the main position, Harvey Cox suggested the importance of what he called “the landing points” along the route of spiritual development. The points are supplied by religion. He also argued that “a group of individuals are not going to accomplish much in the world.” Rather, you need a community of faith to support efforts to change the world toward greater justice and peace.

So, on balance, the conviction that spirituality needs religion emerged as the clear winner. “Janet Taylor”  would be well advised, therefore, to avail herself of the riches of religious tradition as she makes her way toward a more satisfying spiritual life. At least, this would be the prevailing counsel of Rev. McLennon and his supporters.

Richard Griffin

Advocating for Paul

My long-time dear friend, (let’s call him Paul), has endured several weeks of life-threatening crises. Major surgery three times, continuing infection, return trips to the intensive care unit, and other horrors have entangled him in a seemingly unending round of severe health troubles. Along with his many other friends, I have felt much grief and foreboding at what Paul has had to suffer.

This suffering began weeks before he entered the hospital. While undergoing a series of tests to determine the cause of weight loss, lack of appetite, and undefined pain, he continued to decline alarmingly.

What shocked us friends was the discovery that Paul’s primary care physician had not actually seen him for at least a month. Instead, during this period Paul was seen by his doctor’s physician’s assistant and by the physicians who supervised his tests, but never his main doctor.

It still seems almost incredible that a doctor with overall responsibility would neglect to take an action probably taught on the first day he began medical school, namely: Look At Your Patient and See How He Appears!

Admittedly, Paul’s illness would have been difficult to diagnose under any conditions. But friends who saw him recognized immediately how badly he was hurting. That he was allowed to decline so alarmingly for weeks without intervention still shocks those of us familiar with this history.

In reflecting on the experience, Paul draws this conclusion: “The medical system is geared to do things in a certain way,  – for example giving tests. If you seem to be getting sicker, you have to do something yourself, even if the medical staff says you’re all right.”

From my friend’s experience and his analysis of it, I have taken at least  two lessons to heart.

First, if we can, we must all advocate for our own health care. We cannot risk waiting on initiatives from professionals. To a certain degree, we must push our health care providers to take care of us. Otherwise we run the risk of neglect that can lead to serious harm.

This holds especially true for us elders. Unless we are rich and famous, we can easily find ourselves deprived of top-flight care or, for that matter, adequate care. In all too many situations, if we do not advocate for ourselves, health care professionals will not give us the attention that we need.

There is at least one large problem with this advice, however. Many people cannot find in themselves this kind of zeal for demanding their rights. Especially when they do not feel well, they may be unable to summon up the necessary bravado. That was my friend Paul’s situation.

My second lesson, therefore, follows. If we can do so, we should find someone to act as our advocate.  It can make a decisive difference for seriously ill people to have a relative or friend  to help push for  needed medical attention.

In Paul’s crisis, several of his long-time friends got together and came to the consensus that he should be hospitalized immediately. We then asked one of our number, a physician himself, to take the initiative and press for Paul to be admitted.

That, in fact, happened and none too soon. It was quickly determined that Paul needed immediate surgery. Further delay might have led to his death.

After his admission to the hospital, though he then got excellent care, Paul continued to need someone to advocate for his needs. Fortunately, at that point he received constant support from one of his brothers who traveled from another state and remained with Paul every day for weeks. Not only did this brother help to sustain Paul’s morale during this ordeal, but he also proved an important advocate with the medical staff.

This saga of my friend Paul dramatizes the need for family members and friends to take initiative on behalf of others. Many do, in fact, but more of us either fail to recognize the need to take action or let obstacles deter us.

It can be touchy to come forward when we judge a friend or family member is ail-ing. We may run the risk of indignant rejection. Persistence may be required if we are seriously committed to helping.  And much tact may be a needed to prove ourselves advocates worthy of the sick person’s trust.

I still think, however, that friends and family can be indispensable when one is hurting. I take satisfaction from knowing that my friend Paul found such people in time of crisis who may have saved his life. Everyone ought to have family and friends like this.

To become good healers, physicians depend upon our sharing with them our feelings about ourselves and our own appraisal of what’s wrong. In many instances they also need to hear from family members and friends who know the patient well.

Far from resenting such advocacy as interference, wise physicians will know how to respond to the benefit of the person who is sick and needs healing.

Richard Griffin

A Curer and a Healer As Well

Jerome Groopman tells of two experiences that helped shape him into the kind of doctor he is. The first was the sudden death of his father by heart attack some twenty-five years ago, when Jerry was still a medical student. On that occasion the attending physician told him “Well it’s tough, kid,” a response that he felt entirely inadequate.

About this disheartening event, Dr. Groopman writes “This experience explains in part my powerful commitment to care for patients and their loved ones in a way that my father and my family were not cared for – with genuine compassion and scientific excellence.”

This quotation comes from his fine book, “The Measure of Our Days: A Spiritual Exploration of Illness.” He also talked about his father’s death in a notable television program, “The Healer” shown this past December as part of Dateline NBC. I found this documentary portrait of Dr. Groopman inspiring as he treated two of his patients who had diseases that turned out to be fatal.

