Christmas in Wales.

How idyllic that sounds! A fabulous season spent in a land of enchantment.

That’s the way the poet Dylan Thomas described his native habitat in 1955 when he wrote “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.”
As one critic sees it, “Thomas recreates the nostalgic magic of a childhood Christmas when everything was brighter and better.”

As the poet recalled the time, “It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas.”

That weather helped create an aura of mystery for Thomas but perhaps he remembered it with advantages.

My own Christmas in Wales was not like that. No snow fell. I was no longer a child, and I remained far from sharing the imagination of a poet.

Yes, the beauty of the countryside impressed itself on me. From a hill on a clear day, I could look to the north and catch a glimpse of the Irish Sea. To the west, I was awed by Mt. Snowdon rising above the plains.
Nearby flowed the River Clwyd, and not far from the house where I stayed, sheep grazed peacefully. .

Another poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, had seen the same landscape long before, and had written: “Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales,/All the air things wear that build this world of Wales.”

Offsetting this beauty for me, however, were the discontents of absence. In a letter to my mother on December 24, 1963, I wrote (not too gracefully): “Adjustment to an uncongenial style of living, a good deal of confinement, all go to account for this finding life difficult.”

For a year, I lived in a castle-like house belonging to the English Jesuits near the town of St. Asaph. The place was isolated from population centers because, on their legally-allowed return to Britain in the 19th century after long years of exile, the Jesuits wanted to keep a low profile.

I found this isolation difficult to bear, and the lifestyle of my English colleagues did not always sit well with me. Christmas served to bring out some of these feelings.

My purpose for being there was to complete the final stage of my spiritual apprenticeship. This was an austere enterprise, involving none of the usual novelty and variety of travel abroad.

On many mornings, I would look out into a courtyard hoping that the Royal Mail truck would soon arrive with a letter for me. And, all that year, I did not learn a single word of the Welsh language.

The warmth and kindness of some of my colleagues could not make me forget home Christmases. I remember promising myself never to live in such isolation again.

During that Christmas season of 1963, I felt particularly bereft because of President Kennedy’s assassination a few weeks previously. In the days following the event, colleagues from around the world had rallied around us Americans, but it was still difficult to find any consolation for such a loss.

In a letter to my mother on December 15th, I had described my anguish. “This news rocked me for a few days,” I wrote, “and even now, I still feel bursts of sadness and regret sometimes.”

I added that she could not know “the affection people had for him over here.” We had been permitted (by way of exception) to watch television, and my companions grieved with me.

Perhaps the experience of being abroad explains why my most frequent dreams even now involve finding myself far from home with uncertain prospects of getting back.

These fantasies have value for me because they reveal thoughts and feelings otherwise suppressed. As the Swiss psychologist Jung says, “The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul.”

More than four decades after the experience of first being an ocean away from home, I look forward to being once again at home with family and friends in the warmth of Christmas.

Two realities temper my joyous feelings, however.

I feel continued anxiety about what has been happening to our country, our homeland. We are still at war; our political leadership is held in contempt; the planet itself is in peril.  It is difficult to be optimistic.

The second concern is related to the first. Even in our country, flowing with wealth, people without homes can be counted in the hundreds of thousands, if not more.

In Dafur, in Iraq, in Congo and elsewhere, millions wander in search of basic shelter. According to St. Luke, the child at the center of the Christmas celebration and his parents were homeless as well.

These sober thoughts, however, should not be allowed to take away the joy that many of us feel at Christmas. “Joy to the World” says the carol.

Seekers after light can, without scruple, open themselves to let this joy flow in and gladly place a greater value on their own lives and on those whom they love.

     Richard Griffin

During my early growing-up years in the Boston suburbs, I used to believe Catholics had to be Democrats. To a person, the adults known to me belonged to that party, and anything else seemed unthinkable in my young worldview.

In teen age it came as a shock for me to discover many members of my church, especially those living in the Midwest, were actually Republicans. That seemed to me almost unnatural.

Later on, when I first studied Catholic social teaching, the issue became more complicated. I wondered how Catholic Republicans could reconcile the doctrines of their party with those of the church.

I never expected to see the day when, as happened in recent national elections, Catholics were almost evenly split between the two parties. In fact, members of my own extended family became Republican, in their voting habits if not in their voter registration.

Feelings connected with this question arose last month, when the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston spoke out in criticism of the Democratic party.
 

In an interview with Boston Globe reporter Michael Paulson, Sean O’Malley said: “I think the Democratic Party, which has been in many parts of the country traditionally the party which Catholics have supported, has been extremely insensitive to the church’s position, on the gospel of life in particular, and on other moral issues.”

