Eating Mindfully

“Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty.”

To some Americans, these prayerful words are as familiar as old friends. Many people have been long accustomed to saying them aloud before sitting down to dinnerand perhaps other meals.

For many others of us, however, there is no time for such a ritual. We are too rushed and usually grab food when and where we can. We may even lunch at our desk while continuing to work, and give precious little thought to what we eat.

In the hectic atmosphere of an office or the pressures of family schedules, eating does not allow for leisure, much less prayer. And yet, mealtime can offer precious opportunities for renewing our soul as well as our body.

The traditional words of the grace quoted above suggest some of the rich meaning that lies hidden in eating a meal.

First, it is a time for receiving God’s blessing. The Lord looks lovingly on us and we are showered with divine favor. God loves us and the meal is a sign of that love.

Secondly, the food and drink set before us come as gifts from God. They are products of the earth and human hands, yes, but the creator has made them available to us.

Thirdly, we are recipients of these goods that enable us to continue living. They also bring us pleasure, even joy. What the Psalm says of wine, applies to all nourishment: it makes joyful the human heart.

Fourth, the gifts come from a giver who overflows with goods for us. The old word “bounty” suggests an inexhaustible supply of gifts. God’s generosity toward the human family does not know limits, although our selfishness too often finds ways to deprive brother and sisters of their share.

The beauty of this approach can be summarized as Philip Zaleski and Paul Kaufman do in their book Gifts of the Spirit: “Through table blessings, we remember in our hearts and proclaim with our lips the divine source of all food, all nourishment. Gratitude for food thus becomes gratitude for creation, for life itself.”

To eat and drink with awareness of these ideas makes of mealtime a spiritual exercise of mindfulness. That is what some religious traditions would call it using a term favored in much current spirituality.

Here’s how the authors mentioned above describe mindful eating: “Be attentive to every part of the process: how your fork spears the peas or shovels the carrots, how your muscles stretch and contract as hand and arm join forces to lift the food toward your mouth. Be aware of opening your lips to receive the morsel. Attend to the tastes and smells, the dance of the tongue and teeth as you chew.”

This approach, valuable for some, surely does not suit everybody. To me, it feels extreme. Nonetheless, reading it can suggest something of the spiritual potential in an everyday activity vital to our lives.

Reverently said, the traditional grace with which this column began has enough spiritual power to transform the action of eating and drinking. It is a simpler expression of mindfulness that then frees us to enjoy eating straightforwardly without analyzing each small movement of hand or mouth.

No single meal stands alone. When eating, we can be reminded of other times when we have sat down at the table with family members and friends. Many of those gatherings were marked by laughter, celebration, commemoration, or simply quiet exchange with one other person.

Eating thus brings back events in our lives that have made them memorable. If we come from the Christian tradition, meals will remind us of the Eucharist, the sacred rite of thanksgiving to God for divine deliverance from evil.

In this setting we may also become mindful of those who do not have enough good food and drink. How the world allows any of God’s children to go hungry remains part of the mystery of evil. Including them in our own gift-giving and in our prayers has to be part of any authentic spiritual life.

Many people of faith, taught by the Bible, see in earthly meals a preparation for the great feast of heaven, when they will sit down with the angels and saints in the loving presence of God.

Richard Griffin

Wake

Attending the wake of a friend is always a spiritual experience for me. Seeing, dead, a person whom I have known alive stirs in me an awe that never fails to raise the question of what it means to be human. When something so stupendous as death happens, how can it not provoke wonder at the fact of our existence?

The first time I ever saw a dead body was at the wake of an aunt. As a 13-year-old seeing her lifeless, I felt stunned. How could the person I knew and loved have come to this fate?  Something of these feelings have remained with me ever since.

Two weeks ago, I went to the wake of my friend, Dick. Kneeling at his casket, I wondered at the meaning of it all. Before me were the mortal remains of someone who had been in the second grade with me. We had also received First Holy Communion on the same day in the same church.

By what strange providence had this age peer preceded me in death? And how were things with him now?