The first, Gene Brown, a 39-year-old man with AIDS, is worn down after a thirteen-year struggle with the disease. He now has “the feeling that things are spinning out of control.” At this point Dr. Groopman begins treating him with a new experimental drug. The drug, however, ultimately does not work and Gene decides to call off further treatment.

However, his physician continues to care for him with particular concern for his spiritual well-being. Gene and he have an affectionate relationship, marked by mutual respect and love. At their last meeting, as they hug one another, Gene tells him, “Jerry, I love you” and Jerry replies in kind.

When the television interviewer asks Jerry Groopman if a time comes when he focuses more on the psychological and the spiritual, he says, “Yes, it’s in some ways much more difficult because it requires knowing the person and also knowing yourself and being able to open up to that person.”

The other patient, Elizabeth Sanderson, is a woman in her early sixties who suffers from breast cancer. She, too, goes through a series of ups and downs as various treatments work for a while and then fail to arrest the disease.

Throughout this agonizing cycle, Dr. Groopman  attends to her physical needs and the spiritual concerns of the patient and members of her family. As hopes for recovery fade, he nourishes for Elizabeth and others “a different kind of hope, a hope that their lives will end in a dignified and positive way.”

When I talked last week with Herbert Sanderson, Elizabeth’s bereaved husband, he welcomed my distinction between curing and healing. Speaking of Dr. Groopman, he said, “The healing that he does is the way his patients face death; that’s where it all comes together.”

The other major influence making Jerry Groopman the kind of man he is comes from the history of his family. Many members of his mother’s extended family died in the Holocaust. This agonizing legacy informs Jerry’s faith and spirituality. Referring to this legacy, he told me, “It enables me to be comfortable with people wrestling with doubt and uncertainty,” as so many of his patients must in facing their mortality.

Dr. Groopman also told me of his efforts “to find the sacred core in every-one.” When he succeeds at this, he says, “I’ve seen the soul revealed,” as it was with both Gene Brown and Elizabeth Sanderson. Both of them died in peace. Gene said “I’m a fulfilled man, I’ll tell you.” Elizabeth, surrounded by family members, said “I’m not afraid, I’m more overwhelmed with the goodness of God.”

At the end of the NBC documentary, viewers see Jerry Groopman as he takes part in a prayer service in his synagogue. He is shown reading from the Kaddish, the Jewish prayers for the dead. When you consider his work with dying people and his family’s history, this rite takes on poignant significance.

Asked what was going through his mind while praying, Jerry Groopman replies: “I was thinking what the lives of the people I cared for still mean to me.”

Expanding this thought, he adds: “They live in my heart and my memory. They have shaped parts of my life in very substantial ways and I express genuine and profound gratitude to them through that prayer.”

Richard Griffin

A Healer At Work

What strikes me most about Jerry Groopman is the way he loves his patients. Not only that but he shows that love in word and gesture. “You are a good hugger,” says Gene Brown, a forty-year-old AIDS patient shown in an extraordinary program in the series “Dateline NBC.”

This program, entitled “The Healer,” was televised this past December. I regard it as an altogether extraordinary service to the public at large, and to people who face illness in particular. Reviewing it on videotape has further inspired me with admiration for the two patients and the doctor who served them so well.

Dr. Jerome Groopman, whom this program highlights, serves as Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess. He has become widely known through his articles in the New Yorker and other periodicals. His two books, The Measure of Our Days and the forthcoming Second Opinions will enhance his reputation further.

In the first of these books he wrote about a highly successful middle-aged venture capitalist who realized at the end of his life that he had invested in the wrong things – money instead of family and what really counts. His patient’s  spiritual situation confronted Dr.Groopman with a difficult challenge, in his own words “to find some way to give him comfort and to allow him, at the end of his life, to find meaning and to pass meaning on to his family.”

Beyond Dr. Groopman’s impressive scientific credentials, his personal qualities make him an admired healer, something that emerges strongly in the television documentary. Here he brings the latest medical knowledge and techniques to help Gene Brown, mentioned above, and Elizabeth Sanderson, a deeply religious 64-year-old woman, who has breast cancer.

Dr. Groopman’s continued efforts to cure the two people shapes an adventure story in itself. Ups and agonizing downs characterize the struggle that these patients and their doctor wage against their diseases. Some reports the two people get from their doctor encourage them; inevitably, it seems, these upbeat indications are all too soon followed by the dashing of hopes for a cure.

Eventually, they both die, Gene at home after having decided to forego further medical procedures, Elizabeth in the hospital surrounded by family members. Both die at peace, with Gene saying “I’m a fulfilled man, I’ll tell you,” and Elizabeth saying “I’m not afraid, I’m more overwhelmed with the goodness of God.”

