Christmas, Circa 1935

The 1935 Christmas that we see in old magazines and films can seem merely a Norman Rockwell never-never-land, an idealistic presentation of a world that was, in fact, far from ideal. But even in those Depression years, Christmas for a family like mine could be abundant, both materially and spiritually.  

What I remember most about my earliest Christmases is the profusion of gifts and the transformation of time.

The day felt different from any other time. At an early morning hour, my father went downstairs first to turn on the lights and to take one last look around to see if Santa Claus had really arrived. As we followed down the staircase, we children felt a delightful anticipation that was almost better than the gifts themselves.

But the gifts could be memorable as well. One year I got a Lionel train and worked with my father to get it going. The locomotive, turned on by the transformer, would navigate the tracks, up and down hills, and around curves.

My brother and sister and I set to empty our stockings pinned up on the mantle piece. Out would come small objects, knickknacks for our pleasure. Despite advance word about finding lumps of coal for bad behavior, it never happened.

All of this happened in a room where the Christmas tree, with its lights and angels, took pride of place. There also the Christmas crib drew attention, with the small figures dramatizing holy people and events.

The time soon came when we would have to defer play and get ready for church. In those days Catholics like us did not eat or drink anything before Mass, so we did not wait until late in the morning before going off to our parish church, where the sober austerity of Advent had given way to festivity.

There joyous music resounded, red poinsettias decorated the altar, and people somehow looked different from the way they usually did.  The priest now wore white or gold vestments, a sign of liturgical rejoicing.

I knew us all to be in no ordinary time, and I felt myself transported into a new sphere of being. In fact so focused was I on the events of the day that I was able to lose consciousness of time altogether.

Home from church we would have a more hearty breakfast than usual and then return to our gifts. Later in the day, my grandmother and aunt would come, the latter bringing frozen pudding ice cream, a flavor all of us kids detested. My maternal grandmother was our favorite relative, a woman whose love for us was unconditional, like God’s.

My father cut the roast when we settled down at the dining room table in the mid afternoon and we ate our Christmas dinner. I tended to eat too much on such occasions but afterward would go outside and throw a football around with neighboring boys. Or, if there was snow on the ground, I might try out a new sled.

After a simple supper at day’s end, I would be sent to bed early, assured by parents that I would have time to play with my things on other days. Though I would not admit it, I felt agreeably tired, ready for sleep after the festivity of the day.

Looking back over the decades, I still feel affection for this kind of Christmas. Granted how middle-class it was, full of the rituals that others of our time, place, and economic station followed, our form of celebration had its own power.

We knew other children were not so blessed with material goods as we, but that did not stop us from being thankful for what we had been given.

From this celebration I received a palpable sense of God and God’s goodness. Because our Christmas celebrated events centered on Bethlehem so many centuries before, I learned feelings of awe, reverence, and love, qualities that mark all true religion. God was the source of abundance. He overflowed in love for us and in other gifts.

And the time felt holy. Christmas day made me and other family members feel ourselves to be in the presence of someone and some things different. This was more than human time.

Richard Griffin

Awe

If you are the parent of a college student the way I am, you have become familiar with a special vocabulary used by your daughters or sons and their friends. Even when you overhear only one end of their telephone chats with one another, you become familiar with expressions such as “cool,” what’s up?”,  and “sketchy.”

Another word that comes up frequently is “awesome.”  Our juniors use it in tribute to all sorts of happenings that they consider exciting. Its currency has lost some value, of course, because the word is now used routinely rather than rarely. A young woman’s new hairdo or a fellow going to a lively nightspot can provoke the response “awesome;” it does not need the eruption of a mighty volcano.

Probably not one in a thousand collegians realizes that the word “awesome” classically expresses the beginning of a spiritual way of looking at the world. It contains two basic ideas – – fear and fascination. That is how Rudolf Otto, a German scholar of the early twentieth century, described it; he saw it as the human response to the encounter with what is holy.

The experience of awe finds graphic expression in the lives of mystics of every spiritual tradition. The prophet Isaiah is a good case in point. As described in the Hebrew Bible, he had a vision of the Lord “sitting on a throne, high and lofty” and heard angels calling out “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.”

