Growing up, I never once met a Muslim. Nor can I remember ever being in the presence of a person who professed the Islamic faith. In my suburban setting, there seemed be no one of this religious tradition.

When, as an adult, I became a student of theology, the focus of my course of study remained squarely on Christianity. That meant hardly ever mentioning Islam, much less going into its history and teaching. Despite an advanced study of theological issues, my colleagues and I remained almost completely ignorant of this other tradition.

Even when I visited the Middle East in 1965 with a group of Catholic colleagues, I spent only a few days in part of Jordan and there my focus was on the places where Jesus walked.

Looking back, it is hard for me to believe that a faith shared by about a billion other people was a blank slate for me. How could I have remained ignorant of such an important factor in the world’s life?

Fortunately, one of the benefits of living long is the opportunity to remedy some areas of ignorance. I feel thankful at having my life stretch over enough decades for me to begin learning something about Islam.

In that effort I have had the good luck to become acquainted with a person who combines the life-long practice of Islam with a scholar’s knowledge of this tradition. Ali Asani teaches Indo-Muslim culture and languages at Harvard and is often called upon to help people outside the university to attain a better understanding of his faith.

He has long been used to hearing stereotypes about his religious heritage. “How can you believe in a religion like Islam that espouses terrorism and violence?” a graduate student friend once asked him.

“That student could not reconcile images of violence with me,” said Asani, who happens to be a very mild-mannered person.

This identification of Islam with terrorism has taken hold, Asani thinks, because of what he calls “the othering of Muslims in the media.” Americans read, hear, and watch news material likely to implant false impressions in our psyches. Without critical analysis, we easily jump to the association between Islam and violence.

“These perceptions go back centuries” Asani explains. Christians and others have indulged in a mutual stereotyping that dehumanizes people different from themselves. This amounts to a “clash of ignorances” rather than of civilizations. At its most extreme, this kind of collision can lead to ethnic cleansing and other monstrous results.

Western societies are filled with mistaken notions about Muslims. For example, we tend to think that all Muslims are Arabs. But the Muslim population of Asia extends eastward to the Pacific, and most Muslims are not Arabs. And we assume that all Arabs are Muslim whereas, in the United States, 70 percent of Arabs are Christian.

Being a Muslim in one country is very different from being a Muslim elsewhere. Living in Saudi Arabia, for example, contrasts sharply with being Muslim in Senegal, with the latter’s long tradition of peaceful diversity. When Islam is linked to political power, then it takes on a very different face.

What Islam means is submission to the one God. A Muslim is a person who submits to that God. In this definition, the great figures of the Hebrew Bible, starting with Abraham and Moses, were Muslim. So was Jesus, and others in the New Testament.

The notoriously divisive word Jihad means to struggle or to strive. Originally, it was used in a defensive mode as when you struggled to protect your neighbor. But in the 9th century, the word was first employed to justify imperial rule.

As to suicide bombers, Asani states bluntly: “They have nothing to do with religion; there is no scriptural justification for it; these are political acts.” He sees poverty, dehumanization, and colonialism playing into these horrific acts of violence.

Asked about the madrasas, Muslim schools seen in the west as seed beds of violence, this scholar portrays them, in part, as the way poor people, as distinguished from the elite, learn basic skills. To some degree, they are a response to colonialism. It is a mistake to judge that all Muslim education fosters warlike attitudes.

The most important lesson to take away from Asani’s approach is the error of judging a religious tradition outside of its cultural setting. Islam is so diverse that generalizations about it are hazardous. You must remain aware of the sharp differences that characterize this religion from situation to situation.

These insights from a Muslim scholar can serve to indicate how I am attempting to chip away at my own ignorance. Little by little, I hope to learn more about a major force in our world.

Getting to know personally at least one man who is steeped in that tradition is a large step forward. Personal connections probably do more to break down stereotypes than all the books I could ever read about Islam.

Richard Griffin

An inch of brick sticking up in my path is what did me in. Walking blithely along, minutes after a refreshing swim, I failed to see the danger. The next thing I knew, I was lying stunned after falling on my face. Blood was flowing from my forehead and I felt confused. Later, at a health clinic, it would take seven stitches to close the wound.

Plunging downward from a height of six feet is bound to be damaging. It’s also discombobulating and humiliating. You lose your composure, suddenly finding yourself in what feels like a different world. The assurances by which you live have been disrupted and you are left in a gaping no man’s land or twilight zone.

