Until last July Darrel Buschkoetter had never flown in an airplane nor had he ever seen an ocean. He has spent his whole life, some forty years, on a farm in Nebraska where he and his wife are raising their three daughters.

Darrel’s wife Juanita was the main focus of a six-and-one-half hour documentary shown nationwide on public television’s “Frontline” last September. Written, produced, and directed by David Sutherland of Newton, “The Farmer’s Wife” proved engrossing at least to this viewer. For that reason I was delighted to meet Juanita and Darrel this week when they came to the Boston area for further showings of the television film.

“The Farmer’s Wife” details the struggles that this couple have had to make to preserve their way of life. Finances have been difficult for them as they work a 1,100-acre farm and attempt to hold their marriage together in the face of many threats.

Darrel Buschkoetter struck me as a person of quiet charm with a strong sense of himself. At the same time, he showed himself open to the new experiences which his tour of the East Coast is bringing to him and his family.

Of the three children I met only Whitney, the youngest. When I asked this seven-year-old what she liked best about the trip she answered “The Children’s Museum.” The oldest daughter, Audrey reads constantly, her father reports, and dreams about coming to college at Harvard.

When I asked Darrel about spirituality he replied with great conviction, making clear that it holds a high place in his life. Without prayer and religious devotion, he is sure that Juanita and he could never have surmounted their crisis and stayed together. In fact he wonders aloud how couples without the support of a strong spiritual life ever manage to stay married.

He and his family take part in Mass at their Catholic parish each Sunday. The three girls go to parochial school and religious practice is part of their daily life, with grace before meals a prominent feature of it.

When Darrel thinks about God he knows himself to be in contact with someone who is entirely good and completely well disposed toward him. To Darrel God is “really kind, a really good leader if you just follow in the right direction.”

He regards God as a father but he also finds that God is “sometimes more of a mother.” Darrel says that he could always talk more easily to his mother than his father, so that supports his personal theology.

Juanita, for her part, also prays regularly. She spoke beautifully about the experience. It added to the value of what she said that Juanita disavowed any special virtue as a religious person. “Sometimes I don’t know that I am a good Catholic,” she says.

She adds disarmingly: “I’ve heard that faith is what you have when you have nothing else left to turn to.”

I came away from this enjoyable and refreshing encounter with the Buschkoetter family rejoicing that their family and mine are not so different spiritually. We share the same basic faith, they in a rural setting, we among highly urbanized surroundings.

The Buschkoetters’ current experience of urban America has changed their ideas about their own country. Until recently they expected to find in big cities much evidence of crime and other social ills. But instead they have seen people in Washington, New York, and Boston, among other places, who have proven to share some of their own values.

Despite the benefits that have come to them as a result of  the film, they realize that life on the farm will probably continue to pose difficulties. Darrel told me that prices are currently the lowest they have been in forty years and that is putting pressure on farmers. They may have to face other crises such as those revealed in the film.

But they show a quiet confidence in God and in one another that  gives ground for hope. The widespread public attention they have received will fade with time but the benefits of their contact with the rest of America will presumably make a difference for them in the future.

I recommend seeing “The Farmer’s Wife” if it is shown again. It is a beautiful film, both in the views it offers of the Nebraskan rural landscape and also of one family’s life with all of its ups and downs.

Richard Griffin

What work of fiction sold the most copies in the United States during 2003? Why, The Da Vinci Code, of course. For the last 42 weeks this much discussed book has held a place on the New York Times’ list of best sellers and in 2004 continues to rank number one.

The author, Dan Brown, has enthralled many readers with his story of intrigue, mystery, and intricate scheming. However, the fascination that the book has roused in a wide reading public comes in large part from the writer’s use of organized religion and bizarre spirituality as the framework for his adventure.

Friends keep asking me what I think of the book, especially the author’s presentation of religion and spirituality. The simple answer to the latter question is “not much.”  