So, even though they were not cured, they were healed and could die without regret. That way of dying witnesses to their strength of soul and also to the rare ability of their doctor, Jerry Groopman, to enter into their experience with deep understanding and courageous empathy.

His patients often call him “Jerry” in recognition of the personal relation-ship he develops with them and they with him. This tall, physically impressive middle-aged physician with the sympathetic face, risks much himself as he listens to the hopes and fears of his patients.

The way he clasps their hands with his own, puts his arm around their shoulders, pats Gene’s knee and laughs at moments of humor – all reveal Jerry as full of human feeling. At the same time, he tells them openly where the treatment stands and what they can reasonably hope from it.

The last time he sees Gene, they embrace upon parting. Gene tells him, “I love you, Jerry” to which he replies “and you.”

How did Jerry Groopman get this way? In the video he recalls experiencing his father’s death. He and his mother were at the beside and, when his father died, all the attending physician could say was, “Well, it’s tough, kid.” About this response Jerry now says, “I would never imagine caring for patients and their families in any way like this.”

In an interview, I asked the same question of Rev. Herbert Sanderson, the husband of Elizabeth. “My suspicion is that Dr. Groopman’s patients have made him what he is,” he answered.

The interviewer in the documentary asks him if there comes a point when he focuses more on the psychological and the spiritual element in the patient. “Yes,” Dr. Groopman responds, “and it’s in some ways much more difficult because it requires knowing the person and also knowing yourself and being able to open myself up to that person.”

He seems to draw vital strength and inspiration from his own Jewish faith. The last part of the program shows Jerry Groopman in his synagogue for a worship service. The camera focuses on him lighting a candle and reciting the Kaddish in memory of the dead.

Asked what he was thinking about at this point, he answers: “I was thinking what the lives of the people I cared for still mean to me. They live in my heart and my memory.”

He adds, “They have shaped parts of my life in very substantial ways. And I express genuine and profound gratitude to them through that prayer.”

Richard Griffin

Prayer Group

Flash back to a brilliant November day: Five older people sat in a room filled with autumn light that streamed in from the garden. We had prayed silently together for half an hour, until one of us rang a bell marking the end of this meditation. Then we spoke about the experience we had shared.

Hamilton, an African-American aged 76, said he had felt “peace flowing by.” (I have given the real people described here other names to protect their privacy.) Lucy, hostess for the group, spoke of shared spiritual travel: “We’re on a journey toward surrender,” she said with quiet conviction. Of her husband, Ned, she observed, “He’s ahead of us, but we’re all going there.”

Ned has undergone serious loss of memory and takes part each week in group support sessions with others in his situation. He continues to experience the multiple effects of disorientation. Just that day he had lost his eyeglasses and had felt distress until he could find them again. “How difficult it is to lose things,” he remarked, “especially glasses.”

For myself, I feel uplifted by Ned’s courage. He knows what is happening to him as his memory falters but he moves ahead. Identifying with his struggle, his wife offers him loving support. So do the rest of us prayer group members in whatever ways we can – in silence and by word and gesture.

Ned’s ordeal gives an edge to our group’s spiritual experience. Knowing the likely outcome of his illness, we grieve for the confusion imposed on him in his everyday life. At the same time we admire, perhaps even envy, his fortitude and see it as a precious spiritual gift. The many adult years he has spent in the spiritual search have clearly prepared him for this time of trial.

Watching our friend Ned, we learn to face our own future with all its possibilities for something just as hard to bear. I look upon this prospect with foreboding but also, in faith, see it as freeing the human heart for possession by God in a life that continues forever.

Lucy brought our prayer session to an appropriate end, one that teased our imaginations and stirred our spiritual aspirations. She quoted a thirteenth century Persian poet named Rumi: “Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom / How do they learn it? / They fall, and falling / They’re given wings.”

This scene, marked by spiritual striving against a backdrop of trial and suffering, inspires me with new appreciation of meditation and its benefits for soul and body. Like the others, I come away from the experience refreshed and better prepared for the difficulties of daily life.

Flash forward to another meditation just this week. On this occasion the sky outside threatens to rain; partway through, the drops start to fall gently and I hear them in my silent prayer,

When afterward we talk about the experience of prayer, Hamilton tells how he keeps his hands open because he feels a spiritual energy that he wants to share with the rest of us. His feeling for us all is evident and moves me to admiration of this loving man.

He shares with us a poem that was used in his church on Sunday. It was written by Howard Thurman who, at Boston University, was Martin Luther King’s teacher and mentor.

“When the song of angels is stilled, / When the star in the sky is gone, / When the kings and princes are home, / When the shepherds are back with their flock / The work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among the brothers, to make music in the heart.”

We all receive this as an inspiration for our prayer in this beginning of the post-Christmas season. Its agenda intimidates the realist in us, but we take heart from the power of the spirit.

When Lucy gently rings the bell in signal that our allotted time for prayer is over, she lights small candles for us to take home. The flame, she explains, derives from a candle lit by the Dalai Lama in the name of peace.

Richard Griffin