“What is life all about anyway if not to honor our relationships and take care of people who took care of us? What makes us human if not this caring?”

These questions formed part of a message I received last December in response to a column about parent care. My reader identified herself as Nina Fiore, a 31-year-old woman who had spent the previous year taking care, first of her father, then of her uncle, as they were dying.

To do so, this young woman had to break off her career, leave her home, and provide for both these family members in turn. Of this time she writes: “The experience is both rewarding and incredibly difficult at the same time.”

To her, it is mistaken to consider care of the dying as merely a responsibility or as burdensome. In fact, she criticized my column about a middle-aged career woman who abandoned her work and moved back home to help her mother. This reader found fault with me for allegedly presenting the woman as sacrificing herself rather than taking on an experience from which she would benefit.

In fact, I have long agreed with my correspondent’s point of view. I have often had occasion to quote author Mary Pipher on the subject: “Parents aging can be both a horrible and a wonderful experience. It can be the most growth-promoting time in the history of the family.

“Many people say, ‘I know this sounds strange, but that last year was the best year of my parents’ lives. I was my best. They were their best. Our relationships were the closest and strongest ever,’ or, ‘The pain and suffering were terrible. However, we all learned from it. I wouldn’t have wanted things to be different.’”

Like other caregivers, my correspondent had to confront American society’s taboos regarding death. She tells how “neighbors, friends, co-workers, and most family members can barely deal with the reality .  .  . and .  .  . therefore ‘check out’ of most  people’s lives, right when they need them the most.”

As she sees it, empowerment counts as one of the greatest needs of people approaching death. Her task became to “make them feel empowered while they were losing power.” This notion she understands as the need to feel respected and to have one’s dignity preserved.

She also insists on the need for advocacy on behalf of dying patients. This I heartily second, since people with serious disease very often feel too weak to make a case for themselves. From personal experience, I know what a difference it makes to have a family member there to represent my interests.

Nina Fiore credits her then boyfriend, now fiancé, both for understanding her need to be with her family members and for coming often to help out in the caregiving tasks. “I would not want to spend my life with someone who could not understand and do that,” she says.

This young woman indicts society for wishing to shield young people from contact with the dying. “How does youth mature,” she asks, “if it is sheltered from life’s basic events?” Further, she raises the question of priorities by asking “Is it more meaningful to bring home a paycheck than to be with people most important to you while they die?”

This latter question was presumably directed against my statement about not wanting my young daughter to be deflected from her own career by taking care of me when the time comes for my own decline and death. However, I do recognize care- giving to be one of the most valuable human experiences and, for young people, one of the most maturing.

Not basing one’s identity on a career, as Nina Fiore suggests, also shows wisdom although I feel that a career, seen in perspective, itself can contribute much to the maturing process. “I also never confused my work for who I am as a person and for what is truly important to me,” she adds.

Taking care of family members as they decline has helped my correspondent deal with guilt. “I can rest more easily in my own head, knowing I did all I could for them while they were alive,” she writes. It is liberating for her to feel relieved of the burden of guilt as she looks back on this experience that has helped redefine her sense of herself.

My correspondent, by the way, did not grow up privileged and affluent. Her parents were immigrants and her father did not have a high school education. He owned a small barber shop on Wall Street in Manhattan and his wife served as his accountant.

I have shared the views of one reader because I was deeply touched by her response. Hers was the kind of message that gives writing a weekly column added value.

Richard Griffin

When it came my turn, I knelt down in the midst of the group of some dozens of other Jesuit novices, all of them dressed in full-length black cassocks. Then the Master called on several of these other young men to tell me my faults.

This weekly monastic practice was called “chapter of faults,” and was considered a standard way of helping reform our behavior. It went back to the medieval era, if not earlier, thus qualifying as a time-honored tool of asceticism.

In theory, my fellow critics were supposed to focus only on externals─looking grim instead of cheerful, for instance─but in practice some people would say things, not because they would help the brother under criticism, but so as to relieve their own feelings about his irritating habits. At least, that’s what I found myself doing sometimes.

This critique of external conduct was supposed to help us correct our interior dispositions. Whether hearing a recital of my faults helped improve my character remains dubious. Even from the vantage point of five decades plus, such change is difficult to gauge.