It struck me, as it always does, how strange it is that a human being who was once full of life and moved in innumerable ways was now immobile forever. How could it ever end, that life with all its complicated and familiar habits of action and thinking?

In this instance, so much were we alike, in name, age, religion, social class, that my friend’s wake seemed like an apt preparation for mine. Though I was not dead yet, that certain fate awaited me, no matter how well my doctors and I took care of my health. The day would surely come when people would stand around my bier and converse about all sorts of things and, at least from time to time, about me.

In a prayer made next to my friend’s body, I reflected on the last time we had seen one another. On that occasion, we were about to board a boat where we would celebrate the birthday of a lifelong friend of us both. That festive cruise now felt far removed from the body lying before me.

Thomas Lynch, in addition to being a fine poet and essayist, knows a great deal about dead bodies. By profession, he is an undertaker who, as he says, buries some 200 of his fellow townsmen each year in Milford, Michigan. He is also a man of faith who recognizes the body as a temple of the Holy Spirit.

At the end of a recent essay, Lynch extols the ministers and priests who preside over funerals and burials, reverently giving honor to the bodies they commend to God. “They stand─these local heroes, these saints and sinners, these men and women of God─in that difficult space between the living and the dead, between faith and fear, between humanity and Christianity and say out loud, ‘Behold, I show you a mystery.’”

They recognize the mystery of death and the wonder of what happens to the human body. So do I now, as I have done ever since going to my first wake at age 13. Each succeeding time when I have seen the bodies of family members and friends, the sight stirs in me the same awe. How can any one of us ever get used to the death of people we have known alive?

But at wakes, I have noticed, not everybody seems to be feeling awe at death. Some people chat as they would at a party and look to be untouched by their encounter with mortality.

It would be a mistake, however, to judge these cheerful-looking people as detached. Beneath the surface, they too may feel some of the awe that the sight of death always stirs up in me.

My faith tradition has accustomed me to thinking of death as a mystery. That term here does not so much mean a puzzle as a reality too deep for words. Death has a meaning that is so profound that we can never entirely grasp it.

I have never been able to believe that human existence ends with death. Our lives are altogether too rich for me to accept such a negative fate. In my faith, the mystery of death leads to something unimaginably wonderful. Death looks, for all the world, like the end of everything, but I continue to believe it is the transition to fuller life.

Richard Griffin

Ames In Gilead

Any novel whose narrator and central character is my own age certainly gets my attention. That’s the way it was reading Gilead, the beautiful new book written by Marilynne Robinson. I consider it the most satisfying piece of fiction that has come my way in many years.

The author already had a fine reputation with the critics. They loved her first novel, Housekeeping. But that appeared in 1981 and she had published no other novels till this past year. Gilead thus rates as a literary event in itself; beyond that, it offers valuable insights into aging and spirituality, two subjects dear to me.

The 76-year-old narrator is John Ames, a Congregationalist minister who lives in rural Iowa in 1956. Both his father and grandfather were also ministers, each quite different from the other. The elder Ames was a Civil War veteran with a missing eye to prove it, while his son─the narrator’s father─debunked that war and all others.

The novel does not come with individual chapters but takes the shape of one long letter that John Ames, at the request of his wife, addresses to their six-year-old son. It is a testament that will inform the boy about his father’s life and character, after the latter’s death. John feels that death to be imminent, following his doctor’s diagnosis of angina pectoris.

“I do hope to die with a quiet heart,” he says of his spiritual preparedness for that event. About the place which became his home two years after his birth in 1880 and where he expects to die, he turns eloquent: “I love this town. I think sometimes of going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love.”

Reverend Ames appreciates the woman, Lila, who wanted to marry him despite his being 35 years older than she. And having a son in his old age also means everything to him: “The children of old age are unspeakably precious,” he states. As one who became a parent only after 50, I can give a ringing endorsement to this sentiment.

Though he is prepared for death, he does not feel all that positive about old age. “I don’t want to be old,” he explains to his son. “I don’t want to be the tremulous coot you barely remember.”