Isaiah’s response was to recognize himself as “a man of unclean lips,” but an angel came down and touched a hot coal to his lips, purifying him for his mission.  

Centuries later, Jesus at the time of his baptism saw the heavens open and heard a voice saying “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.”  This was an experience that filled him with awe and carried him into his public ministry of proclaiming the Kingdom of God.

Such powerful experiences are not restricted to figures in the Bible. They have been handed down in traditions other than the Judeo-Christian.

In a new book, “Why Religion Matters,” the scholar Huston Smith cites Hindu lore, referring to a vision that one of his students has of the god  Krishna “in his terrifying cosmic form.” Professor Smith alludes to the Buddhist tradition as well and cites “the Buddha finding the universe turning into a bouquet of flowers at the hour of his enlightenment.”

Using the image of a carapace or hard shell that stretches over the world, Huston Smith also gives readers this definition:  “Mystics are people who have a talent for sensing places where life’s carapace is cracked, and through its chinks they catch glimpses of a world beyond.”

Of course, such experiences are not limited to religious people. Those who call themselves “spiritual but not religious,” the way many do nowadays, can find this kind of genuinely awesome experience in the world of nature or in the life of the arts.

There is a story about the great 18th century composer George Frederick Handel telling what it was like to compose the “Hallelujah Chorus.” “I thought I saw the heavens open, and the great Lord Himself,” he was reported to exclaim.

You may have had something like these precious experiences. Many people, very few of whom are monks or consider themselves mystics, have. According to one poll, an astonishing 32% of Americans report having mystical prayer experiences.

Spiritual writer Elizabeth Lesser urges everyone to place great value on these inner events: “We should cherish those moments when we have an awareness of our life being something more than it appears to be.”

Are we allowing ourselves to cultivate moments that are truly awesome? When they come into our life, do we let them change our daily feelings about ourselves and our world?

A walk in a cemetery led to such an experience for me long ago. It was a beautiful place with abundant foliage and sculptured mountains off in the distance. There, suddenly, a realization sunk into me that I cannot express fully. At the risk of my insight sounding banal, let me here provide an inadequate summary of what I then received: “God is real and you will always remember this truth.”

Richard Griffin

After Morning Prayers

After taking part in morning prayers with a group of friends last Saturday, I talked with one of them over coffee and cake. Though I do not know this man –  – a retired banker and current philanthropist –  – very well, I found conversation with him remarkably uplifting. In fact, later in the day and on succeeding days, the more I reflected on our exchange, the more I considered it an occasion of grace.

Both of us had been moved by what the speaker at the prayer session had said about peace. In her five-minute commentary on scripture, she had filled us with reflections about spirituality that carried over into the gathering that followed.

First, we talked about our agenda for that Saturday. His would feature a visit by one of his daughters with her 15-year-old son. Spending time with them, especially the grandson whom he does not see very often, was an event that he was eagerly looking forward to. He noted that boys at that age change so much so quickly that it is hard to keep up with their growth.

My friend, whom I will call Jack, went on to tell me how he feels blessed in living into his 70s. He regards it as a gift from God that he has seen the third generation after him and has the prospect of seeing a fourth, since one of his granddaughters is married and in her middle 20s. Jack feels grateful for the good health he enjoys and the opportunities for doing good brought to him in his later decades.

His wife has had some serious physical problems and walks with difficulty. But she has adapted cheerfully to her leg brace, a device that, along with a helping arm from her husband, allows her to get places where she wants to go. Jack agreed with my remarks about her resiliency, a characteristic that he and I also regard as a gift.

Jack also shared with me the benefit he is drawing from a course at his church that focuses on Abraham in the book of Genesis. This study is stirring Jack spiritually and he repeated to me “be a blessing,” the phrase spoken by Abraham from which he is deriving spiritual relish.

In my part of the conversation, I shared with Jack my own plans for that Saturday. These included a meeting of members of my church concerned about a crisis. Later in the day I would attend a cocktail party given by a 90-year-old friend in honor of his late wife. Finally, I would be celebrating the birthdays of two of my brothers and be introduced to the fiancé of a niece. All of these events of that day would offer material for reflection and prayer.

