“Did God make himself?” This question, if you can believe it, a four-year-old child recently asked her mother. She really did.

How could such a young person ask such a deep question? I don’t know but have irreproachable witness that she actually did.

Maybe it’s an example of the natural wonder that every child is born with. This would be the wisdom that children have until schooling or Saturday morning cartoons shake it out of them.

Whatever the case, the question about God qualifies as an instance of someone almost unbelievably young reaching into mystery.

Mystery is that condition of things whereby there is more to be known about them than we can ever know.

I take it as a gift that I have been able to maintain some of the wonder about God’s inner life that I first felt as a child. Thanks to my spiritual tradition with its emphasis upon the Holy Trinity, I learned enough about the inner life of God to enable me to think about this mystery from time to time all through the decades of my own life.

While not claiming to be a theologian, I have read what theologians have said.

More important, I have entered into the celebrations of the church’s liturgy that have focused on various aspects of the divine being.

What I love about this mystery is its revelation of an exciting dynamism within God. The divine being is seen as the site of movement, rather than inactivity. There is not a lonely solitude there but rather a continual exchange of love.

In this scenario, the Father gives life to the Son, and then together in love they produce the Holy Spirit. If this sounds sexual, then perhaps it is reflected in the physical love that human beings exchange with one another. It is the way we use human experience to grope for who God is.

This language does not mean gender, however, because that would make the three persons, or at least two of them, sound masculine. Father and Son have to be understood as above gender, so that you can call God “She” just as much as “He.” And, if you follow the original language of the Bible, you almost have to call the Holy Sprit “Her.”

Back to the girl’s question, I do not know how her mother answered. My response would have been to explain my belief that God never needed a beginning. God always was.

I like to think that this answer might stimulate further wonder on the child’s part about God’s being. Could there actually exist a being who never began, always was?

Not having any experience of a thing without a beginning, we are flabbergasted by such thinking. Even the astronomers, who assign almost unimaginable ages to the galaxies that make up the universe, see the Big Bang as the beginning of that universe.

To get your mind around the idea of a non-beginning, you have to go beyond rational thinking. Drawing on some of the wonder I felt in my early years, I still find it stimulating to contemplate that reality.

As further answer to the child’s question I would fantasize about the movement in God’s inner life as a kind of replacement for a beginning. No, God did not have to make himself but God did not have to simply wait around doing nothing. Instead, there was this marvelous activity that amounted to a life fuller than can be imagined.

The question we began with here contains an insight altogether remarkable in a child. Her asking it means that she has at least some grasp of something fundamental about God. The girl seems to know that God is sufficient unto himself.

Otherwise she would not have posed the question as she did. Her words presuppose that no one else could have made God. Only God would have been an agent powerful enough to have been the cause of his own existence.

I feel glad for a child’s question that has stimulated me to an enriched contemplation about God. God did not need to make himself but I believe God made me. And I am convinced God did so out of the love that permeates his own being.

That realization strikes me as enough to reenergize the contemplative life for many a meditation.

Richard Griffin

“My heart is broken.” These words from an elderly woman shown on a television news program represent the feelings of many people whose parish churches face closing.

A priest who is an official of the Archdiocese of Boston simply says of such a closing: “It’s a death.”

The decision of the archdiocese to shut the doors of some 60 churches has made Catholics in many areas weep. Some of their pastors who must move out for another assignment, or perhaps retirement, also feel the loss. Among them, a few have tearfully said they also feel a rejection of their ministry.

Incidentally, one of the churches to be phased out is Our Lady of Mercy in Belmont, the parish where I received my first communion. The memory of this event, happening when I was seven years old, has given me a lasting emotional tie to a building that will soon be given over to the wrecking ball.

In contacting parishioners for this column, I had hoped that they would talk about the connections between their parish church and their spiritual life. Some of them did speak to that subject but only in passing. Instead I discovered that most of them were preoccupied with other issues, so much so that it was hard for them to talk about anything else.

Almost inevitably, to some parishioners the closings are connected with the sexual abuse scandals that have plagued the Archdiocese of Boston. Despite official denials, many people believe that the closings would not have otherwise taken place.

Asked about the closings, one longtime parishioner says: “My honest opinion is that none of it would have happened were it not for the abuse cases. The whole thing boils down to this: they have to absorb the cost of abuse cases that happened 40 years ago.”