Using a reference to baseball (a sport he loves, even to the extent of watching a Red Sox/Yankees game on television), John envisions what his body will be like in the next life. “I imagine a kind of ecstatic pirouette, a little bit like going up for a line drive when you’re so young that your body almost doesn’t know about effort.”

Belief in God is central in his life and his preaching of the word gives expression to that faith. His attachment to church, extends to the physical building where his congregation meets. He loves to slip away from his house at night when he cannot sleep, sit in one of the pews, and pray while allowing himself to fall peacefully asleep.

What he calls “the deep things of man” have become his familiars through the practice of his ministry. He speaks about “grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials.” I find touching the relish he feels for the rites of religion as he reaches out to God and the people whom he serves.

Of spiritual bravery he speaks with further eloquence: “To acknowledge that there is more beauty that our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.”

Ames’s closest friend is a fellow minister and age peer, a man identified only as “Boughton.” Their relationship brings much support to John but also has become the source of complication. His friend’s son, John Ames Boughton, now in his 30s, has led a checkered life that troubles both his father and the man for whom he is named.

When the younger Boughton returns to Gilead and seeks counsel from Reverend Ames, the latter feels turmoil and must wrestle with conflicting emotions. His working out of these issues ushers the minister into another stage of spiritual development.

The author brings to this novel, not only a creative talent for entering into the life of a man in old age (at least, as people used to think of it), but a sensitive understanding of religion and ministry. Insights abound but they do not impede the smoothly flowing narrative letter that John Ames writes for his son.

Marilynne Robinson is an artist who, among much else, evokes a sense of place, remote from my own. And yet, she makes me feel a kinship with this Iowa minister, a man approaching the end of his life with faith in God and love for the people God has given him.

Richard Griffin

60th Anniversary

The ringing tones of the cantor crying out the Jewish prayer for the dead carried across the bleak snow-covered grounds. Around him in stark relief were the grim reminders of industrialized murder: barbed-wire fences, huge ovens, railroad tracks. Above the main gate were the words “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes Free), surely an ironic motto for a death camp. Nothing there made free.

There were tears in the voice of this bearded cantor as he commemorated the dead of Auschwitz. It was testimony to the murder of an estimated one million Jews, along with gypsies, homosexuals, and other branded by the Nazis as deviant. Listening to the prayer sung so eloquently, one could call up in imagination whole families of people put to death, ignominiously, without a shred of mercy.

This ceremony marked the 60th anniversary of the date when advancing Russian troops freed the surviving prisoners from captivity in Auschwitz. For the occasion, many survivors had come there, those who had long ago managed to escape death at the hands of their military murderers.

World leaders were there too, as was Elie Wiesel, himself a survivor of this death camp and later Buchenwald. In his speech, Professor Wiesel appealed to his listeners, especially younger people, never to forget the event being commemorated.

“My good friends,” he said in fractured English, “if you after this day will be the same, then we have lost. An encounter with this memory, which now you are the custodians of, must do something to you and through the whole world.”

He was right to say this because the holocaust has a spiritual significance that should never be forgotten. This mass murder, carried out with all the machinery of an efficient modern state, reminds us of the evil that so often lurks within the human heart.

This is how revelations about the Nazi death camps first struck me. As a teenager during World War II, I had no idea that Jews were being persecuted for their religious and ethic identity. Like most other Americans, I lived unaware of the mass murders organized and carried out by the National Socialist machine in Germany.

When the atrocities became known, I felt shock that has stayed with me over the intervening decades. In fact, this knowledge became part of my spiritual life then and now. Among other things, this evil showed me how much we need God.  Left to ourselves, I believe, we human beings can prove thoroughly unreliable.  

Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps make easy optimism about our human condition unrealistic. There is at work in the world a power that, if we do not combat it, can readily turn us into wielders of violence against our fellow human beings. From being our brothers and sisters, they become objects of our hatred and brutality.