As I left the gathering my soul felt buoyed up by the heartfelt exchange with Jack, and I reflected on the traditional role of spiritual conversation in the life of seekers. In my novitiate training long ago, I learned the value of talking with other people about the spiritual life. And this value came home to me often, especially when I talked with close friends who shared my ideals.

I had also learned the value of keeping silence but there was much time for that. When opportunities came for conversation, then I experienced the spiritual benefits from learning how others were faring in living toward God.

The masters of the spiritual life have also taught that idle and superficial conversation can sometimes harm the soul. Living in 21st-century America can make this a hard saying because our culture elevates chatter into a way of life. Like almost everybody else, I enjoy bantering with friends and exchanging clever remarks. However, I also find that such chatter, if carried on too long, can eat away at my soul.

Just the day before Jack and I talked, I had been in a conversation with a group of colleagues, a discussion that left me feeling low. By contrast with the way Jack talked, these other men never said anything of substance. The result for me was a spiritual malaise that acted as a true downer. It has made me appreciate even more my spiritual conversation with Jack.

Richard Griffin

Iraq by George

“Shooting stays with you, it’s like riding a bike, you don’t forget it.” On this subject George MacMasters speaks from recent and deadly experience.

A few months ago, this soon-to-be-50-year-old Harvard aquatics instructor returned home from the war in Iraq. He was physically unscathed, though for weeks after his arrival back in the U.S., he felt nausea every morning.

That phenomenon he attributes to seeing “a lot of dead bodies, heads blown off, brains blown out, and limbs torn off, things like that.” He feels bad especially about the loss of so many young people and knowing that “they had hardly lived yet.”

His son, stationed in Falluja, only 15 minutes away from his father, was among the seriously wounded. Still in his early twenties, he suffered drastic burns in both hands, along with wounds in his face and ear. “Shrapnel was coming out of his head weeks and months later,” says his father.

Despite his desire to go there and fight in the front lines, getting to Iraq was not easy for George. From the beginning he emphasized that he could speak Arabic, but the Army and National Guard brass seemed not to value this asset. Nor did they apparently care that he had served in the Marine Corps from 1976 to 1986, the latter four years as an officer.

After getting a waiver for his age, George, a tall, strapping, athletic middle-ager, was accepted into the active reserve and volunteered for Guantánamo where he spent the next six months patrolling the hills near the U. S. base. Only at the end of this duty did the head of the intelligence unit discover his proficiency in Arabic.

For the remaining five months of his sojourn in Guantánamo, MacMasters spent his time striking up conversations with the prisoners held by American forces. “A lot of times they would talk and they didn’t want to tell me anything. But slowly, as you get talking, they would volunteer information.”

“We got some good intelligence,” George reports, some of it leading to certain prisoners being released from the most difficult confinement. But others would try to get intelligence from their interrogator. “It was a kind of chess game: They would be working on me while I was working on them.”

But George still hoped to serve in Iraq as a private and a rifleman because “that’s where the real fighting is done, right on the fire team.” Unable to get released from his unit back home, he called up the Pentagon. “I got to full-bird colonels,” he says, and pressed his case.

The brass inquired who was pressing them and heard “Oh, it’s Sergeant MacMasters and he’s a pain in the ass, that guy.” Finally, he got his way and ended up in an Iraqi police station in Ramadi. If you wanted action, it was the place to be. Among other things, “we were mortared every morning and every night, all the time,” he reports.

During his 12 months there, he engaged in two dozen firefights and three major attacks. “I actually got to see the enemy and I shot at them. I knew I hit a few of them but I have no idea how many I killed.”

A Marine rifle company was based next door to help provide security. George would eat with them regularly. One day when the company went out on patrol in a 7-ton truck, George heard explosions 500 yards away. Six of the marines were hit: “One marine was killed, four had two legs blown off, one had one leg blown off,” according to George.

He saw them brought in: “These were all kids – 19, 21, 22.” When the grievously wounded were brought to a hospital, a navy corpsman reportedly joked with them later about them now having to learn how “to pick up girls from a wheelchair.”