On a more personal level, he confides his feelings about his own parish: “I’m very disenchanted. I’ve been in this church since 1947, my kids were baptized there, my parents were buried there. Where am I going to be buried?”

His ultimate feeling is one of resignation: “I’m still hurt but you’ve got to roll with it; the archbishop has made the decision.”

This parishioner’s wife adds: “Our pastor was devastated and angry. They told him to get over it.”

Another man has been connected to his parish his whole life, 74 years. “It means a lot to me that it’s closed. I’m sorry because it’s a warm church, it’s been the spiritual side of my life.”

Yet this same man goes on to insist “I’ve got my own faith and that is not going to be changed by the closing. Spiritually, the church is the same.”

A friend who lives in a suburb northwest of Boston says the people there do not much care which parish they go to: “They don’t have the same attachment that people in the inner cities have.”  He, too, sees a tight connection between the parish closings and the sexual abuse scandals.

Not everyone agrees, however, that the closings should not have happened. Ann Smith, whose parish will be closed, says: “I think people have to get behind this and support it. As badly as I feel, something has to be done.”

This comes from a person who received her first communion and confirmation in her current parish church and was also married there. But she admires the archbishop and realizes that his is not an easy task. Having attended several cluster meetings during the planning period, she sees more clearly why the decisions had to be made.

A lawyer who attends church in the Gloucester area does not agree. He goes so far as to call the closings “church-sponsored iconoclasm.” With this phrase he regrets that the archdiocese is tearing down so many valued structures.

My findings suggest that the official church has a larger problem, a crisis of confidence on the part of not a few members. Had I spoken to Haitians, African-Americans and other Catholic minority communities, I suspect their reactions to the closing of parishes might have been even more negative.

Perhaps the Archdiocese needs a more thorough process if it expects to bring its people along with its plans.

Richard Griffin

News clips of demonstrations against the marriages of gay and lesbian people frequently show signs condemning supporters of such marriages to hell. One such sign pronounces the awful judgment: “God hates homosexuals.”

I have substituted the word “homosexuals” for another word that I consider too vulgar to be printed here. It is with some reluctance that I avoid that word because it offers a perfect example of the abuse that gay and lesbian people sometimes have to endure.

Though I like to believe that the people indulging in such abuse do not belong to my faith, I know better. Some of my fellow Catholics, in their zeal to defend marriage as they have known it, have often hurled reproaches against those whose sexuality differs from theirs. I deeply regret their actions, and hope they will come to see that this way of defending marriage is not Christian.   

Gay Catholics who have been on the receiving end of insults, abuse, and hatred from people who regard themselves as loyal members of the church can tell you how painful it is to meet rejection from those who profess the same faith. These abusers apparently see no contradiction between their professed love for Jesus and their ill treatment of brothers and sisters whose sexual drives are different from their own.

Not a few Catholics, as well as many others, feel apprehensive about the milestone event that took place in Massachusetts last week. From now on, unless the legality of marriages between members of the same gender is overturned by the voters two years from now, same-sex marriages will remain legal in the Commonwealth.

I am aware, of course, that this event, hailed as another breakthrough in civil rights, is decried in other quarters as a violation of God’s law.

The latter view is that of the official Catholic Church. Both the Vatican and American bishops have condemned same-sex marriage, seeing it as weakening heterosexual marriage and providing an inappropriate setting for the raising of children. In a statement released last week, Sean O’Malley, the Archbishop of Boston, began by saying “It is with deep sadness that we will realize this Monday the creation of same-sex marriages.”

To his credit, however, the archbishop went beyond this beginning and urged “that our sadness at what has happened should not lead us into anger against or vilification of any group of people, especially our homosexual brothers and sisters.” Further, he reminds Catholics that “our task as Christ’s disciples is to build a civilization of love. We must see each person as an irreplaceable gift from God.”

Archbishop O’Malley’s statement followed by a day another issued by a group of more than 100 prominent Catholics. After taking note of the “considerable controversy” about the legalization of gay marriages, these leaders have called attention to a pastoral message issued 18 years ago by the American Catholic bishops to parents of homosexual children.

