On the Windowsill

With the approach of summer, Phileas J. Fogg has taken up a favorite vantage point each morning, lying prone on the sill of an upstairs bedroom window.  This position gives him a fine opportunity to check the activities of other neighborhood cats as well as other beings, human and animal, as the area awakes to a new day.

What actually impinges most on Phil’s psyche, no one can say. Perhaps the call of the cardinal and the warbling of the other birds nearby strikes him more than any sightings. In any event, he often assumes more a meditative pose than a investigatory one as he lies there contentedly.

My own bet about what he experiences is more elemental. I would wager that Phil values most the touch of the soft balmy air currents on his skin. After the rigors of this past winter, he must love to feel the warm contact from the atmosphere, the way the rest of us often do.

Since last report, Phil has been diagnosed for diabetes, an ailment that frequently afflicts cats of his senior status. At first, the vet’s announcement came as a shock, an apparent death knell of our household member. Without insulin shots, Phil’s future seemed short indeed, and there was no way we could imagine ever giving such shots to this ornery beast.

But, if he is now terminal, it does not show. Of course, in the long run Phil is doomed to death like all other living beings. However, he does not allow  disease to cramp his life style unduly. He still moves with a tiger’s sudden speed on occasion and, like his other feline relatives, sleeps contently during much of the day.

The one noticeable difference in his habits comes from his new craving for water. Often he will leap from the floor up to the kitchen faucet hoping to slurp from its flow.  He will even poach on the water glasses of his masters, in our place settings at table. Recently he even indulged himself in a helping of black bean soup before his unvigilant masters put an end to this surprising theft.

Susan threw the rest of the soup out despite my making to eat it. She appeared horrified to envision me downing food that Phil had been into. But is he really any dirtier than we?  Would our eating what had become cat food do us in?

I am reminded of an anecdote from a niece’s childhood. She was once discovered to have been eating some dog chow.  When confronted by her aghast mother, the child confessed and promised not to do it again.

“By the way,” her mother asked, “how did it taste?” “Just like cat food,” her daughter answered.

Among Phil’s traits I most admire is his contemplative stance on the world. I actually feel envy that he can do absolutely nothing for hours on end. Why has he been given this gift and not I?

His stance reminds me of lines in T. S. Eliot’s 1930 poem “Ash Wednesday.” “Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still.” If only I had better learned sitting still. The balance between caring and not caring is another and subtler issue, suitable for longer discussion.

I often gaze into Phil’s eyes when he rests in his meditative mood and wonder about his inner life. Then the words of another poet, William Blake, always come to mind: “What immortal hand or eye / Framed thy fearful symmetry.” Of course Blake was talking about a tiger, but Phil qualifies as my tiger.

There are no escape attempts to report on here. Perhaps age has reconciled Phil to the vocation of the cloister. If given the choice at this stage of life, maybe he would even opt for the interior life of our house. After these many years, it is also his house by now, imprinted with his escapades and daily routine.

What I hope for this summer is many bright days. There is nothing Phil likes more than the play of the sun’s rays over the inner surfaces of our house. Perhaps this response to the light is to be expected in a contemplative. If enlightenment looms large in the world’s spiritualities, then Phil is in his element.

I often watch him respond to the rays as they come toward him when he lies on the master bed. He will roll over, seemingly in order to focus the sunlight to its best advantage. When, as happens too often, the morning clouds over, I grieve with Phil for the loss of the light.

I leave off here so as to go play with Phil. This I do despite my fear of having got the situation backward. When it comes right down to it, isn’t it Phil who is playing with me?

Richard Griffin

Writing Columns

Readers of this column frequently ask me where I find my materials. They also wonder if I worry about not having anything to write about.

To the first question, the short answer is – largely from my own daily experience. To the second, I usually respond “no,” except that I sometimes feel pressure when the time available for writing is short.

Running out of things to write about is impossible in a world so large and full of event and personality. This world is alive with action and interaction, and these motions lie ripe for picking. Every time I set forth from my house I open myself to encounters with the potential for reflection. And also when I stay home.