What struck me was how narrow O’Malley’s assertion was. The “gospel of life” addresses many concerns ─ war, economic deprivation, and capital punishment, among others. Why is abortion such a privileged issue?

And why are today’s Democrats a particular target? We should note that one of the leading Republican candidates for the presidential nomination is strongly pro-choice and perhaps not otherwise dedicated to the gospel of life.

O’Malley’s hard line differs from that of his fellow American bishops. In response to a statement they made, one knowledgeable commentator, Thomas Reese, spoke to the New York Times. “Can a Catholic in good conscience vote for a candidate who is pro-choice?” he asked. “What they are saying is, Yes.”

I myself am strongly against abortion. I think that everything possible should be done to help individuals to avoid that option.

At the same time I am against criminalizing abortion. Even though I regret the loss of unborn human life, I certainly do not want to send women to prison, or even to court. This I hold even if they have chosen what I regard as a highly undesirable and, at least sometimes, immoral course of action.

To my mind, criminalizing abortion represents a self-defeating and unwise policy that many Democratic and Republican elected officials have correctly resisted.

To focus Catholic teaching on this one issue strikes me as a serious mistake. Threatening Catholic politicians with exclusion from the Eucharist, as some bishops have done, makes it worse.

We should remember, too, that no law can ever eliminate abortion. Instead, to criminalize abortion inevitably creates a gulf between rich and poor. In fact, some current data show that abortion tends to be more prevalent in countries where it is forbidden.

A psychiatrist friend strongly committed to Catholic doctrine and practice has told me of her experience during medical training in New York when abortion was illegal.

She personally observed what others have noted ─ that wealthy women had access to safe abortions, while poor women were limited to dangerous and sometimes lethal procedures.

The day after the Paulson interview, his paper published an op-ed by my old friend David O’Brien, Professor of Roman Catholic Studies emeritus at Holy Cross in Worcester. In his article O’Brien rejects O’Malley’s “unwise assault” and explains the reasons why a wider view must be adopted.

Catholics who vote for politicians who support abortion rights do so, O’Brien argues, because they are pro-choice, not pro-abortion. In taking this stand, they are being accountable to voters.

The same writer argues that the cardinal and his fellow bishops must take responsibility for the advice they have given to voters in national elections. He explains this responsibility emphatically. 

“Voters who made antiabortion politics their priority must share responsibility for disastrous domestic, foreign, and military policies that violate almost every tenet of Catholic social teaching,” says O’Brien with devastating accuracy.

In his conclusion, O’Brien calls for the two sides to find common ground, a realistic possibility, though a limited one. Abortions can be reduced in number by actions shown to be effective.

Like my friend, I freely admit the mistakes of the Democratic Party in its treatment of pro-life politicians like Bob Casey, the late governor of Pennsylvania.

At the same time, I cannot feel that the church’s credibility is increased by Cardinal O’Malley’s pronouncements.

The cardinal could have spoken words helpful to people trying to weigh issues of life and death in this political season. I, for one, regret that he chose to send out heat rather than light.

      Richard Griffin
 

The name of an obscure Austrian farmer became known to me decades ago when a scholar friend published a book about him. His story inspired me then, and it still does now that he has received undreamed-of recognition.

That Austrian man’s name is Franz Jägerstätter, and he has just been declared blessed by the Catholic Church. His beatification, the last step before he is declared a saint, took place in the cathedral of Linz, Austria, last month,.

The book, In Solitary Witness, first appeared in l966, and was written by the historian Gordon Zahn, who was then on the faculty of UMass-Boston. Its significance came from the central figure ─ one of the few Austrian Catholics who publicly opposed Hitler.

The Vatican’s choices of people to be recognized as saints do not always please me. For instance, the church recently decided to so honor 498 Spaniards who were killed in the Spanish civil war by the forces opposing Franco. This decision.smacks to me of being more a political action than a religious one.

But the Vatican deserves praise for honoring Franz Jägerstätter, especially because he defied the Nazis despite church authorities who told him he was wrong to do so. The conscience of this farmer, who had minimal schooling, proved to be far more authentically religious than the stance of his bishop and the pastor of his parish.

Important to the story is Jägerstätter’s family. He and his wife had four daughters, a fact used by those who counseled him to report for duty in a war he recognized as evil. But he refused even while knowing this decision would lead to his execution and leave his family without him.

His wife Franziska, now 94, feels happy about his recognition by the church. At the beatification ceremony she wore red, the color of martyrdom. Even though his sacrifice made her life difficult, in retrospect she recognizes the value of his decision despite the effects it had on her family. His four daughters, now in their 60s and 70s, also attended the beatification liturgy.