Despite the graphic lesson of Auschwitz, events suggest that, as a world community, we have not learned that lesson. The mass slaughter of innocent people in Rwanda and Darfur, to mention only two places among many, shows how little we have backed off from killing those who get in our way.

We can be grateful for educators such as those associated with “Facing History and Ourselves,” the Brookline-based agency that teaches young people and others the lessons of the Holocaust. For the last 25 years this organization has not let us forget the awful facts about one of the world’s most horrific crimes.

There is something dreadfully askew in human life, a fact demonstrated over and over. To me, this points toward a spirituality that is not based on pessimism about the human prospect, but one that takes such evil into account. It also points to the central position in this spiritual outlook of hope in God.

The faith traditions that speak to me hold that God is the only one deserving of complete and utter trust. God is the one who will absolutely not falter in love. One of the sayings of Jesus that I often ponder is: “Why do you call me good? No one is good, but God alone.”

Of course, Jesus does not mean that humans lack goodness completely; rather, he contrasts us with the transcendent God in whom goodness is complete. The liberation that happened 60 years ago should be seen as a call to deepen our horror of evil and to direct hope toward the one who is all good.

Richard Griffin

Leaving, Thirty Years Ago

This month marks the 30th anniversary of what possibly counts as the most important personal decision I have ever made. This decision was to break with the structures that had previously ruled my whole adult life.

On a February day in 1975, I signed official papers from Rome, releasing me from the Jesuit society and the Catholic priesthood. At age 47, I faced the world for the first time as an independent adult without the intimate support of the religious family that I had joined a quarter century before.

A few year later, an ecclesiastical iron curtain shut down against priests applying for church approval of their release, part of a new policy of Pope John Paul II to keep clergy from leaving. I had escaped in time.

As I walked down Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue that morning, I felt as if I had taken myself back and reclaimed the freedom I had willingly surrendered at the end of adolescence. It may have been winter outside, but for me the season of spring had emerged interiorly. I was taking on a new stance toward the world, and the prospect excited me.

One night, twenty years earlier, I had dreamed of leaving the Jesuit Society, only to wake up in a sweat and discover with relief that it was not true; now it had become true, but I no longer felt any terror in it. Some apprehension about my being on my own, yes, but I also felt a strong admixture of relief and anticipation. Leaving would not be a horrible, irredeemable mistake as it had been in the dream, but a deliberate action that I had taken and would not regret.

No longer was anyone around who would protect me; from now on, I was responsible for myself as I had never been before. But that was part of the adventure of setting out in middle age toward an unknown future in the world.

Thirty years later, people still ask me why I left. In response, I tell these questioners there are two explanations. The first takes hundreds of pages, the other only two words. These words are: “I changed.”

Of course, this shorthand version merely hints at the countless events, outer and inner, that transformed me as an individual and the church to which I belonged. Incidentally, my leaving the priesthood and the Jesuits did not involve leaving the church, contrary to what many people have assumed.

In later life, I continue to place great value on the spiritual tradition into which I was born. However, I do confess disagreeing with authority in the Catholic Church seriously enough to be glad that I have not had to represent it officially during these last thirty years.

Strangely enough, at the time of leaving I felt greater admiration for the Jesuits than I had for many years previously. To me they remained members of an organization that had shown remarkable courage in making radical changes following the lead of the Second Vatican Council in the middle 1960s.

In leaving their ranks, I did not have to slink away under cover of night. Despite walking away from them, I retained the friendship of many of my former colleagues and have always welcomed further association with them.

Looking back from the vantage point of these thirty years, I feel my decision was appropriate, perhaps even wise. I wanted to change the angle by which I looked upon the world, and that has proven of much value. Greatest among the gifts that leaving made possible have been marriage and parenthood, of course, for which I feel highly privileged and deeply grateful.

In much of my first career, I would have scrupled to leave. Certain biblical texts ran through my mind from time to time, especially the saying of Jesus about the man who put his hand to the plow and then abandoned it. The Lord called such persons “unworthy,” a label that I shuddered to have applied to me.