Becoming a columnist has changed the way I look at the world. Expecting to write each week heightens my inner sense of possibility and allows me to find meaning in events that otherwise would pass without my noticing them. Having this angle on the world drives me to sift an encounter with a friend whose name I cannot remember. A conversation with a stranger, as the two of us wait for a thunderstorm to blow over,has the same effect.

As too many people have already recognized, I can be a dangerous guy to talk with. My habit of taking interior notes on conversations often leads to publication. No wonder certain friends have taken to labeling certain remarks as off the record.

However, I take pains to protect privacy. Some columns have died in my computer without ever having seen the light of day. And I often disguise people or indicate that I am using pseudonyms if people have not given me permission to use their real names.

In my view, the best single benefit of writing is discovering what you did not know you knew. I resonate with Donald Murray’s provocative statement: “We write what we do not mean to write and find a meaning greater than we could have dreamt.”

For this reason I often think that almost everyone could benefit from writing. To me, it is like daily swimming or walking: both activities are so beneficial that I sometimes wonder why everyone does not do them. Physical exercise almost always makes you feel better about yourself and your world; literary efforts, no matter how modest or halting, can put you in better possession of yourself.

Heightened awareness brought by writing makes me alert to the drama in people’s lives.  If I had not inquired about the physical disabilities evident in a woman named Julie Favre, I would never have discovered how, when she was a student at Radcliffe in the 1970s, she threw herself from the roof of a college building, suffered severe and permanent injuries, only to discover God and an entirely new set of values and style of life.

Some columns write themselves inside my head. A chance event can provoke me to turn ideas over and over until their fuller meaning emerges. That happened one day when I was accosted by a person resentful of something written by a dear friend who happens to be a fellow columnist. By the time I arrived home, the column was ready to emerge from my head fully grown.

Like walking, swimming often stimulates good ideas. A few laps up and down the lane sometimes enable me to sort out ideas that were entangled and full of knots. And, of course, good writers stir me to develop my own ideas and ways of giving expression to them.

Readers often propose excellent topics. A July, 2001 column, for example, arose from two friends suggesting that I write about their fathers, both naval veterans of World War II. It led to a piece appropriate for Veterans’ Day.

Another reader suggested my visiting the house in Brookline where Jack Kennedy was born. This visit turned out to be fascinating in itself and, I like to think, interesting to readers. No one, however, urged me to write about my activities in opposition to the Vietnam War, writing that attracted a lot of grief for me.

Some readers have sent me documents that proved fine sources for columns. A young man, for example, who spoke at his grandfather’s funeral allowed me to use the list of maxims for finding value in life that his grandfather used to repeat. The old man’s daughter also shared with me her father’s account of his activities for the World War II resistance movement in France.

I have cited here only a few out of many other contributions that readers have made to my journalistic life.

One final confession: of late, I am tempted to include a deliberate mistake in each column. Finding errors wakes up many readers and, though they disguise it, they seem to enjoy catching me wrong. Perhaps I will add a “Find the Lurking Mistake” feature to each of my writings so that readers can stay entertained.

Richard Griffin

Father’s Day Homily

Bill Russell, an old friend and former colleague, has sent out a copy of his homily for Father’s Day. Now working in Kingston, Jamaica, this Jesuit priest is a person of unusual ability and special charm. His legion of friends, me among them, have come to admire his personal gifts, and I have wondered how he can be so attractive a personality. Thanks to his Father’s Day sermon, I now understand better. I would like to share some of it with a wider audience.

Father Russell recalls his father teaching him how to swim when he was hardly more than a foot tall. His father dipped him into a shallow lake, while supporting him with his arms under his son’s back. Like other young children first in this situation, the boy was terrified that he would sink, and balanced on the verge of tears. In soothing response, his father kept reassuring him that he would never let him go.

His father taught the boy his prayers, reading them from a printed card. The man also taught the child his catechism questions and answers, though he understood little of it himself, since he was not a Catholic. He took the lead in saying grace before meals, asking God’s blessing on the food Bill’s mother had prepared for her family. And, before Bill and the other children went to bed each evening, the father would bless each one of them.