About other casualties, he observes, “When you looked in their faces, they looked like babies, not men.” Of himself at their stage he observes: “I knew nothing at that age, I had learned nothing, what I wanted or even what the world was about.”

He holds it against civilian and military leaders whose policies are responsible for these casualties. “Their policies result in the deaths of young people,” this veteran says boldly. “To me staying the course meant accepting the death of so many young people killed each month as an acceptable loss to maintain a policy.”

George believed that getting rid of Saddam was a good thing. “What I didn’t agree with, over time, was the lack of preparedness of the leadership in conducting the war; right from the get-go I wanted them to have more troops.”

He hates the thought of American troops leaving. But he considers “pretty absurd” training up the Iraqis to defeat the insurgency. “If we can’t defeat this insurgency with the greatest military in the world, how can we expect a rag-tag bunch of light infantry Iraqis to defeat it?”  

Richard Griffin

Bateson on the New Age

“We represent a phenomenon that never existed before,” says Mary Catherine Bateson of herself and her age peers. She has been interviewing a lot of them and they tell her: “I don’t feel like someone who’s 60, or 70, or 80.”

This she explains by observing that “we all carry the mental picture of our own grandparents, what they were like when we were children.” But they lived in a different world and they aged differently.

Author, educator, and cultural anthropologist, Catherine Bateson sees today’s older people as “something new.” Not only do more of us live longer but we live in an era of radical change.

This change has not merely altered technology and introduced new material objects such as emails, cell phones, and i-Pods. More profoundly, our generation has had to change attitudes on basic human realities─relationships between men and women, attitudes toward sexuality and gender, views about race and the environment.

Our era also has made it possible to bring together two realities that often used to be in conflict: wisdom and activity. Many older people are now volunteering, taking courses, traveling, and eloping (the latter much to the surprise of their children and others.)

As for wisdom, it’s the one word about aging that most of us like, observes Catherine Bateson. And we like to think it comes almost automatically with age.

It used to. Viewing the past with and anthropologist’s eye, she observes that in older traditional societies people knew the rules, and by age 40 they could prove useful by providing memories that were important to the community.

However, she points out, it no longer happens this way. What brings wisdom nowadays is not mere experience or length of years; if you wish to become wise, you have to take your experience and reflect on it

This means valuing a “kind of learning that takes place outside of the classroom. Something happens, delights you, scares you, tweaks your curiosity. That’s what wisdom consists in: not just years, but years of experience.”

When you combine the two, activity and wisdom, you produce something of which the world stands in sore need.

Our new longevity has extended the life span of families. Formerly, children were lucky to see one grandparent, more often than not a grandmother.

But now, Catherine, observing the structure of the extended family, says, “I’ve known kids with seven or eight grandparents: the grands, the great-grands, the ex-grands, the step-grands, and the grands-in-law.”

“They have enough grandparents to choose from,” she adds, “so a bit from this one and a bit from that one and they get their full share of grandparental love.”

Another new phenomenon has given children great-aunts and great-uncles who, by virtue of good health and mobility, display a vitality that used to be rare.

But Bateson sees most of us as still “stuck in an old imagination.” This prevents us from claiming the influence we could have in society.

As for politicians, “they are dead wrong: in thinking that just because a person is 60 or 70 or 80 they don’t care about the future.” Social Security, prescription drugs, and other such issues are by no means the only ones that interest us. We should be confronting the politicians more broadly and telling them “What you’re doing is going to make the world worse for my grandchild.”

Many Americans who are in early or middle adulthood typically do not have time for the future. In Bateson’s view, they tend be “incredibly busy and they have fewer assets than they thought they’d have, they are really scraping economically.”

This is where older people can be of help and also help themselves in the process. “The world is full of parents, couples working two jobs who would be grateful to have an honorary aunt or uncle or grandparent tactfully involved,” Catherine suggests.

She feels strongly about intergenerational bonding, as do I. “If you don’t have a child in your life, get one,” she advises us elders quite bluntly.

To the excuse of persons who say they cannot establish such contacts, Bateson sees volunteer activity with organizations as a helpful way of getting in touch with younger people. So are joining organizations, taking courses, going to church.