I also thought about the promises Jesus made to disciples who left everything to follow him. Had I, by turning away from the call, forfeited the reward in heaven that had helped motivate me to leave home in the first place?

Fortunately I came to feel liberated from detached, literal readings of scripture, enough so as to reject these misgivings. The personal, unconditional love that I had become convinced God felt for me was enough to overcome these negative thoughts before they could become scruples.

This latter conviction became the ultimate reason for the freedom that enabled me to leave. I had made a theological and spiritual discovery that proved powerfully liberating. God’s love was active in my life, I came to see; and it enabled me to follow where my heart led.

Looking back over three decades, I see my first vocation as good and providential; similarly, I judge my life since then as a time of grace and blessings.

Richard Griffin

Most Important Story of 2005

What were the most important stories concerned with religion in the year 2004? That’s a matter of opinion, of course.

In their annual survey, members of the Religion Newswriters Association have made their choices. To them, the most significant was not a single story but two. They are the faith issues connected with the election of George W. Bush to a second term, and the discussion of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of Christ.

Had the survey been taken at the end of December rather than part way through that month, I suspect the results would have been different. Then these writers might well have chosen the worldwide response to the dreadful tsunami that shattered so many lives along the coasts of the Indian Ocean.

Surely, the response of nations, private relief agencies, and people throughout the world would have justly been chosen the most important story of the year. On an unprecedented scale, governments, relief agencies, and individuals reached out with money and other forms of aid to people reeling from the storm’s impact.

Among the reasons why the relief effort has proven so important, at least two  spiritually significant ones stand out. First, those who have responded with help have done so regardless of the religion professed by those in need. That the greater number of them has been Muslim has not proven a barrier to generous giving.

Nor has the United States─or any other country, it seems─acted merely for political advantage. Instead, people the world over have responded spontaneously out of compassion for fellow humans who have suffered so much.

Secondly, very few religious figures appear to have interpreted the disaster as a sign of God’s displeasure with human beings. Fortunately, the great majority of leaders have seen this massive death and destruction as a natural disaster that does not at all express the judgment of God on the actions of people. In fact, most seem to have respected the mystery of evil rather than attribute vengeful motivation to the deity.

The generous actions of citizens and nations give reason for hope that such sharing of resources will continue in this new year. Perhaps the biggest story of this 2005 will prove to be wealthy countries doing more on an annual basis to help nations that are saddled with dire poverty.

Already underway, the Millennium Project is an effort by the United Nations to cut in half the extreme poverty of the world, and to do so by the year 2015. The United States and all the other rich countries have already agreed on this plan but have not yet put up the money.

To provide enough money for improving health and education for the world’s poor, these nations will be expected to increase development aid to about 50 cents of every 100 dollars of their national income.

Currently, our federal government gives only 15 cents, an amount far lower than most Americans think. When asked, most of us estimate an amount twenty or thirty times greater than the reality.

Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at Columbia University, has been leading the Millennium Project. He stands convinced that, spent wisely, the money could make an immediate difference in the countries where people are suffering extreme deprivation.

Professor Sachs proposes concrete examples:  “We could save more than one million children per year that are dying of malaria by helping to distribute on a mass basis, like we do with immunizations, bed nets to protect the children against malaria.”

This project is no shallow “do-goodism,” but an effort that would help overcome the instability that threatens the whole world, including us. For Sachs, the ultimate goal is to see poor nations stand on their own rather than continuing their dependence on others.

You may wonder why a column on spirituality deals with economic aid to other countries. The answer, on my part, comes from the heart. Long ago, I discovered how the inner life must include active compassion for all other people.

Not only that, but political and economic concerns became part of my spiritual vision. Reading the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, the words of Jesus in the Gospels, the writings of Gandhi and Thomas Merton among others, helped me realize that it was wrong for me to craft a spirituality detached from the needs of our brothers and sisters around the world.

Richard Griffin

Lively Old Women

Is it possible to be in your nineties and at the same time be happy? Contact with two dynamic ladies born in 1913 has convinced me that it is.