While still a child, the boy was allowed to sit in his father’s lap in the driver’s seat of the family car, and turn the steering wheel and honk the horn. When Bill got his first summer job, at age 12 or so, his father informed him he had to give back to his family, to defray the family costs of  room and board, 25 of the 27 dollars that he was paid each week.

Years later, when Bill went off to college at Holy Cross in Worcester, his father gave him back all the money, and with interest, telling his son to feel free to spend it in whatever way he wished. As his father dropped Bill off at his dorm, he sat down on a bed and told his son how proud he was to have him in college. Even though, as he explained it, he would be paying one-fifth of his salary on one-eighth of the family, this father told this son he was worth every penny.

Bill’s father also drove his son to the novitiate in Lenox, Massachusetts, when the young man first entered the Jesuit community. In those days, 50 years ago, that meant almost total isolation from face-to-face contact with parents and other family members. As the son recalls, it was a highly emotional occasion for his father who “hugged me one last time as I waved goodbye from the seminary door, watching him wipe away the tears from his eyes –  the one and only time I ever saw him cry.”

When his wife died, Bill’s father told him there would be no stone to indicate her grave. She had been too frail to support a heavy stone, his father explained; in any event, she would not be there because “she would go straight to God.”

When his own turn came to die, the father informed his children that he had nothing left, all his resources having been spent on them. For his children, he continued to have the warmest feelings. “He was the one who was so proud of all of us,” says this son, “who spoke of us as if we were unbelievably precious in his sight.”

The preacher ends with a simple sentence from the heart: “I cannot begin to tell you how proud I am to be his son.”

Only twice in this homily does Father Russell use the word “God.” But he does not need to because he finds in the person of his own earthly father so much of what his spiritual tradition attributes to God.

The heart of it is unconditional love. The son recalls his father as a man who loved him without any hedging. This father was a giver of himself to others; in fact he  found his greatest gratification in spending himself for them.

Does this not suggest the divine Father for whom, in the Bible, lovingkindness is what distinguishes him most?

Richard Griffin

Though I Walk

To change ideas about oneself, there is nothing quite like a personal encounter with the danger of death. That was my experience recently when I rushed off to the hospital in the middle of the night.

I had awakened with constriction in my chest that suggested a possible heart attack. This sudden crisis climaxed months of walks and other daily activities made uncomfortable by similar physical pressure felt within my upper body. This time, however, it had happened when I was at rest and the discomfort was much worse.

At the hospital, the cardiologist diagnosed a heart problem and, two days later, he did an angiogram. This procedure quickly revealed a blockage in one artery, which the surgeon remedied by inserting a stent that would assure normal blood flow. I was released the next day and allowed to resume daily activities after another week.

This unemotional account of what has become a standard medical procedure, undergone by many other people, leaves out one moment of intense feeling. During the placement of the stent, the surgeon momentarily cut off the blood flow from that artery, thus subjecting me to the most agonizing pressure in chest and throat than I had ever experienced. For what seemed endless minutes, I felt desperate.

The whole experience has left me with a vivid sense of my own vulnerability. Feeling vulnerable is not new to me; it has always been present not far removed from my psyche. Having a disability from birth has no doubt heightened that perception and made it part of my inner life.

Before having the catheterization, I had signed the standard paper that allowed the surgeon to perform the procedure. Those documents I always find frightening because they list the terrible things that can go wrong. Signing it can feel like sentencing yourself to great grief for an indefinite future.

But facing the unknown, coping with threats to one’s life, and living with vulnerability are familiar parts of spirituality. These challenges call for responses from the deepest part of us. They put us to the test often bring out the best in us.

Another part of it is daring to trust. I did not know the surgeon personally. Though I did ask him some questions about his track record in doing the procedure, ultimately I had to trust that he would do his best and that his best would be good enough. This counts ultimately as trust in God because I envision God as present in the healing work of human beings.