Placing oneself at the mercy of peers was also humiliating. That, too, was seen as one of its advantages by the spiritual masters who presided over it. Striking a blow against pride was an important way of helping novices like me advance toward perfection.

I felt the sting of being subjected to comments on my behavior. Even those colleagues who were tactful and well disposed toward me could wound my psyche. It hurt to listen to peers whose sole duty, for the moment, was to point out publicly how I failed in my approach to the religious life.

However, the ritual did reveal to me my own rigidity, a trait that then loomed large in my personality. Many noticed how unbending I was in observing the rules and, especially, in judging my peers. “Brother often shows disapproval of others,” they would say, or something close to it.

I hope that they would no longer say this. I have long since changed my attitude toward rules, and I find that one of the great blessings of later life is the capacity to rejoice in my own imperfections.

In my twenties and thirties, however, I stood convinced that this was the authentic way to go. I considered myself as called to embark on the way of perfection as understood by the spiritual tradition in which I had grown up. At its deepest, I saw this summons as the will of God for me.

Though I retain respect for much of the ascetical tradition of my church and my former religious order, I came long ago to consider many aspects of it as inappropriate, even harmful, for me. It has a great intellectual and spiritual pedigree based in the New Testament, but this does not mean that all of its practices were good for me or for others.

I would add that my religious community, like many others, has long since reappraised these ascetic practices and abolished many of them. Today’s novices have probably never heard of the chapter of faults.

Rituals such as the chapter of faults rested on false assumptions. They simplified human psychology and presupposed a view of life very different from what most of our contemporaries share, thanks in large part to the discoveries of modern science. At this remove it is difficult for me to understand why I ever accepted procedures like this one without mounting serious objections.

Of course, I favor self-discipline and regret that it is so often misunderstood in our society. There is nothing wrong with bringing reason to bear on our emotional drives. I do not regret having learned how to lead a life in which the rational part of me would set limits on the instinctual.

However, the drive for perfection prevented vital parts of my personality from emerging. Instead of leading us to integrate the emotional with the intellectual, the novice master used to tell us to “beat it down,” meaning to subject our feelings to unyielding control. His regimen had the effect of emphasizing the worst parts of my character rather than the best.

Later life has led me to an easing of this pressure. Instead of pushing myself toward some ideal of moral perfection, I now feel content to live with myself as I am. That means accepting those impulses formerly labeled faults without worrying about their influence on me.

Of course, I feel concern about the effects of my actions on other people. It’s important for me not to offend them unnecessarily. Nor do I refuse opportunities to reach out to them with help, ideally with respect and affection.

But it seems better now to let the rhythm of life carry me along rather than to push myself according to some prefabricated agenda. This time offers the chance to look at life as a free-flowing stream that carries me along, not a construction site with me as architect.

Richard Griffin

Does prayer, offered by someone at a distance, help a sick person to get better? Can my talking with God on behalf of a friend in another place help heal that friend?

Surprisingly, these questions currently interest scientists. Some researchers around the country are busy trying to measure whether religious activity can influence bodily recovery.

Our federal government has funded several such studies, spending more than two million dollars to support them. This expenditure, initiated by the Bush administration, has drawn fire from some critics who call it a waste of public money, but supporters consider it an innovative way to test the effects of intercessory prayer.

My interest in a connection between prayer and healing has been heightened by a recent illness. During this time, friends galore promised me spiritual assistance for my recovery. “You’ll be in my prayers,” they typically assured me; at least one of them even told me to count on the prayers of a group to which she belongs.

I warmly welcome these offerings of spiritual support. It gladdens my heart to realize how many people care enough to make mention of me in their prayers. It pleases me to receive backing from people for whom the spiritual life has crucial importance.

But what, exactly, does this backing imply? Is there an implied message that praying for the sick will lead to improvement through divine action? Can I believe in the same hope of intervention by God?

I do not ask the questions that way, however. The most important issue for me is not whether the prayer of friends has the power to change my health for the better. I do not expect direct divine action to improve the functioning of my bodily organs.