One must judge the book for its entertainment value, not for its supposed insight into spiritual reality. It should be seen as a work of the imagination, rather than as a narrative grounded in real-life religious history.

True, the Catholic Church, its history, some of its policies, and its priorities loom large in The Da Vinci Code. And a mostly lay order of men within the Church, namely Opus Dei, figures largely in the plot. But no one should attribute to the author, skilled as he is with fantasy, realistic insight into the workings of either institution.

Wildly popular as this book continues to be, it amounts to little more than fun. The writer is clever indeed, though personally I found his tale deficient in most of the qualities that make for good literature.

However, my purpose here is not to badmouth Dan Brown but to evaluate the parts of his book that touch on religion and spirituality.

The Catholic Church appears here as an institution full of vested interests, the chief one of which is preventing the truth about Jesus ever getting known.  That truth envisions Jesus as a mere man who married Mary Magdalene and who had a child by her. Instead of founding the Church himself, he entrusted that task to this Mary and enshrined around her a cult of the “sacred feminine.”  

The author imagines that a secret society was founded many centuries ago to preserve the secret location of the Holy Grail. Usually understood as the cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper, here the Grail signifies Mary Magdalene herself, the one who gives birth to the daughter of Jesus.

Another organization committed to keeping the secret from ever getting out is Opus Dei, the religious community sponsored by the Vatican. As a group of men who are pledged to support the church, Opus Dei stands ready to do anything, even murder, in order to prevent the church’s enemies from releasing the truth.

As the story unfolds, the Vatican decides to cut its support for Opus Dei, a move that changes the motivation of this community to discover the secret of the Grail. Now it will use the secret to protect itself against the Vatican, threatening to unveil the truth if the Vatican follows through on its threat to Opus Dei’s standing in the Church.

By contrast with myths like these, what is the reality? Of course, there is no historical evidence for either Jesus being married or his planning to put Mary Magdalen in charge of the church.

It is true that the Catholic Church has a dubious record when it comes to women. Though it extols the mother of Jesus and a great many female saints, it forbids the ordination of women and, by and large, bars them from meaningful roles in running the Church.

As to Opus Dei, it is an organization that does, in fact, have strong support from the Vatican. It also has a reputation for secrecy in its mode of operation.

Even more than the Church to which it belongs, this lay order has a reputation for being anti-feminist. Many Catholics, in so far as they know Opus Dei at all, also feel it to favor right wing policies both in secular and ecclesiastical spheres.

So I would never recommend this book as a good source for information about or insight into religion and spirituality. However, The Da Vinci Code may entertain you thoroughly and hold you in suspense during long winter’s nights.

Richard Griffin

Few books have had such a strong impact on me as did Elie Wiesel’s novel “Night.”  First published in 1958, this slim volume was as dark as its title, reflecting the near despair of a Holocaust survivor. As a young boy, Wiesel had seen his parents and sister die in Buchenwald, one of millions lost to Nazi beastliness.

This personal account of horror, degradation, and loss of faith in goodness personalized for me one of the major horrific events of the twentieth century. At the time I wondered how anyone who had undergone such an experience could ever recover any positive attitudes about human beings and believe in our capacity for doing good.

Recently, I wondered the same thing about Robert Jay Lifton, not himself a survivor, but a psychiatrist and scholar who has made a distinguished career studying human beings connected with the Holocaust, the Hiroshima atomic bombing, and other terrible twentieth century happenings.

His research has made this Brooklyn native famous in the field of psychohistory. For a long time he was based at Yale University, but now has become a visiting professor at Harvard Medical School.

In the course of a public conversation with Dr. Lifton, two weeks ago at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, I asked him about his experience. Would having talked to such people as Nazi doctors, Hiroshima survivors, and American victims of brainwashing in the Korean War have left him unscathed? Could he have salvaged any hope from his interviews with people connected to such terror?