After the confusion cleared, my first interior gesture was to accuse myself of stupidity. The fall could easily have been avoided. Why did I not look where I was treading? How could I have been so distracted as not to be wary of a familiar hazard?

Since the event, I have replayed it in my mind over and over. Where exactly was the tipping point, I seek to discover?

But, as John Updike, in his most recent novel Villages, makes one of his characters reflect, “Accidents are accidents and demonstrate only the vacant absurdity of everything that is.” This is not quite my philosophy but it gives emotional expression to the feelings of chaos that falls provoke.

This kind of calamity happens to the celebritous as well as the rest of us. Complications from falls were a factor in the death of Katherine Graham, the legendary publisher of the Washington Post, and in that of longtime network news anchor David Brinkley.

When Harold Pinter was announced the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature, he was shown in the world’s media with a cane in his hand and a bandage on his forehead, emblems of a fall he had suffered recently.

The day before I wrote these words a neighbor emailed me with news that a mutual friend had fallen getting into a taxi and had broken his leg. And two other friends have done such damage to themselves by falling as to bring on seemingly endless complications.

We elders have no monopoly on falls. Falling is something that happens to people of all ages. I think of the graduate student friend who fell down the stairs of her divinity school. And in winter we see casts, braces, and splints on all sorts of people who have slipped on the ice. Everyone faces the possibility of this experience.

But older people fall more often and, when we do, the results can be much worse. In my city and elsewhere, our pathways are full of hazards, some of them the result of negligence. Cities and towns, individual homeowners, and landlords should be ashamed of the faulty brick sidewalks and other obstacles that endanger the passage of people with disabilities and others who must walk carefully.

Of older Americans, one out of three of us is reported to fall at least once each year. (Some studies suggest that the number is even greater ─ more than half.) And in the year 2002 such falls resulted in death for more than 12,000 of us. Had I landed on a stone railing nearby, my latest plunge to the pavement could have unceremoniously ushered me into that group.

For those with osteoporosis, the risk of breaking bones is acute. Unfortunately, bone breaks often lead to other reverses in bodily well being and, often, complications both long-lasting and grievous.

With stakes this high, all of those in later life have compelling reasons to take care. My latest misadventure has led me to make changes in my gait. Instead of walking with a sliding motion, moving my feet along rapidly, I now take pains to lift them. And when I must move fast, I scrutinize the terrain on my route. The Psalmist says: “Walk humbly before the Lord.” I now do.

The director of the Yale Program on Aging points to the loss of confidence some older people suffer as one highly undesirable result of falling. She says it often makes us cut back on physical activity and hesitate to leave our homes at all, a truly unfortunate outcome.

Almost every house presents hazards, especially on stairs and in bathrooms. Ideally, we should make physical changes to reduce the dangers but, according to one survey, more than a third of older adults say they cannot afford them.

Medications also increase the risk of falling. The side effects of many drugs include dizziness and vision problems. Part of a fall-prevention plan would involve adjusting medications to make sure they do not heighten the risk.

More information on preventing falls is available from the National Council on the Aging, reachable at 202 479-1200. If you have access to the Internet, the address is www.ncoa.org.

Richard Griffin

What American magazine has the largest paid circulation? Which one has twice as many subscribers as the runner-up?

The answer to both questions is, of course, AARP the Magazine, weighing in at 22 million in paid subscriptions. The closest to it, Reader’s Digest, has just 11 million. The front runner has beaten out some 12 thousand other magazines that are published in the United States.

The millions of readers the Magazine attracts are apparently not deterred by its pretentious title, in which the letters AARP no longer stand for the American Association of Retired Persons.

The editor of this periodical, Steven Slon, impresses me as a remarkably nice guy in a business usually too high-powered for nice. But he does have strong views about language acceptable in his magazine, some of which he presented to an audience gathered at the recent American Society on Aging conference in Philadelphia.

If you want to get published in the Magazine, you had better avoid terms such as “old.” The editor faults this word because “it is a judgment.” If you want to use one that is better, he suggests, use “older.”

Slon even objects to “aging,” calling it “a loaded word.” It should not be applied to adults but rather to his grandson who is currently six years old.

Another term nixed by Steve is “senior,” as applied to long-lived people. And, of course, the word “retirement” has become a big no-no, now that the concept has been dropped from the very name of AARP.

Slon approvingly quotes Hemingway, who would seem to know something about words. About this one, the great novelist allegedly called retirement “the ugliest word in the English language.”

Steve is amused by, but does not recommend, the term “wrinklies.” That is what some Brits use, especially those who produce the humor magazine Oldies.