Rather, I believe in the efforts of my physicians and other health care professionals to serve as intermediaries, directing toward me the goodness of God. Similarly, I look to family members who provide me with marvelous loving care at home; they embody divine providence toward me. So do visiting nurses and others who work for my healing.  

My approach finds support in a newly published book entitled Prayer: A History.

Its authors, Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, survey the practices of people around the globe. It is common for people to offer prayers in the hope of changing things for themselves and those they care about.

The writers offer many examples of traditional prayer that is integrated with a larger culture. This they contrast with the kind of prayer that is associated with modernity and considered a form of therapy. Deeply individualistic, it seems valued to the extent that it works.

With respect to prayer directed toward bodily healing, these authors emphasize its connection with community. “Healing prayer, we submit, is a work of repair, reknitting the social fabric that is frayed by illness or ruptured by death. It is a divine work, but its natural medium is a flourishing religious culture with a robust sense of communion between self and society, between society and the transcendent. Failing that sense of communion, healing prayer often takes on the appearance of a strange embellishment or an oddball obsession.”

I, too, see prayer as a divine work made meaningful by its connection with a culture and a community. This kind of prayer has graced every stage of my life. The community of faith has blessed all of the significant turning points of my life with prayers appropriate for the occasion.

Thus, as a Christian, I have received the traditional seven sacraments to prepare me for new situations. These prayers of the church continue to enhance my life in my eighth decade.

Countless members of this community, acting as individuals, have also offered prayers on my behalf throughout the years. To have been included by them has made me part of an extended world. I look back with pleasure on the many occasions when I have joined with people of other nations and traditions as we have stood together in raising up our needs to God.

Prayer thus strikes me as a fine remedy for isolation. At its best, it brings us into contact with many other people, a community much larger than our own, one made up of those who focus on spiritual gifts such as hope and love. I feel happy to be associated with those who pray for me and, if they are among the saints who will someday come marching in, I would like to be of their number.

As to the questions about prayer’s effects that scientists are studying, I await their findings with some interest. But I do not need for these researchers to demonstrate prayer’s value in quantitative terms.

I also take note of the Zaleskis’ sober conclusion that “the studies so far devised have proved inadequate to the task, not least because they depend on an unsophisticated understanding of God and prayer.”

Richard Griffin

Had you peered through the upper front window of my house, anytime over a recent two week period, you could have spied me sitting immobile, thoroughly captivated by a book. Family members considered that I was living temporarily in 19th century America, plunged as I was in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s new work, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.

Thoroughly wrapped up in a fine book, I once more savored the benefits of holiday leisure time. It allowed me to appreciate the many satisfactions of reading about a man who, from his earliest years, was passionately devoted to books. As he was growing up, Lincoln had few books at his disposal; but those he managed to find─the King James Bible, the plays of Shakespeare, Pilgrim’s Progress─played a vital role in shaping the man he would become.

In approaching Lincoln, Goodwin faced a daunting challenge. After all, she had proposed to write yet another book about the person who has had more written about him than any other American. She needed to find a new way to make her subject and his era come alive for her readers. She therefore decided not to focus solely on this great, iconic figure, but rather to see him in relationship to his most formidable political competitors.

In April 1960, she evokes a moment when few realized that Lincoln would be a great man. William Henry Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, all thought themselves to have a better shot at the Republican nomination than did the hulking rail splitter from Kentucky and Illinois. And these three competitors did not soon thereafter give up the dream of becoming president.

But Lincoln, once president, made extraordinary use of his rivals. By bringing these men into his cabinet, along with Edwin Stanton and other leading politicians of the time, and managing to bring their skills to bear (without being stymied by their ambitions and often quixotic personality traits) Lincoln successfully steered his administration through the most trying time in American history.

Goodwin portrays the 16th president as a man of altogether rare qualities of personality. “An indomitable sense of purpose,” she writes in summary, “had sustained him through the disintegration of the Union and through the darkest months of the war, when he was called upon again and again to rally his disheartened countrymen, soothe the animosity of his generals, and mediate among members of his often contentious administration.”