In refusing to serve in Hitler’s army, Jägerstätter resisted pressure from dozens of people, officials and others, who continued to plead with him to reverse his stand. He was decapitated in a Berlin prison in August of 1943.

His executioners tried to terrify him by denying him a hood over his head and making him lie face up to the guillotine. His body was cremated and his ashes ultimately brought back to his native village, St. Radegund in Upper Austria, where he is now honored as a saint.

Of significance is the way this beatification and other factors have changed the church in Austria. For a long time after the war had ended, Austrians were generally reluctant to face up to their country’s collaboration with the Nazi regime. Now, all of the current Austrian bishops welcomed the honor given to Jägerstätter, an amazing turnaround for leaders of a church that had enthusiastically welcomed the Nazis in the 1930s.

When the 1938 Anschluss was proposed, whereby Austria would become part of Germany, the predecessors of today’s Austrian bishops had issued a command to all Catholics to vote for it. In 1939 one of the bishops instructed the troops: “It is God Himself who is behind what the Führer commands.”

My old friend Gordon Zahn, who first uncovered the story for American readers, todoes not know about Jägerstätter’s beatification. The historian, now 89, has suffered Alzheimer’s disease for years and recently entered into hospice care. How poignant that he will never be aware of what his book helped bring about!

To my mind, the life and death of one Austrian farmer shines out from the awful darkness of the Nazi era. His witness to truth, paid at such a great price, stands as an example for our time as well as his own.

What the leaders of the church did by way of acceding to Hitler still makes me cringe. Though only one person among so many, Jägerstätter leaves me with hope. He dared take a stand in conscience when everyone and everything said not to.

Normally I resist hero worship. So many of the people proposed by popular culture as heroic turn out to have hidden baggage. You have to be careful about putting your faith in any one person unreservedly.

About anyone who shows the way for others, Rabbi Abraham Heschel once said: “A prophet is a pain in the ass, by the grace of God.” I imagine that the newly recognized Austrian saint was difficult. Perhaps even more than we all are difficult.

But that’s not the point. As he grew into maturity he learned to put conscience first, even when that led to an awful fate. And it was a conscience solidly founded in a great spiritual tradition.

So I gladly recognize him as a saint and see him as a model for myself and others.

Richard Griffin

Years ago, Thomas, as I will call him, dug himself into a $25,000 debt. He lied to his wife, claiming his paychecks were late, and he used their household money to gamble. The gambling led to his loss of a job, and came perilously close to destroying  his marriage.

But four years ago he took part in a week-long rehabilitation program that led him to admit being a compulsive gambler. Now, in his early 60s, he is clean and helps others with their addiction, serving them as an accredited counselor.

Researchers who have studied the matter claim that only two percent of older people are gambling-addicted. Thomas takes serious issue with their findings. “I would boost that figure up to 40 percent,” he tells me.

He is convinced that the general public does not understand how widespread the problem is. Nor do the professionals, he adds. “A lot of people are in denial,” Thomas says, “especially senior citizens.”

This experienced counselor tells of senior women who, as soon as they have received their Social Security checks, prepare to go to Foxwoods, which boasts of being the world’s largest casino. He also has seen older people enter a convenience store, buy a 100 dollars worth of scratch tickets, return to their car, scratch them, and go back to the store to buy more.

In his experience, a single scratch ticket can affect a gambler, just as a single drink can launch alcoholism. He believes the gambling addiction to be an illness, and that people have a disposition toward it.

Not surprisingly, he harbors strong feelings about casinos. Thomas believes they target senior citizens and seduce them by free meals and other perks. He therefore opposes Governor Patrick’s plan to license new casinos in Massachusetts.

A call to Gamblers Anonymous in Boston (617-338-6020 also put me in touch with a woman named Rose. She works there as a volunteer, coming in at three in the afternoon and working all night. About the academic estimates of older gamblers being only two percent of the total number of problem gamblers she says flatly: “I totally disagree.”

Rose thinks of her sister as typical. By getting addicted to scratch cards and games at Foxwoods among other forms of gambling, the latter lost both her family and her home. Now reformed, Rose’s sister looks back with sorrow on her earlier life when she blew away all her resources.

There are many people like her, Rose insists. “They have spent years saving it, and then it’s gone.” They call the Boston number and Rose listens to their sad stories. Then she refers them to the trained counselors who volunteer their services to the agency.