Other sinful words in the presenter’s view are “spry,” “feisty,” and, perhaps the most damnable, that sneaky little word “still.” When Steve hears that weasel of a word, it makes him think of a certain culture hero in my home town.

John Kenneth Galbraith, that neither old nor spry nor feisty patriarch who has been alive for the last 96 years, loves to tell about the op-ed piece he once wrote on “still.” In it he expressed dismay at how often people approached him asking: “Are you still walking, talking, reading, writing?”

What astonished Galbraith was the response. He heard from more readers on the subject of “still” than on anything else he had ever written for a newspaper.

Slon offers a provocative reason for his perception that different generations prefer different words.He calls those who have lived long “pre-ironic.”

This I take to mean that we elders cannot see the delicate meanings in the words that he wants to avoid. This generalization suggests that he has not met many people older than he who have developed a fine sense of irony about life’s absurdities. In fact, however, some of us find it quite difficult to breathe in an irony-free zone.

Some of editor Slon’s preferences about words will strike most people as forced and merely precious. As if to refute him, Abigail Trafford of the Washington Post, the very next speaker on his panel, pridefully introduced herself boasting: “I’m an old broad.”

I certainly do not mind if someone wishes to call me “old.” To me, it comes as a mark of honor, not an insult. What can be better than the gift of longevity?

In fact, I take a strong stand behind “old,” a perfectly fine word even though AARP – –  and American society in general – – keep trying to dump it. AARP has been working for years to purify itself from anything that suggests people’s duration on earth. In doing so, it has successfully created a name for itself that stands for nothing.

But Steven Slon says that to use “old” is unacceptable because “it is a judgment.” Of course it is, but so is just about everything else. “You’re sweet, you’re thin, you’re kind to do that, you’re the top.”

A journalist friend supports my view of “old,” and, hitting back at the purists, calls it “the newest four-letter word.” He may not be a speller, but he is right.

About some other words I feel mixed. I very much dislike the words “senior” and “senior citizen” as applied to people my age. I fault the words largely because they have been already taken by those in the fourth year of high school and college. However, “senior” is perfectly fine when used as a comparative: “She is my senior by six years.”

I recognize “feisty” and “spry” as clichés and resolutely avoid them.

Slon makes some good points. But let’s not condemn ourselves to a linguistic correctness so fussy as to put everyone to sleep.

Richard Griffin

If you are about to retire from your job, and discover that your company is planning a party to mark the occasion, should you agree to take part in this celebratory event?

You are on the brink of retirement and are seriously thinking about moving to a new town. Is this a good idea?

With a view toward the increased leisure that comes with retirement, you are about to commit yourself as a full-time volunteer at your local hospital. Does this make sense?

Yes, to the first; No to the second and third. At least, that is what Bob Weiss would answer. And, at the moment, he probably knows more about retirement than just about anybody else.

That’s Robert W. Weiss, Senior Fellow at the UMass Boston’s Gerontology Institute. Over the past few years, he and his colleagues have made a thorough study of the subject, interviewing 89 men and women retirees. From this research has come a book, The Experience of Retirement, which will be published in November.

Those interviewed, it should be noted, are all from Boston suburbs. Moreover, almost all of them are middle-class and many have had careers in the mainline professions.

Weiss explains that he himself can be considered retired, having stepped down 14 years ago as professor of sociology at UMass Boston. But ever since, he has continued his work in research, lecturing, and writing.

The main reason for accepting the party? It will make you feel better about yourself. “Even a bittersweet retirement event is better than no event,” concludes Weiss. The celebration will also give a positive twist to your thoughts about the workplace and colleagues that you have left.

As to moving your residence, you would not be acting wisely. It would be much better at this time of major transition to test the waters rather than to take the plunge.

The same caution applies to volunteering. In general, it’s a fine thing to do but committing yourself prematurely to a full-time slot forfeits the leisure that offers you many new possibilities.

For those thinking of retiring, Weiss offers an all-purpose rule of thumb: “The more orderly the retirement, the better.” That means advance planning and, especially, linking plans with the wishes of one’s spouse or significant other.

Trying to make this relationship flourish must loom large in any happy retirement.  When handled right, this relationship with a life partner does not remain static but changes, over the years, into a closer companionship.

Another central task for people in retirement, especially for those who live alone, is to stave off social isolation. About this, Weiss says that most handle it reasonably well. But those who derived their community from their workplace will need to adjust or face loneliness.