For me, trust in God has long been a key part of spirituality. Starting in the third grade of public school, I used to recite the 23rd Psalm from the Hebrew Bible, with its focal lines: “Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for Thou art with me.” These words have continued to console me through the years as they did in my recent health crisis.

As other have discovered, hospitals are not places that are conducive to prayer. Through long hours of sleepless nights, I tried to meditate but usually found it impossible. I was physically uncomfortable and often assailed by noise from the busy nurses’ station.

Despite this failing effort at spiritual exercises, however, I did put myself in the hands of God and intermittently tried to discover the spirit within me. I also practiced the spirituality of counting on kindness. For me this means expecting the people who serve me as nurses, doctors, food-bringers, bed pushers, blood drawers and others to act in my best interests.

In fact, they were kind to me and amply justified my trust. Living a few days in the hospital remained difficult but the devotion of all these people made it much better than it otherwise would have been.

Though back at work and other accustomed activities, I see myself differently. On the one side, it is easier to envision my life ending, perhaps suddenly. On the other, life has become more precious to me. Even more than in the past, I value each day and its gifts.

I have been blessed by bodily repair and I look forward to further life enhanced by renewal.

Richard Griffin

George Vaillant on Old Age

“Don’t listen to people like Tom Perls, George Vaillant, Betty Friedan, William Shakespeare, and Simone de Beauvoir. They were all between 40 and 70 when they wrote about aging.”

So says George Vaillant, one of the people he warns about. Instead, he uses a favorite simile to suggest a different approach: “Old age is like a minefield; if you see footprints leading to the other side, step in them.”

In his experience, those footprints will belong to people 85 and over, not to young pedants. “Don’t pay attention to know-it-all professors who try to teach you golf or to fly a plane without ever having been up in it,” he advises.

Dr. Vaillant freely admits having been one of those know-it-alls himself, but his studies of older people have led him to learn humility. A psychiatrist focused on human research, he has a leading role in the famous Harvard University Study of Adult Development, a project that has lasted 50 years.

In a recent talk at the Cambridge for Adult Education, this 68-year-old researcher shared with an audience of mostly older people, from many cities and towns around Boston, some of what he has learned about growing into old age.

Among the possible ways of thinking about the subject, he finds human development by far the most interesting. The only reason why Americans tend to think negatively about later life, he says, is that disease becomes more frequent then.

The same thing happens with automobiles: even a hundred-year-old Rolls Royce will have a bad drive train. “You just accept the fact that the last year of life, whether you die at 7 or 107, is going to be kind of a bummer,” he says. “You pay attention to the other 106.”

The study with which he has been involved has followed three groups of people during almost their entire lives, from teenage through old age. This longest study of aging in the world has taken three separate groups of people – – a total of 824 individuals – – and interviewed them intensively. Building on this work, Vaillant in 2002 published the book “Aging Well.”

In the Study’s web site Vaillant describes the individuals followed by the researchers. The first group is made up of 268 socially advantaged Harvard College grads born around 1920. The second contains 456 socially disadvantaged men from Boston’s “Inner City.” Finally, the third comprises 90 socially middle-class, intellectually talented women from California’s Bay area, born about 1910.

On that same web site, Vaillant lists, in his own personal and characteristic language (including parentheses), some of what he considers the most significant findings thus far:

  • It is not the bad things that happen to us that doom us; it is the good people who happen to us at any age that facilitate enjoyable old age;
  • Healing relationships are facilitated by a capacity for gratitude, for forgiveness, and for taking people inside. (By this metaphor I mean becoming eternally enriched by loving a particular person.)
  • A good marriage at age 50 predicted positive aging at 80. But, surprisingly, low cholesterol levels at age 50 did not.
  • Alcohol abuse – – unrelated to unhappy childhood – – consistently predicted unsuccessful aging, in part because alcoholism damaged future social supports.
  • Learning to play and create after retirement and learning to gain younger friends as we lose older ones add more to life’s enjoyment than retirement income.
  • Objective good physical health was less important to successful aging than subjective good health. By this I mean it is all right to be ill as long as you do not feel sick.