Thomas and Rose are both obviously sincere and speak from real-life experience. They both qualify as highly credible witnesses. But they leave me with a problem since the research done on the subject by reputable scholars concludes that relatively few old people gamble with resulting harm to themselves and others.  

After reviewing a dozen or so articles on the subject I have found a scholarly consensus that the proportion of elders who gamble uncontrollably is less than two percent.

Most students of the question believe that older people who have the habit of gambling indulge it largely because it brings them together with other people. Besides, when it’s non-addictive, they find it fun.

About casino gambling in particular, I can cite an important federal research project.  This 2003 study looked at eight different casino sites, most of them in the Midwest, and compared the gambling habits of older and younger people. Their findings  “do not support the view that casino gambling is a major threat to the elderly, preying on the aged and leading them to destructive gambling practices.”

Furthermore, the study found that the elderly “generally exercise better money management and experience proportionately fewer gambling problems than the general population.”

However, when I asked presenters at a recent Boston College conference on gambling about the percentage of addicted older players, I received conflicting replies. Professor John Hoffman of Brigham Young University agreed with the two percent estimate, but Dr. Marc Potenza of Yale Medical School sees enough of such people to remain somewhat doubtful about it.  

In a recent AARP Bulletin another researcher, Emily Sachar, reports: “The gaming industry makes no bones about the fact that older gamblers are its bread-and-butter business. Like the general adult population, most older Americans gamble responsibly, overwhelmingly for fun, and in the hopes of winning money.”

However, she did add the cautionary note that “older gamblers are especially vulnerable to wagering more than they can afford.”

So I leave readers with this dilemma. Do my age peers usually find gambling to be a harmless diversion? Or is it a widespread curse that wrecks the lives of many more older people than commonly realized ?

One sad conclusion we can make: for anyone in the grip of the gambling  addiction, it can be devastating.

Richard Griffin

Among friends, my reputation as a cook continues to take devastating hits. When they gather together, some who have known me the longest take unbridled delight in making fun of my alleged mishaps in the kitchen.

They recall with special pleasure the time when I blew up a chicken on our stove’s launching pad. That incident occurred in the early 1970s when I belonged to a household of six companions that ─ for literary reasons, being fans of the novelist Walker Percy ─ we called “Love in the Ruins.”

When it came my night to cook for the group, I placed the chicken (already dead, mind you) in a glass dish, shoved it into the oven, turned on the gas, and, after a time, was greeted by an explosion that made my housemates rush to the kitchen looking to find me dead also.

However, I’m glad to report having survived the explosion more or less unscathed. I cannot say the same for the chicken. The poor beast had glass shards driven into his carcass all over. If it had been dead before, it was triply so now.

Instead of letting me serve the chicken after some more broiling, my companions forced me to put the remains out in the trash. What they did for sustenance that evening I forget. But old friends have never allowed me to forget the chicken. And they take malign delight in my misfortune.

Some time after this catastrophe, I acquired a Crock-Pot, a vessel whose contents were less likely to end up on the kitchen ceiling. I was even able to prepare a pot roast for my mother, who pronounced it “better than good.” (Fairness requires me to add that my mother was known far and wide for taking delight in any meal that she had not prepared herself.)

Over the years, my specialties have evolved. In my present-day household, on those occasions (admittedly rare) when we serve lobster, I am invariably assigned the role of killer. Even my wife and daughter, both of whom have sometimes shown themselves critical of my kitchen performances, praise me for bringing a quick death to those crustaceans.

Unlike me, they feel scruples about cooking lobsters, but not about eating them. But if the lobsters (like the chicken) ended up on the kitchen ceiling, wouldn’t they be accessories after the fact?

I also once baked a cake. That enterprise forced me to don an apron, the only time I can remember being so attired. Unfortunately, however, the doorbell rang just at the crucial moment when I was about to take my creation out of the oven. I rushed to the door to find several young neighborhood girls who were selling Girl Scout cookies.

What bothered me about that event was not the spoiling of the cake, bad enough in itself, but the sight of me at the door. There I suffered the humiliation of presenting myself, not as a strong male patriarchal figure, but rather as a wimp dressed in an apron. (My in-house critic points out, however, that the latter is an admirable role model.)

In any event, this traumatic experience has inhibited me from learning to bake, though I rate as an expert consumer of chocolate-chip cookies and apple pies.

Other dishes of mine, such as hamburg or steak prepared lovingly over a slow fire, have been pronounced “adequate.” This word I would like to take as praise, but my nearest and dearest regard it as almost entirely negative. Perhaps my wife’s judgment goes back to her French-oriented convent school days when weekly good-conduct cards were being handed out.