Of those interviewed, he says: “I’ve always focused on survivors’ capacity for resilience.”  And he himself has taken from those contacts surprisingly positive results. “I categorize myself as neither an optimist nor a pessimist” he adds, “but somebody who continues to work and behave and live with hope.”

In reflecting on the history of the twentieth century with all of its terror, this scholar sees the human psyche as having been changed by this history. At the same time, certain abiding human values continue, no matter what.

“There is always a kind of interaction between enduring psychological characteristics,” he believes, “and changeable shifts that have to do with the forces of history and collective influences.” Among the continuing traits of human beings, he cites our need to nurture and be nurtured, for sexual expression, self-esteem, and the capacity to get along with other people.

Dr. Lifton sees the present historical moment as a time when we have lost clear cut guidelines and certainty about values. Thus it has become unclear how we should act at certain ages, and what to do in the face of knowing we will die. “We are struggling with dislocation,” he says, “and we’re also struggling with the mass media and the information revolution.”

This has made for a new situation that affects our psyches, creating the many-sided self. However, we also labor under the “more dreadful and threatening knowledge that we are capable of exterminating ourselves as a species with our own technology,” Dr. Lifton warns.

Reflecting on World War II, this scholar sees that titanic conflict still touching us now, especially those of us who came of age then. He calls the terrible Nazi genocide worked against Jews and others, along with the atom bombing of Japan, “the two pivotal events of the twentieth century.”  Those events continue to reverberate in him as reminders of our capacity for self-destruction. He also thinks they have a relevance to the current state of our country.

In his research on Nazi doctors, Dr. Lifton found them using what he calls “distancing,” the ability to inflict extreme violence on other people without feeling very much themselves.  This phenomenon amounts to a serious problem in our time, making it necessary for us “to make more clear to scientists, military people, doctors and others what their responsibilities are and how what they do affects other people.”

This scholar applies to elders what he has learned about survivors. Those of us in our 60s, 70s and beyond are survivors in two ways. We have lost many people known to us and we have also lost certain elements of our world as it used to be.  Survivors either shutdown or open out. This opening out means the capacity to take in loss and to move ahead. But to do that you must first allow yourself to feel the pain of the loss.

In answer to a question, Lifton finds it strange the way the events he has studied have all taken on a new and immediate relevance. So much of his work has dealt with apocalyptic violence, a subject that terrorism has raised anew. And he worries about our nation: “we have taken on something of an apocalyptic vision ourselves.

Asked how older people can share wisdom gained from long experience, Dr. Lipton answers forthrightly: “I think we should assert ourselves.” He believes electoral politics insufficient and urges elders to get involved in non-official organizations. “One has the right to articulate what we have learned.”

Richard Griffin

“Join Jim and Sherry in their Sukkah (in the backyard)” said the flyer delivered to our door by our neighbors. This welcome invitation came adorned with a graphic in green depicting a verdant tree, amid grass and sprouting leaves.

The prospect of joining in our friends' celebration of their autumnal holiday gladdened my heart. My instinct is to thank God for the fruits of the earth and the other gifts that this time of year brings us.

For Jews, the feast of Succoth comes as the third of the high holidays and is observed for a week. After Rosh Hashanah, the commemoration of the New Year, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, this third feast day joyfully celebrates the harvest.

It also reminds Jewish people of their ancestors wandering in the desert for 40 years after the fateful escape from Egypt, when they dwelt in temporary huts for shelter from the sun and wind.  

The Saturday when we were invited turned out to be a beautiful, clear, and seasonably cool afternoon, ideal for sitting in the back yard next to the garden.

Jim and Sherry's Sukkah was made of wood, with a roof decorated with dried corn stalks and other gourds. One end of the structure was wide open, enabling us to look out at the garden and surrounding houses.

This Sukkah had enough space for ten or so friends and neighbors who arrived during our stay. After we chose food and drink, Jim began our session with a traditional prayer from the Jewish liturgy for the day: “Blessed are you, O Lord, Ruler of the Universe, who has commanded us to dwell in the Sukkah.” We all assented to this beautiful prayer with the single word “Amen.”