Young people, Vaillant believes, have to be self-centered. “You will never have a self to give away,” he says, “if you don’t start out life by being selfish.” A woman who studied biographies and autobiographies calculated that, when subjects were 25, a whopping 92 percent of their wishes were directed toward the self. But by the time they got to be 60, only 29 percent of their wishes were self oriented.

Adult development occurs very slowly and there is no surefire way of speeding it up. But, when it comes, this inner growth moves us toward empathy for other people and altruism. What Vaillant calls the “emotional brain” gets increasingly well connected to the forebrain and we learn to control our passions.

This student of human change considers retirement as one of the great gifts of modern times. In 1900, only one percent of Harvard grads were retired; now 15 percent are. “We have the opportunity, not to live forever, but to retire and do something different.” Vaillant considers longevity as offering the chance to experiment and to use play to discover  ourselves in new ways.

About the awful things that happen in old age, he reminds listeners that they happen in adolescence too. He quotes the Russian writer Solzhenitsyn: “Aging is in no sense a punishment from on high but brings its own blessing and a warmth of color all its own.”

Richard Griffin

Anastasius and the Monk

From the early centuries of Christianity comes a spiritually provocative story connected with the Fathers of the Desert. The version told here can be found in a 1992 book written by a friend, Ernest Kurtz, and Katherine Ketcham, and called The Spirituality of Imperfection: Modern Wisdom from Classic Stories.

Abbot Anastasius had a book of very fine parchment, which was worth 20 shekels. It contained both the Old and the New Testaments in full, and Anastasius read from it daily as he meditated.

Once a certain monk came to visit him and, seeing the book, made off with it. The next day, when Anastasius went to his Scripture reading and found it was missing, he knew at once who had taken it. Yet he did not send after him, for fear that the monk might add the sin of perjury to that of theft.

Now the monk went into the city to sell the book. He wanted 18 shekels for it. The buyer said, “Give me the book so that I may find out if it is worth that much money.” With that, he took the book to the holy Anastasius and said, “Father, take a look at this and tell me if you think it is worth as much as 18 shekels.” Anastasius said, “Yes, it is a fine book. And at 18 shekels it is a bargain.”

So the buyer went back to the monk and said, “Here is your money. I showed the book to Father Anastasius and he said it was worth 18 shekels.”

The monk was stunned. “Was that all he said? Did he say nothing else?”

“No, he did not say a word more than that.”

“Well, I have changed my mind and don’t want to sell the book after all.”

Then he went to Anastasius and begged him with many tears to take the book back, but Anastasius said gently, “No, brother, keep it. It is my present to you.”

But the monk said, “If you do not take it back, I shall have no peace.”

After that the monk dwelt with Anastasius for the rest of his life.”

The beauties of this story are many, most of them connected with the spiritual stature of Anastasius. Aware of the theft of his most valuable possession, this saintly man resists the human impulse to anger, indignation, and self-pity. He does not consider himself a victim, but instead looks to the good of the person who has wronged him.

With rare spiritual discernment, the abbot feels concern about the spiritual state of the thief. Instead of pursuing him and accusing him of the misdeed, Anastasius shrinks from putting the monk in a situation where he would almost surely have to lie. That would have the effect of adding another sin on top of the first.

The story turns on the potential book buyer’s decision to consult Anastasius, a quite understandable move, given the abbot’s authority. The reason the latter shows restraint is that he sizes up the situation spiritually, rather than emotionally as most people would.

Anastasius is also a model of detachment. He hangs loose even from his dearest possession, since he values the spiritual welfare of another person as more important than any mere thing. And he loves God enough not to allow the love of material possessions, however holy, to take him away from God. Even though the abbot treasured the book for inspiration and prayer, he is willing to let the monk keep it.

Notice also how the abbot preserves his peace of soul throughout. The average person would be upset by the betrayal of a friend or associate. Not Anastasius, however. He keeps his focus on what is most important – the love of God and his neighbor.

The effect of the abbot’s compassion is to bring about the permanent repentance of the monk. Turning away from his sin, the monk wants to spend the rest of his life with this great-souled person who has taught him so much.