Often, those who suffer isolation do not recognize what is happening to them. The researcher urges people to try various activities, even if they feel pessimistic in advance that any one involvement will work for them

No single way of organizing retirement works for everyone, but certain approaches have proven worthwhile. Balancing engagement and freedom; choosing activities that replace the ones you like best in the workplace; trying things you always wanted to do but never got around to; finding retirement activities that boost your feelings of self worth ─these are staples.

About volunteer work, Bob Weiss offers a helpful generalization. “The closer your volunteer position comes to being a real job, the better.” But volunteering often produces feelings of frustration when you are not given a meaningful role. Again, the best rule of thumb, he says, is not to commit yourself without trying the position first.

As for paid work in retirement, the author finds that 16 or so hours per week suits most people best. That schedule provides enough time for a desirable mixture of labor and leisure.

In this study I would have liked to see more evidence of retirees who have opted for community service. Asked about retirees getting involved in social action, Bob Weiss says: “That’s unusual ─ almost always they are people who have done it before.”

That strikes me as true, but the idea of huge numbers of retirees in Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere focused on improving their tennis game, preparing for their next luxury cruise, or ready to drive a golf ball down the green fairways, but doing little or nothing for the common good, gets me down.

With all the gaping holes our society shows ─ in schooling the young, in providing health care, in relieving poverty ─ we could use what the Gerontological Society of America calls “the tremendous reservoir of skills and experience in our rapidly growing older adult population.”

Retirement is a time of great potential. The time has come for drawing on it and putting it to use for the benefit of us all.                     

Richard Griffin

A friend of many years standing (whom I will here name Paul) has shaken my inner world by revealing something of his own.

He is a person of strong character and sharp intelligence. In addition, he has devoted his life to community service in ways that continue to inspire me. At the same time, he cherishes his family and is an admirable husband and father.

Paul’s life is notable for continuity. He takes seriously the educational and governmental institutions that have helped to shape his character and his career.

So, too, with the church. From childhood on, Paul has been an active Catholic, well educated in the teachings of the church and committed to helping others in need. Now arrived in mid-life, he has continued his allegiance to this tradition, along with his wife and family.

Recently, however, in the midst of a conversation about the church, Paul surprised me by allowing that he now feels shaken in this allegiance. Recent events have upset his confidence in this institution that has been such a major influence on his life. Nowadays, he is so deeply troubled by much of what church authority does that he has doubts about his place in the church.

This disclosure of Paul’s problems with his church and mine has hit me hard. Coming from a person of such longstanding and solid attachment to the tradition that we share, this news persuades me that the current crisis in the church is more pervasive than I had thought. If Paul is scandalized enough to consider alternatives, then the number of other people who feel the same way must be legion.

I count myself among those who feel similarly troubled. Many actions taken by those in authority within the church bother me also. It grieves me to know that so many Catholics feel torn between authority and conscience

By reason of my now advanced years, I bring to this question a perspective not likely to be shared by the young. They did not directly experience the changes that the Catholic Church made in the 1960s, as I did. Those changes of both attitudes and practice, made by the Second Vatican Council─convened 43 years ago this month─excited many people of my generation and made us hope the Church would stay committed to reform.

However, even before that decade was out, the pope of the time, Paul VI, had forced on the church a decision about birth control that was to prove disastrous. And, in time, the failure of the church to implement the vision of Vatican II left us with disappointed dreams. Even the long reign of the late John Paul II, while productive of much good, maintained a model of one-man rule that clashes with the Gospel and serves the church badly.

The explosive revelation of sexual abuse by the clergy has come as a terrible blow to Catholics at large. For many laypeople, the worst part of it was the failure of the bishops to accept responsibility and take action. In the greater Boston area, people still feel outraged that the Vatican rewarded the deposed Cardinal Law with a plush position at Santa Maria Maggiore, one of Rome’s most prominent basilicas.

Catholics of my age have been long inured to corruption in the church. Many of us learned to live with it decades ago and considered it the price to be paid for the institution’s human fallibility. We even learned how to twist it into an argument for the church’s divine origins. Though Boccaccio’s Decameron, written in the 14th century, was never our bedside reading, we could have found support in its pages for this attitude.

The second of the Decameron’s 100 stories tells of a man in Paris who was considering converting to the Catholic Church. A friend was urging him on.

Before making a decision the fellow wanted to make a pilgrimage to Rome, the heart of the church. His friend urged him not togo, fearing that Roman corruption would surely prevent his conversion.