We are reminded once more how dark this era was. The war casualties that amounted to more than 600,000 deaths on both sides (more than America has suffered in all its other wars combined) were a frightful assault on the emotions of their countrymen. How Lincoln himself managed to cope with the reports of deaths coming from the battlefields, and what he observed there first-hand, continues to provoke wonder.

Private griefs intruded as well. In that era, the death of young people was a staple of daily life. Salmon Chase, governor of Ohio before he became Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, endured the death of three wives, at least two of them in their 20s. During his presidency, Lincoln had to bear the death of his son Willie and the resulting terrible depression of his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln.

Throughout the four year struggle, the president held fast to his determination to save the union. It was only with time that he came to see how the emancipation of the people held as slaves was part of that same purpose. For a long time previously, Lincoln had been willing to compromise on the question of slavery so long as he could hold the union together.

It is painful to read that he did not consider Negroes equal to white people in intelligence and natural abilities. Moreover, he had held that, when freed, they should voluntarily go back to Africa.

Details about Lincoln’s lifestyle as president, as recounted by Goodwin, fascinated me. For instance, he used to attend the theater regularly, going to Grover’s Theater more than 100 times during his presidency. He found that plays would provide him with breaks from the often grim news of the war.

Even when pressed with business, he also would spend hours talking with friends, telling stories and anecdotes stemming from his past life. One of his favorite recreations would be to drop in at Seward’s house and talk with him far into the night.

Lincoln’s readiness to receive in the White House ordinary citizens in huge numbers revealed not only his interest in people and his patience. These public receptions also witnessed to his belief in the importance of the American populace feeling close to their government.  

The pathos of Lincoln’s assassination never fails to stir me, as it does almost everyone who reads about it. That a man who had saved the national community, as had Lincoln, could have been lost to the nation when it still sorely needed him still appears as a terrible tragedy.

Richard Griffin

“I will take my chances on the power of intercessory prayer,” my Protestant theologian friend replies with an impish smile. I had asked him what he thinks about the many prayers promised me by friends during a recent illness.

“You’ll be in my prayers,” they have told me over and over. Having heard about my being sick, they promise to include me in the daily requests they address to God.

I cannot remember explicitly the names of all the friends who have responded to my need for comfort with the same kind of spiritual gift. They obviously consider their prayers for me the best gesture they can offer.

I much welcome these offerings of spiritual support. It gladdens my heart to realize how many people care enough to make mention of me in their prayers a priority

However, I have lived into an age when many people have given up any credence in the value of prayer. Normative in some ways is the attitude expressed in an affectionate letter I have received from a friend in her twenties. She writes: “I just wanted you to know you have been and will continue to be in my thoughts.”

This experience has made me reflect on prayer and the belief that it can change things. In that effort I welcome the reflections of others who have studied the history of this prime spiritual activity.

In their newly published book entitled Prayer, Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski offer many examples of traditional prayer that is integrated with a larger culture. This they contrast with the kind of prayer often associated with modernity that is little more than therapy. Deeply individualistic, it seems valued because it works.

Of prayer directed toward bodily healing, these authors emphasize its connection with community. “Healing prayer, we submit, is a work of repair, reknitting the social fabric that is frayed by illness or ruptured by death. It is a divine work, but its natural medium is a flourishing religious culture with a robust sense of communion between self and society, between society and the transcendent. Failing that sense of communion, healing prayer often takes on the appearance of a strange embellishment or an oddball obsession.”

To me, the prayers of friends are evidence of that sense of communtion and reflect a deeper spirituality than may ordinarily be evident. Meister Eckart, the 14th century German mystic once said “There is nothing so much like God as silence.” Some of my well wishers may have discovered through silent prayer an approach to God that has given them deeper insight into reality than one would otherwise imagine.

Do I think that prayer has enough power to change my health for the better? Though I remain open to this possibility, this is not a question I focus on. For me it is enough to be included in the daily chorus of petitions that people everywhere make to God on my behalf. I welcome being part of that mysterious process.

I do not expect, much less demand, divine intervention directly delivered to improve the functioning of my bodily organs. Rather, I believe in the ways my physicians and other health care providers have to express the goodness of God toward me.