In that message, the bishops said: “The teachings of the church make it clear that the fundamental human rights of homosexual persons must be defended and all of us must strive to eliminate any forms of injustice, oppression, or violence against them.”

The Massachusetts Catholic laity and clergy finish their own brief statement by saying: “We call on all of our brothers and sisters in the Commonwealth to treat same sex couples with respect and to do no harm to them or their families. We urge a respectful discourse and dialogue among all people.”

I have talked to two Catholic pastors who worked on the statement. Father Robert Bullock acted because of his alarm at “the rancor and anger and the language being used toward homosexual people.” He calls such behavior “reprehensible” and sees the statement as a corrective to such attitudes.

Father Walter Cuenin, for his part, says: “As a faith community, we need to find ways to dialogue with one another with respect.” With regard to the alienating effect of hateful actions toward them, he adds: “Gay people belong in the church” and he wants to make sure they are not rejected.

My hope is that this statement of Catholic laity and clergy will help ensure peace based on mutual respect among members of the faith community and all people of good will. Whatever our position on gay marriage, it is vital for us to treat one another with love.

Richard Griffin

“A long life makes me feel nearer truth, yet it won’t go into words, so how can I convey it: I can’t, and I want to. I want to tell people approaching and perhaps fearing age that it is a time of discovery. If they say – of what? I can only answer, ‘We must each find out for ourselves, otherwise it won’t be discovery.’”

“You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality. When at last age has assembled you together, will it not be easy to let it all go, lived, balanced, over?”

These two quotations come from Florida Scott-Maxwell, a woman who successively was a short story writer, a playwright, and psychologist. Her words here come from a small book of reflections, “The Measure of My Days,”   published in 1968 when she was 85 years old.

I frequently distribute these quotations to audiences to whom I have spoken about growing old because I consider them full of wisdom. This woman at a time of physical decline gives expression to the beauty found in the search for truth and in its discovery at the last.

The search for truth cannot be put into words, the writer says, nor can the spirituality that supports it. In talking about truth, she reveals something vital about later life that most people who have not yet arrived there know nothing about. This well-kept secret is that old age is a time of and for discovery.

American culture is notoriously dubious about the value of later life and makes us fearful about approaching it. Too often, it is seen in almost exclusively negative terms: decline, disintegration, death.

A woman who is nervously approaching her 50th birthday gave expression to this conventional view in the New York Times Magazine, two Sundays ago. Daphne Merkin wrote: “All I can see in front of me is a decades-long campaign of vigilantly keeping the forces of decrepitude at bay.”  If this is truly all she can see, then she remains terribly ignorant about the experience of Florida Scott-Maxwell and huge numbers of other older people.

Were you to listen to attitudes like Ms. Merkin’s, you would never realize that advancing age can be the best time for development of the soul. If you truly care about your soul, you can be like an explorer of a new world, the inner world marked by breakthroughs into the light.

In the second quotation, I love the phrase “fierce with reality.” This is a kind of fierceness that endows human life with a special value. To judge by her writing, that is what Florida Scott-Maxwell had as she moved into her middle 80s and eventually into her 90s.

She speaks of coming to possess “all you have been or done,” a mysterious interior work of reviewing life and embracing its precious parts. In doing this, we draw from the events of our life the value that has lain hidden in them. At least, this is the way I interpret what the author is talking about but I am confident meditation on her words can produce further meaning.

Notice that she calls attention to the need for time. An interior agenda of this kind cannot be rushed. It will probably take years to accomplish this spiritual task. We will have to resist the typically American approach whereby everything has to be accomplished ASAP and devote much leisure time to this exploration.

The writer sees it as a task of assembling ourselves, putting ourselves together spiritually in a new way, piece by piece as if in a jigsaw puzzle, until we have become a new whole. Obviously, in thinking this way, we are forced to use imagery to describe spiritual realities that cannot otherwise be grasped at all.

Then we are prepared to let it all go. When the interior work is accomplished we become no longer resistant to surrendering ourselves to God or the light, or ultimate reality. In this view, there is a time for everything and this is the time for final gift of ourselves.

Scott-Maxwell speaks of the final surrender as “easy.” Surely it will not be that way for everybody. However, doing the interior work would seem to be the ideal preparation for whatever may come.

Richard Griffin