We never do learn explicitly what happens to the book. But do we have to be told, after learning about the compassion of the abbot and the conversion of the monk?

Richard Griffin

Ruth Abrams Honors Elders

It was appropriate for Ruth Abrams to open her latest art exhibit close to Memorial Day. This 79-year-old Brookline resident has made memory the central focus of this display of collages, assemblages, and video. The 20 different pieces of her art recall some of the people and events most important in her life.

One of the collages memorializes Phil Ross, a fellow college student at Ohio University in Athens, who became her boyfriend. After he had given her his fraternity pin, he went off to the Army and was killed in the Battle of the Bulge.

Ruth remembers vividly how she learned of his death. Her roommate met her after class and walked back to their dormitory. There her sorority housemates gathered around her and broke the awful news to her, what she calls “hollow, blank history.”

Soon after, she went off by train to Wilkes-Barre to visit Phil’s family whom she had never met before. They were in mourning and she joined them in their Jewish ritual. One of her preoccupations was wondering whether to give back Phil’s fraternity pin.

In a collage entitled “Trains and Memories,” Ruth uses photos of Phil in uniform, recently sent her by his half brother. In the words written on the display she poignantly asks: “Was it 58 years ago? Why do I still have tears?”

Another collage allows the artist to express her philosophy of later life. It bears the title “Lobster, Take a Risk,” and quotes author Eda Le Shan who sees in the lobster–which needs to shed its shell in order to grow–a model for growth through the courage to change.

“Aging can be a time of change,” says Ruth Abrams, “and a time for growing. The secret of successful aging is to go on to explore life, learning, shedding the old for new challenges.”

Asked if this indeed expresses her philosophy, Ruth agrees. Disarmingly, however, she laughs and lightheartedly refers to herself as “this crazy lady.”

The exhibit “When I Grow Up” features a box enclosing the doll Ruth received when she was six years old. Her family was poor; the doll was given her by a family friend. On the outside of the box, she lists all the things she wanted then. Among them was a bicycle, something she finally acquired at 14. However, she parked the bike on her back porch and it was stolen. Never again would she have another one.

I enjoyed seeing again “Father’s ‘Golden Hands’,” a small display of some tools that Ruth’s father used for various repairs. The term is a tradition Jewish expression for suggesting a person skilled with his hands. Ruth’s father, who owned a gas station, would respond to neighbors hinting at their need to have something fixed. This he would do much to the disapproval of his wife.

A more complicated display  requires lifting a veil to discover words used as stereotypes of old people. “Old” suggests “lonely” or “self-centered,” for example. The artist here delivers the message that old things as well as people are valuable and should not be tossed aside.

Commenting on the value she finds in creating the parts that go into a show like this one, Ruth says: “There’s so much learning that goes on when you’re working physically with a piece.”

She feels the creativity in herself but also complains about some loss. “the trouble is I’m also forgetting,” she regrets. However, she does see this process as a kind of balance.

When she turns toward a collage that centers on outrageous older women, she refuses to include herself in this number. “I’m not outrageous; I’m pretty conservative,” she claims. Of course, she is correct literally in so far as the material in her show comes from what she has conserved or saved, rather than thrown away. Whether this artist is conservative in her world view, however, seems much less certain.

Before this show ends, Ruth plans to reach out to the multicultural community of area residents. She has prepared voice-overs of her “Fabric of Life” video in four languages – – English, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian (and soon, Spanish) for use with the various linguistic groups.

She will invite them to come to the exhibit and give their reactions to her work. Presumably, these reactions will show differences in mentality that may reveal a variety of responses to aging. Ruth hopes to interest gerontologists in analyzing these differences.

The show is on display through June 18th at Newbury College. The college gallery is located at 150 Fisher Avenue, Brookline. My reason for taking notice of this event is the inspiration I derive from seeing one of my age peers display to the public her continued creativity. Ruth Abrams offers just one more proof of the spirit shown by so many people as they sift their later years for value.

Richard Griffin