Similarly, I look to family members who gift me with precious loving care at home; they also give expression to divine providence toward me. Visiting nurses and others suggest to me that someone attaches significant value to my life and well being.

Our historical era also features bizarrely opposite attitudes toward prayer. Many people, Americans especially, show themselves fanatic on the subject and feel free to direct God’s thunder upon those whose politics they dislike. The spoutings of televangelists on the right have precious little in common with the faith that has marked my whole life.

I value the tradition of prayer that has graced every stage of my lengthening life. To have prayed for others all during this time and to have been included in the prayers of countless other people has made me part of an expanded world. I look back with pleasure on the many occasions when I have joined with people of other nations and traditions as we have stood together in expressing our needs to God.

Often I feel dissatisfied with the quality of attention I give to prayer. The best remedy for this problem, I have discovered, is to rely on the prayers of others. They can pick up for me my lack of spirituality by including my prayer in a widespread chorus of believers.

Among its other features, prayer offers a fine remedy for isolation. It can bring us into contact with a community much larger than we normally imagine, one made up of those who strive for spiritual gifts such as hope and love. When this chorus comes marching in, I want to be of this number and I feel thankful for those who have reached out toward me.

Richard Griffin

My friend has announced surprising news. In the near future, Bill, as I will call him, intends to get a hearing aid. Family members have been telling him that he often does not hear what they are saying to him and he has noticed himself missing what others tell him.

You would expect me, as a more or less rational person, to welcome Bill’s decision to invest in hearing assistance. After all, I’m the guy who years ago in another column approved of Bill Clinton acquiring hearing aids for each ear. When still in the White House, Clinton announced the change, explaining that long exposure to loud music and blaring political meetings had damaged his hearing.

Similarly, I have applauded other friends when they have outfitted themselves with artificial hearing devices. I have also condoled with them in their complaints when the aids do not work as well as advertising promised.

In Bill’s instance, however, I confess to feeling resistance to the idea. Perhaps it’s that he is the friend I have known the longest. Ever since we were schoolboys together, decades ago, we have remained close. Ours is the pleasure of frequent association that includes sharing the major events, both joyful and sorrowful, that have marked our lives.

What bothers me about Bill’s prospective new move is that, to my inner feelings, it seems like diminishment. Bill is becoming deaf, as he freely admits to me and others, and that grieves me. Of course, I admire his courage in making this admission; not everyone can summon up the gumption to recognize this disability, and many stubbornly resist the efforts of others to make them get help.

Given the rational choice, I would certainly want Bill to hear what is said to him, rather than to hold his ground and refuse to get a hearing aid. Knowing from such long experience what a marvelous friend he is, I want him to be fully involved in my life, in that of his family, and with his other friends.

So why should I be saddened? For a long time, I have been an enthusiastic admirer of the technological advances that improve the livers of other people. And I have advocated the kind of openness that allows us to change. Bill is, to me, a model of such openness.

Still, there is my emotional response that refuses to welcome instances of decline among those that I care about. Perhaps the strength of my emotion comes from a series of diminishments that I have recently experienced thanks to emergency surgery. I now find myself feeling closer to disability and diminishment than I have ever felt in my adult life.

On the deepest level, experiences of this sort are sobering because they remind us of the ultimate decline that leads to death. I shrink from facing my own diminishments because they are a prelude to the final taking away of my human functions.

Perhaps I can here invoke a man who speaks and writes with wisdom about these matters. Dr. Andrew Weil recently gave an interview to the online service Beliefnet on the subject of aging and its spiritual values.

He finds the denial of aging, so pervasive in American society, to be based in the fear of death. “Aging is a constant reminder that we’re moving in that direction,” he says, “so I think that’s the root fear.” He adds that we fear other things as well such as the loss of independence and of familiar pleasures in life.

Weil’s formula for dealing with these fears is “facing them squarely and being honest about them.” But his main response is to pursue a vigorous spiritual life, a recommendation that I second heartily. Spirituality, in my book, remains a strong support for people struggling with some of the difficult issues of later life.

As part of that approach Weil believes in meditation. About this practice he says: “I think meditation has, first of all, really helped stabilize my moods. I think it has also increased my concentration and made it easier for me to be more mindful .  .  . and I think it’s made me more aware of my non-physical self.”