You might also reach out to the grandchildren of friends who live far away, perhaps inviting them to eat with you. Ours is a society that indulges in segregation by age and thus squanders opportunity and sets limits to what we can do to change things for the better.

Bateson believes strongly in the value of volunteering. She does so not merely because it helps to build up society and improve our communities.

She also considers volunteer activity important to individual development. That is why she urges those involved to “use your volunteer work as a way of framing and reflecting on what it means to be wise and active, both at the same time.”

Richard Griffin

Stop Aging Now

Thomas Perls, M.D., a prominent geriatrician at Harvard Medical School, calls it “huck-sterism.” Of its practitioners he says, “I think they do our field and our society a great deal of harm. I think they’re very dangerous.”

With these scathing comments, Perls takes aim at the anti-aging industry. His par-ticular target is people with M.D.s after their names who go around selling the idea that aging can and should be stopped.

These purveyors of the anti-aging gospel belong to a larger American industry that reaps billions of dollars from its products and services. Dubious drugs, ill-advised plastic surgery, food fads, new spiritualities, diet regimens, and many other gimmicks conspire to persuade Americans that they can put a stop to aging, at least for a while.

The hidden assumption of doctors who practice “anti-aging medicine” is that aging is a disease. They would like everyone to think that aging is something bad.

Ronald Klatz and Robert Goldman, the two founders of the Chicago-based American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, are, in their own words “at the center of it all.” They are not shy in their claims: Klatz has told an interviewer from Penthouse, “Within 30 years we will have a shot at immortality.”

Last October I talked with Bob Goldman whose medical degree caught my attention: it comes from the Central American Health Services University, Belize Medical College.

In his talk at the Harvard School of Education, Goldman delivered his message with great personal pizzaz. “Aging is not inevitable,” he asserted. “If we don’t solve the aging process, we are going bankrupt, we will become a nation of nursing homes.”

If there is any single danger for Americans now, he stated, it is the water most of us drink. “Tap water is poison,” Goldman claims. Instead, we should all be drinking distilled water. It is hard to believe anyone would say this, but Goldman asserted that brain loss, Alzheimer’s disease, and other such bad things happen because of tap water.

You have to wonder about anyone who proclaims, “there is nothing graceful about grow-ing old.” When he asked members of the audience, “Who would like to live to be 150?” more than a few hands went up. Not mine!

According to Goldman, anti-aging medicine is the coming thing. Of himself and his col-leagues, he says, “we’re practicing the way everyone will in the future.” He expects that “surgical de-aging” will become routine along with replacement of body parts.

Following our meeting, Goldman sent me two of his books, co-authored by Ronald Klatz. The first “Stopping the Clock,” presents “dramatic breakthroughs in anti-aging and rejuvenation techniques.” Goldman does not practice the soft sell: here he shares with readers “why many of us will live past 100 – and enjoy every minute!”

The second, “7 Aging Secrets for Optimal Digestion and Scientific Weight Loss,” among other things teaches readers how to “detox your inner core and shed unwanted pounds in the process.” On page four, incidentally, the authors treat seriously reports that a Chinese man, Li Ching-Yun, was born in 1677 and died in 1933!

As must be evident, I find this doctrine intellectually shoddy and socially harmful. To me, it’s a kind of propaganda that serves the interests of big money rather than the common good. It is unscrupulous to prey on people’s fears about change.

Yet, it enjoys amazing respectability in American society. In his publicity materials, Goldman displays a photo showing him a as a member of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. International conferences, medical textbooks, and contacts with Capital Hill, all help raise the profile of the cause.

The anti-aging folks throw around impressive names as endorses. These people know how to wield the media in order to convince the public of their professional prestige.

Yet, they are peddling a doctrine that is noxious. Certain kinds of anti-aging ideas are basically anti-human. It sounds almost banal to say so, but growing old is a fundamental human experience that brings with it rich rewards as well as trials. To try and do away with this expe-rience means twisting out of shape what it means to be a human being.

Of course, I favor measures that have proven themselves by increasing our chances of living longer well. It remains scandalous that only an estimated 10 percent of Americans over age 65 do any significant exercise. And too many of us continue to eat junk food. For our own self-respect we need to take better care of ourselves, physically, mentally, and spiritually.