Best of friends, Helen Grimes and Marcia Kleinman vie with one another in their zest for life. In a conversation of an hour and a half, it’s difficult to keep up with this duo. They bubble over with enthusiasm for almost everyone and everything.

Though both dating from the Wilson administration, they grew up quite differently. Helen’s family was Irish Catholic in Cambridge; Marcia’s was Jewish in New York. The latter’s father owned a window factory in Brooklyn and was affluent, while Helen’s family had little money.

Helen’s education came through the contacts she had with the families she served as a domestic. Marcia had the advantage of graduating from New York University to which she commuted by train.

Both have strong political views, neither cherishing any love for George W. Bush and his regime. Marcia’s political consciousness developed through her post-college work for the American Jewish Congress. She felt radicalized by seeing signs “No Hebrews may apply” and experiencing other forms of discrimination.

For her part, Helen would ultimately rebel against her inherited faith. “That Irish Catholic stuff was pushed down your throat,” she explains. She left the church in her 40s, in part because “I didn’t believe in heaven or hell.” Now, along with her daughter Dot Harrigan, she considers herself a Humanist, rather than a Christian.

Marcia’s evolution differs from that of her friend. “I’m Jewish,” she says, “but I’m ecumenical.” She takes great delight in having wide ethnic and religious variety in her extended family. Among the latter, she mentions a great-grandson whose name is Gabriel Wong.

Helen traces her intellectual development back to a single book that continues to inspire her thinking. That book is Will Durant’s “The Story of Philosophy,” first suggested to her by a Yankee woman in whose household Helen worked as a mother’s helper.

Both women feel devoted to the Cambridge Center for Adult Education where they have been involved for decades. In the spirit of adventure, they take a variety of courses.

Helen laughingly tells of taking a life drawing class and sketching a nude male model. “I did down as far as possible,” she recalls, “and up as far as possible, but I didn’t do possible.”

Not surprisingly, both women draw much of their vitality from contact with younger generations. Of the wives chosen by her two boys, Marcia says: “I fell in love with my daughters-in-law.” As to those different from herself, she boasts: “I call myself the best ecumenical specimen in captivity.”

But don’t let the buoyancy of these women fool you─both have known heartache and disappointment. Helen lost her own mother when she was only eleven. And one of her daughters died of alcoholism at the age of 53.

Marcia’s first marriage ended in divorce when her first son was only two-and-a-half. “At that time,” she observes, “divorce was looked down on.” And she lost a wonderful sister at age 39.

At one point the ladies turned to this writer, asking me to explain why some people have long lives. Clearly, they were addressing the question to the wrong person. They have the answer themselves.

Helen Metros, another woman who recently shared with me her experience of life, says: “I never have time to be sick; I’ve missed but one day of work in seven years.”

Since the mid twentieth century, she has worked at two Harvard Sq    uare restaurants, finding satisfaction in waiting upon many different people, some of them famous. Among the latter she counts John Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Clement Attlee, George W. Bush (in his Harvard Business School days), Tip O’Neill, David Pryor, and Ben Affleck.

“To me they’re not big names; they come in and I wait on them,” she explains. What does count, Helen expresses in a favorite slogan: “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.”

Like the other Helen, she grew up in South Boston in an Irish Catholic family. In the 1930s there, she says, everyone was poor but doors were never locked and no one went hungry.

Her husband, now retired, comes from the Greek Orthodox tradition. For worship, they are accustomed to go to both Catholic and the Orthodox churches. “That’s part of marriage,” Helen believes, “you incorporate what you have.” Her religious spirit shows in other ways: “I know I have God with me all the time,” she says.

She derives warm satisfaction from a party she gives every year for 50 of the oldest and neediest people around. Also, she sponsors an annual concert at Children’s Hospital.

These activities make her feel happy. So do her family relationships. “I love to be with my grandchildren,” she enthuses. Of her spouse she says: “He’s a good husband, father, grandfather. How can you ask for anything more in life?”

Richard Griffin