My own appreciation of meditation goes in a somewhat different direction but I also value Weil’s approach to it. I rely on this spiritual exercise to help me deal with the mixed feelings I experience at many stages of my later life. Meditation, especially with friends, buoys me up when I face unexpected challenges.

In meditations over the coming weeks, I hope specifically to sort out my feelings about my friend Bill’s decision and what they reveal about my attitudes toward my own life. Perhaps a tension will remain between my rational and elemental self on this issue but I will look toward a better integration between the two.

Richard Griffin

If Bob O’Shea had ever wanted to bring all his friends together in one place, he would have needed to rent Fenway Park. At least this was my fantasy─and that of many others─about the number of people he could call friend.

Last week. Bob died, some three months before his 77th birthday. His death made me weep both for him and his family, and for the loss that I suffered of my longest and best friend.

Bob and I remained close for 63 years, ever since we started high school together in 1943. In both high school and college, he majored in friendship, focusing on personal relationships that always meant more to him than anything else.

At St. Sebastian’s Country Day School, founded only two years before we began as freshmen, Bob led the way in a vibrant social life. While most of his fellow students, notably me, were gangly adolescents, Bob had an assured poise in almost every situation. It was said that, when he called on a girl to take her out, he would also charm her mother as well.

He had a great gift for humor, then and ever afterward. Conversation with him typically provoked laughter, no matter how seriously he took the subject at hand. He had an acute sense of the ridiculous, and never took himself too seriously.

But his life revealed dimensions that we would not have suspected 60 years ago. Some of us thought him destined for an early marriage, often surrounded as he was by charming young women. However, he had the patience to wait for the right one. He married in his 50s, and his life was happily transformed.

Long ago, his friends observed that although he was a bright student, he never allowed school work to interfere with real life. Nor was he obsessed by rules, being celebrated for his ability to charm his way out of uncongenial restrictions.

Throughout his life, his intellectual interests remained strong and active. And his early skepticism about rules belied a steadfast moral sense that helped him provide a compass for those in search of one.

A line in the newspaper notice of Bob’s death describes him well: “Beloved friend of many.” Understating it this way merely hints at the intensity and the scope of his friendships. He was deeply loved by an unusually large number of people.

His family was at the center of his world. When he was 55, to his continuing happiness, Bob married Lauren Curry. A few years after their marriage, he and his wife adopted two daughters in South America. They were a great gift in his life and Bob observed to a friend that he and Lauren had secured the national treasures of Bolivia.

The family circle extended further, for Bob’s love and concern for others included his brothers, his nieces and nephew, as well as numerous cousins. One younger cousin has written of him: “I always knew I could call on him to get grounded, when I felt like a lonely planet out there.”

There were others as well. His niece Janique says: “At last count, his godchildren were numbered in the 50s.”

Much larger was the group of people with whom Bob did business as an insurance agent. He did not regard his customers as mere purchasers of insurance coverage. Instead, he made friends of them and their concerns became his own.

He took his faith tradition seriously all his life but he was not uncritical about it. When the sexual abuse crisis erupted in the Archdiocese of Boston, Bob was deeply angered by both the perpetrators and the authorities who had done nothing to stop it. He loved his Church and, for that reason, felt deeply critical about those who misused its authority.

For me, Bob was the epitome of love and concern for others. I once wrote a column about him in my series on spirituality. Since I did not dare ask his permission, knowing he would reject any suggestion that he was any sort of paragon, I used a pseudonym to describe a man who practiced a ministry of helping other people.

Without indulging in sentimentality, I described him as a kind of saint. This portrayal would have horrified him, but to me it was the reality of his character. The spiritual tradition that he and I espouse says that, ultimately, all you have to do is love.

But this statement drips with irony because loving is one of the most difficult of human activities. It must have been difficult for him too, at least sometimes. But that is the way he lived his life.

This, ultimately, is what made him unique. He was a man whose concern for others stretched wide. If the fulfillment of spiritual life is to love, he reached fulfillment long ago. That is the reason why he leaves behind so many people who both mourn his loss and celebrate his life.

Richard Griffin