After that we talked, asking about the couple's children who, when they were still at home, used to be an important part of the observance. This fall, Tamar is visiting India for a few months, and Akiva is away at college.

We also bantered about the neighborhood and local residents, all in a relaxed and joyful spirit. While we talked, new guests came and, gradually, others would leave as the afternoon moved on. (Everyone had gone by the time the Red Sox faced off against the Yankees.)

Our hosts established a spirit of pleasure in one another's company. Though they and the other guests who were Jewish were observing an important liturgical day, they made sure it remained a lighthearted occasion for everyone. We laughed a lot, as we sat in this once-a-year structure and enjoyed the company and the environment.

At the same time, we were conscious of what the day means to people who identify with a great faith. For our host, Jim, “it's a special time when we as a family get together and build our little temporary dwelling. It takes us out of our ordinary routine and puts us in touch with nature.”

He also feels contact with sacred history: “Looking out from the Sukkah in the evening, we see the same full moon that our ancestors saw thousands of years ago. Singing songs in the Sukkah gives me a feeling of great rejoicing.”

I myself, though not Jewish, feel strong appreciation of the faith tradition of the Jewish people and owe much of my own to it. Our whole civilization is indebted to those who have preserved the observance of special days through much travail and tragedy over so many centuries.

The feast of Succot that we were privileged to observe as guests has a deeper meaning than is commonly realized. In fact, David Linghoffer, writing for the online site Beliefnet, calls this feast an “edgy encounter with the apocalyptic strain in Judaism.”

He sees it as the most radical of the Jewish days of celebration because it points to “the final triumph of God over evil” at the end of time. To him, it completes the cycle that begins with Rosh Hashanah and goes on to Yom Kippur. Those two feasts may suggest that a struggle between good and evil “must go on forever, with no hope of an ultimate victory.”

Sukkot, however, offers a “preview of what it will be like to experience the culmination and conclusion of the historical process” when God will be victorious and history will come to a glorious end.”

Richard Griffin

A physician friend has told me of a time when he was a young resident and responsible for the care of a woman, age 34, who was dying of lymphatic cancer. The patient had a 14-year-old son who was at the hospital waiting for news of his mother’s condition.

When the woman died, my friend had to inform the boy of his mother’s death. The doctor came to the waiting room and told him the sad news. The boy’s response was to punch the doctor in the face. As my friend told this story of something that happened many years ago, he seemed again to recoil from the punch.

Eventually the boy was able to sit down with the doctor peacefully and grieve with him over the death, so burdensome to both of them, though in different ways. For the physician, it represented a painful loss of a patient whom he had come to value as a person. For the boy, it meant being deprived of a parent whom he needed and cared about.

The story gives dramatic expression to an instinctive response toward death, especially when that death is of a young person and directly affects young people. The boy lashed out at a fate imposed on him while he was still vulnerable and even less able to understand than adults ever can why a person dies when still needed.

Though it may seem to violate spiritual ideals, this kind of initial reaction to the death of someone much loved testifies to value. The person whom we have lost to death is worth getting upset about. Not entirely without reason do we flail out at the fate imposed upon us. We may feel what the Earl of Gloucester, in Shakespeare’s King Lear, felt in his time of despair: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, / They kill us for their sport.”

Spirituality, of course, does not stop at this instinctive response to death. Rather, it tries to find meaning in the experience of dying despite what is often felt as an unacceptable assault on our human dignity.

But a sound spirituality cannot welcome suffering for itself. Certainly the Christian tradition gives no approval to a love for suffering. “It is not appropriate,” says a writer in a newly published spiritual encyclopedia, “to conclude  .  .  .  that suffering is to be welcomed or left unrelieved.”