He ignored this advice, however, went to Rome, and came back home. Anxious to discover if, indeed, he had decided not to convert, his friend put the question to him. The man answered: “Certainly not. Any church that can continue to last through so much corruption must surely be divine.”

I remember hearing this argument, or variations on it, during my whole lifetime.

However, there is a difference between corruption in past centuries and those we experience in our own lifetime. When, for example, you are a parishioner at Our Lady, Help of Christians church in Newton, and see your pastor deposed for makeshift reasons that disguise the abuse of church authority, then it hits you hard.

Many Catholics have given up on the church. Despite my ongoing resentment toward the culture of church authority and my rejection of many values the clerical structure reveals, I cannot see myself ever leaving. It is my spiritual home; it belongs to me and not only to those who wield power.

Richard Griffin

A few days ago, at a street party, I heard a neighbor, my senior by a few years, recite by heart two lines from Longfellow’s “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” words that he had memorized, seven or eight decades ago. The two lines go as follows: “Archly the maiden smiled, and, with eyes overrunning with laughter, / Said, in a tremulous voice, ‘Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?’”

The maiden, in this long narrative poem, was Priscilla Mullins and the man, John Alden. The latter had come to see the young woman on an errand for his friend, Miles Standish, the Captain of Plymouth. It was to recommend Standish as a husband for Priscilla, but instead the woman was smitten with John himself.

The line, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?” was to become famous to great numbers of Americans now of a certain age. And Henry Wadsworth Longfellow achieved household-name status, perhaps the best known poet in the country with a reputation that still flourished when I was in elementary school.

The poem quoted above was not the best known of his works, however. “Listen my children and you shall hear / the midnight ride of Paul Revere” were words that even more schoolboys and girls in the 1930s would have known by heart. When my age peers and I were young, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ranked as our poet laureate, the almost-official celebrator of our national history.

Like many other eminent literary figures of the past, Longfellow has long since gone out of fashion. He is now regarded by critics as a writer who produced some fine poetry but one whose sentimentality and uneven literary quality limits his attractiveness in the modern era. Still, it offered me pleasure to reach down from my bookshelf an edition of his complete poems, a volume acquired by my mother long ago.

The incentive to look at Longfellow again has come from a new friend. Ivan, a faculty member at Notre Dame, has spent parts of the last two summers in Cambridge, in order to research material for a book on Longfellow. My friend, surprisingly, is a native of Patagonia, the extreme southern region of Chile, and teaches South American history.

Ivan is studying the works of Longfellow that are connected with the Spanish language. As professor of modern languages, first at his alma mater Bowdoin College, then at Harvard, Longfellow developed fluency in French, Italian, and Spanish, in addition to other languages. Most of us who became familiar with his poems long ago never realized what an accomplished teacher and scholar he was.

This renewed interest in him recently moved me to visit his house on Brattle Street in Cambridge. Though I had attended concerts on the lawn several times, I had not been inside the house for many years. Going through it, with a knowledgeable and enthusiastic park ranger as guide, proved an enjoyable experience.

Before it became Longfellow’s, the mansion was famous for housing George Washington when he first assumed command of the Continental Army. In 1835, Longfellow moved in as a boarder; he did not own the house until his marriage. The father of Fanny Appleton, his bride, gave it to him as a wedding present.

Walking through the rooms and hallways, I felt a mixture of emotions. The Victorian charm of the furnishings and the memories of another era evoked by the memorabilia touched me agreeably. But hearing again about the horrific death of Fanny, surprised by fire that caught her dress, and the way Longfellow never quite recovered from this event, created in me a renewed sadness.

We did not see the upper floor where this tragedy took place; insufficient federal funding for the Longfellow site has reduced staffing and made extended tours impossible. But the main floor is full of tangible reminders of the poet and his era. The “spreading chestnut tree” that once protected the village blacksmith survives in a wooden chair in Longfellow’s study. The chair was a gift from the children of Cambridge, and many of them came to visit him and to sit in it.

We know that Longfellow wrote charmingly  about his own children, We were happy to recognize, on the dining-room walls, the portrait of the three daughters─“grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, and Edith with golden hair”─who invade his study in “The Children’s Hour.” We should also remember that this happy home was the center of considerable intellectual and literary activity. Abolitionists and transcendentalists gathered at the poet’s table, and his own work of composition and translation brought consciousness of a wider world to a young nation.

Memorizing Longfellow is not longer a staple of grade-school education, but a visit to the poet’s house helps us to realize why he was a towering figure in his own time, and why he should not be forgotten by ours.

Richard Griffin