But that does not mean buying into quick-fix, unreliable, and often downright dangerous schemes that promise what no one can actually deliver. As baby boomers advance in age, it’s only going to get worse. More hucksters will appear ready to promise us youth and happiness.

Richard Griffin

Bob Bullock’s Legacy

Father Robert Bullock was a friend of mine for 61 years. Starting as high school classmates in 1943, we stayed close until his death in 2004. For the gift of such a friendship I continue to feel grateful.

My vantage point gave me abundant chances to appreciate Bob’s fine personal qualities. From early on, I valued the traits of character that made him easy to be with and that produced good work and good works.

But, though I esteemed him from the beginning, I confess having underestimated his potential for both intellectual development and spiritual leadership. With time, I came to see that his talents in both these areas were outstanding.

It delights me to see how many other people recognize those characteristics, and love Bob for who he was and for all that he accomplished in his ministry as a university chaplain and parish priest.

They also continue to hold him in high esteem for his insight into one of the most crucial issues of our time. As Rabbi Irving Greenberg has said of Father Bullock: “He was our mentor and role model because he understood what is demanded of us when you face an event of such evil.”  

As a prime mover in the agency Facing History and Ourselves, Bob helped create a vital bond between the Catholic Church and the Jewish community.

Over the last 30 years, the Brookline-based  Facing History has become national and international in scope as it works to teach young people and others the awe-full lessons of the Holocaust. Two and a half years after his death, Father Bullock continues to be acclaimed for his part in promoting understanding of what the horror of those event means for everyone.

The occasion for this renewed focus on my friend is a recent commemoration of his life and work held at Boston College, his alma mater. Presented in the Burns Library, this celebration marked the first display of his archive. The collection includes his sermons, letters, photos, and other memorabilia that help document Bob’s career.

I take pleasure in seeing how the university where my friend did his undergraduate studies has recognized the value of his personal stature and his accomplishments. The collection housed in the library, now being prepared for eventual showing to the public, will preserve a record of his legacy for the indefinite future.

In the program prepared for this event, Father Bullock is quoted for the value he set on wisdom. “It (education) talks about trying to acquire wisdom─not just knowledge,” he said, “but the intelligent application of knowledge, to try to see below the surface of things, to try to achieve the moral balance.”

That quest for wisdom, for seeing below the surface and achieving moral balance, expresses one of my friend’s central themes. That is why he read so avidly and explored these themes in conversation with friends and those who specialized in the study of history.

From 1978 to 2004, Father Bullock was pastor of Our Lady of Sorrows parish in Sharon, Massachusetts. There he ministered to the Catholics of the town and reached out to the Jewish residents, becoming personally known and a friend to many of them.

His ties with the Jewish community enabled him to continue the work he had begun during his time as chaplain at Brandeis University. During the turbulent 1970s, he had served the Catholic community of Brandeis while developing a deeper understanding of the Catholic Church’s treatment of Jews and holding his own church to account.

During this same period, Bob was also director of campus ministry for the Archdiocese of Boston. In this capacity he helped many, including me, to carry out their ministry in the midst of continued turmoil in church and academia. He managed to stay cool in the storms that whirled about us in those troubled (but also dynamic) times.

Starting in the middle 1970s, he served Facing History as its prime Catholic figure, working to bring about deeper understanding of the church’s historical role and trying to reverse the lethal prejudices that had brought about such unspeakable harm to the Jewish community in Europe.

Many of us older people think, at least sometimes, about the legacy we will leave behind. My friend Bob’s life serves as a model of one that clearly made a difference and will endure.

Few of us, perhaps, will have made the same impact on our larger society as he did. But inevitably we too will have had our own distinctive impact.

We all have the capacity to make a difference. Figuring out the best ways can prove a fine agenda for one’s later years.

What may count most in the long run is our character. The capacity to be our best selves, being courageous and, most of all, compassionate toward others, makes us important, no matter how the world may ignore us.

My friend Bob was a person of character, and this explains best why so many people continue to honor him after his death.

Richard Griffin