In that era when words countered for something, the phrase “assez bien” was  dreaded by those schoolgirls. Though literally the words meant “good enough,” in context they signified that you had not only done badly but, if you had enough of these judgments, you were in acute danger of being thrown out of the place.

That’s what “adequate” means in my kitchen and dining room. I stand in mortal fear of hearing these words from those closest to me. We all know what they mean.  And, as I think about the chicken and the pot roast, and the cake, I can be grateful not to be subject to weekly judgments of assez bien.

For my next project, I’m thinking about writing a cookbook. My inspiration would come, not merely from the adventures cited above, but from the example of Irma Rombauer. Born in 1877, her birthday falls on the very day in which I am writing these words.

In 1935 she published The Joy of Cooking, a book destined to become one of the all-time favorites in the genre. She did so “even though she was a terrible cook, according to her own family,” as Garrison Keillor has reported.

What further inspiration do I need than that?

Richard Griffin

It’s obsessive, no doubt. For more than thirty years, I have been saving the playbills of every theatrical show I have seen, the programs of every concert I have heard, and the flyers from each museum I have entered.

That amounts to a whole lot of stuff by now. Two boxes, crammed to the top, hold all this paper. For old time’s sake, I recently fetched this material down from our attic and perused each document.

If your memory is as bad as mine, you can appreciate what it means to have these mementoes. Otherwise I would have plumb forgotten the great majority of the artistic events that, even when they gave me intense pleasure, faded from my recollection distressingly fast.

Fortunately, it takes only a moment to bring back images of some performances and displays. Sometimes I can even find the notes that I wrote about the event. That adds to the fun of remembering where I was and, often, with whom.

In this sea of artistic events, two promontories stand out above all the rest.

The first dates from 1975 when I went to the Wilbur Theater in Boston to see a play called “Brief Lives.” Daniel, a friend who was visiting at the time, came with me to this matinee. He had no idea what we would be seeing, and I had only vague expectations.

What we beheld that afternoon proved to be the finest one-man theatrical production I ever expect to see. The magnificent British actor Roy Dotrice brought to life the memoirs of an eccentric 17th century diarist named John Aubrey.

The actor, made up to look like an incredibly sloppy old man at age 71, first appears asleep in his four-poster bed, behind curtains. Awakening, he begins to regale us with his life experiences, his acerbic comments about other people, and his philosophy of life.

After the performance, I bought an LP recording of the play, so that I could still listen to its marvelous soliloquies. Much of Aubrey’s humor was bawdy, a fact that added to the enjoyment of the afternoon. It takes forbearance not to quote here from his earthy anecdotes.

What added even more was the theatrical set. Never before or since have I seen such a marvelously detailed framework for a play. In itself it was a work of art. It recreated the room where Aubrey lived, with hundreds of books piled on shelves, faded tapestries on the wall, and the remnants of recent meals strewn around. It was marvelously messy, just the setting for a character who loved living in distinguished squalor.

My friend and I walked away from this performance buoyed up in a way only fine art can do. We had seen a great actor whose work brought us back into a different time and place, and our imagination and emotions had been enlivened by the experience.

The other occasion that has stayed with me vividly was in a different realm ─ music. In 1992, on a visit to London, my sister Carol and I went to St. Paul’s Cathedral for a performance of Elgar’s “Dream of Gerontius.”

This oratorio has been a favorite of mine since adolescence when I first heard it performed in Boston. One prominent critic calls it the greatest piece of religious music between Verdi’s “Requiem” and Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms.”

On this occasion, the grand setting of the famous cathedral proved an ideal setting for this deeply religious work. The church’s soaring interior graced the event as the composer introduced us to a dying man who prepares to face God’s favorable but awe-provoking judgment.

The three singers who accompanied the orchestra performed beautifully; they and the chorus made us feel the kind of spiritual uplift that great art can provide. I have listened to the work many times since, never without being moved. Already, I am looking forward to another performance by the Boston Symphony in January.

These two instances of pleasure in art, culled from a pile of hundreds, can stand for a lifetime of experiences worth remembering. Whenever I choose to look at these old programs, I can feel again something of the joy I felt first long ago.

By people better balanced than I, the obsessive collection of documents will be judged compulsive. But, for me, the practice counts as one way of building a life. Almost everybody finds that true of photos. The playbills I save provide a similar record of influences that have had an appreciable impact on a lifetime.

The experiences that move you or lend meaning or extend the limits of life, ─ these are worth saving. Even if some of the stuff you preserve proves ephemeral and should be thrown away for the sake of your mental health, some other things deserve to be kept because they help define who you are.

Richard Griffin