In this tradition, at least, a loving God does not want his creatures to suffer but, in the mystery of the world’s freedom, allows it to happen as if reluctantly. That his son Jesus suffered so terribly gives Christians hope of finding some meaning in the experience of death. To discover meaning there, however, is a spiritual gift that no one can count on.

As I look back on the death of family members who passed on prematurely, the pain of their passage has lessened over the years. But the mystery remains: why were the days of my beloved nephew cut short when his presence meant so much to us all?

I no longer feel like punching someone in anger over that sudden death, though his absence still causes pain. It makes me take refuge in a spirituality that can accept what is not understood. This kind of spiritual stance toward the world can give some assurance to hearts that remain broken because of the death of loved ones.

At the same time, one cannot deny that death often inflicts harm on others that may never be repaired. My father’s death came at a time that left my mother vulnerable to anxieties that made the rest of her life terribly difficult. This unhappy effect made me mourn my father even more than I would have otherwise.

My efforts to find reasons for this death have never progressed very far. I still regret that my father did not live into old age. He had much to give that his family needed. But I do find in my spiritual tradition the continuing strength to accept what I do not understand, leaving it to God’s love.

The boy who punched the doctor has become a man long since. One can wonder whether, as an adult, he has perhaps discovered a spirituality that has enabled him to find in his mother’s premature death some consolation and even some meaning.

Richard Griffin

“Now is the time.” “I have a dream.” “Let freedom ring.” “Free at last.”

These words, used as refrains by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his famous “I Have a Deam” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, continue to resound 40 years later. While recently watching a videotape of the event, I was again moved, not only by his eloquence but by the beautiful spirituality that animated his vision.

As we prepare to celebrate King’s birthday tomorrow, it is appropriate to emphasize the spiritual dimensions of this speech.

Only a person steeped in the Bible could have spoken the way Dr. King did to the 150,000 gathered in Washington D. C. on that famous day. And only a person who had absorbed the message of Jesus could have offered his particular vision of freedom, bodily and spiritual.

“Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice” Dr. King tells the huge audience of people assembled before him, eager to hear his every word.

“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” he informs his listeners in Washington and around the country.

“Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi” he proclaims. And he utters the same wish for every other part of America.

“Free at last,” he cries out in ringing final words, “thank God Almighty, we are free at last. Five years later, this quotation from a Negro spiritual would be applied to his terrible assassination.

Throughout, Dr. King saw himself as calling America to be its own best self. That was the new nation whose Declaration of Independence and Constitution promised freedom to every person. The words of those documents Dr. King described as magnificent but their promise was yet to be fulfilled.

It was one hundred years previously that Abraham Lincoln had freed the slaves. But, as the speaker saw clearly, “the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.”

Dr. King’s appreciation of the brotherhood of all people is another factor that gives spiritual power to his vision. He envisions the day when people of every sort can sit down at the same table as brothers and sisters. This is the banquet spoken of in the great biblical tradition in which he grew up.

He speaks like the prophets in the Hebrew Bible who nourished his soul. “We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” he says, using the words of Isaiah to express his people’s thirst for their rights, human and civil.

Then, in describing his own dream, he alludes to John the Baptist, himself echoing Isaiah:  “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

Dr. King’s commitment to nonviolence forms another precious part of his spirituality. Witnesses who attended the huge rally 40 years ago recall the fear that gripped many people in Washington that day.. “The atmosphere was very tense,” says black leader, Roger Wilkins. Some white people fled the city because of the violence they expected.

They need not have worried, however, because Dr. King insisted that the struggle he led was one based in spiritual power, not violent action. Here is the way he put it: “Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”

Of course, that would involve suffering. But Dr. King’s faith had room for that. “Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive,” he told his people as he drew upon the spiritual legacy of Jesus. The speaker believed that good would eventually come from the trials that his people had to endure unjustly.

Dr. King gave profound expression to the spiritual gifts that occupied a central place in his own life. Faith, hope, and charity were to hold decisive importance in the great struggle that he led for his people and for the whole nation.

Richard Griffin