Lester Lee’s Grandmother

A friend, Lester Lee, has sent me a copy of a sermon he preached on January 19th, the Sunday before this year’s celebration of Martin Luther King Day. Professor Lee had been invited by the pastor of his church to deliver the sermon on this special occasion.

He entitled his sermon: “The Good Samaritan: Martin Luther King, Jr. and American Democracy.” The text makes me wish I had been there to hear my friend’s inspiring words, but reading them is enough to touch me with spiritual insight.

A passage that I find especially moving is one in which Lester Lee reaches back into an event in his early history:

“I know in my own personal life that I learned about being a Good Samaritan from my grandmother, Deaconess Earl Virginia Murrell.  One day when I was a youngster, walking with her through Central Square here in Cambridge, we encountered a beggar, a disheveled man, lying in a doorway.  I started to snicker at him.  But before  I could utter a disparaging word, my grandmother grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and shook me.  She said, ‘Don't you ever laugh at another human being.  He, too, had a mother and is a child of God.’  My grandmother had mercy on that man's misfortune and taught me the meaning of mercy.”

Now middle-aged, this man looks back over the decades and targets this incident as crucial in his outlook on the world. His grandmother taught him a lesson that he has never forgotten and continues to live by every day. It is a powerful lesson that goes smack against the temptation to look down on others less fortunate than ourselves. The woman’s words remain beautiful as they testify to the basic dignity of each human being as a child of God.

About the same time, I heard a report of a young teacher in a high school classroom, let’s say in Colorado, who played a similar role to my friend’s grandmother.

One of this young woman’s students said something in class that was derogatory about people on welfare. This boy suggested such people were lazy and undeserving.

Taking the boy aside, the teacher, only a few years older than he, pointed out to him how fortunate he was to belong to a family with adequate money and other resources. It was not his doing that had resulted in his life being so blessed but rather came from the gifts he had been given. The appropriate way to look upon people down and out, she suggested, was with compassion.

I felt buoyed up by this young teacher’s response and I feel glad to know about her intervention. She is a credit to her profession in delivering to an adolescent a lesson that may serve him well for the rest of his life. He is unlikely to learn anything more important in his high school career.

When I was a child, I remember being mystified by seeing people begging in Boston. How could it be, I wondered, that some people had so little while others had so much? What would my father do, as he and I passed a panhandler on the street? Feelings of awe still come over me, so many decades later, that the world remains so unbalanced.

Though large-hearted people will continue to try and right this imbalance, success will not come anytime soon. Meanwhile, the spiritual challenge remains to respect the God-given dignity of people who are dispossessed. Whenever we feel tempted to look down on them, we could not do better than to conjure up the image of my friend’s grandmother and the shaking she gave her beloved grandson long ago, from the scruff of his neck down.

And the young teacher’s lesson given to her student to set his values straight can remind us of our own need to recognize the dignity of others, no matter how reduced in circumstances they may be.

Only at our own spiritual peril can the rest of us afford to forget the call to compassion. When people poor in material goods and troubled in spirit come into view, it may be tempting to look down on them or even despise them for supposed shiftlessness. To give into this temptation, however, is to do harm to both them and ourselves.

Richard Griffin

Coughlin and the Age Lab

Joe Coughlin is full of provocative ideas. Talking with him, one soon discovers why the Age Lab at MIT has drawn the attention of so many people across the country who are interested in improving the experience of growing older.

Professor Coughlin founded this laboratory, a notable force for change, in 1999. He determined to bring together an interdisciplinary team of researchers and engineers in fields as disparate as health sciences and aeronautics in order to better the lives of older people.

Coughlin came to the field of aging through his work with transportation issues. He realized there was a major “infrastructure or mobility gap” between the needs of older people to get around and their available choices. After all, 70 percent of the American population live in the suburbs, but many older suburbanites have no access to transport other than the private car.

This situation highlights the contrast between our brilliant success in achieving greater longevity on the one hand, and our failure, thus far, to ensure that older people have the mobility necessary to ensure their quality of life.

In his own research, Coughlin is trying to “develop new business models that respond to the demands of today’s and tomorrow’s older adults by seamlessly integrating technology and consumer services.” This brings him into collaboration with major companies in the United States and abroad as they enter into partnerships with the Age Lab.

Already, the Age Lab, working with these industrial partners and service agencies, is developing some promising new products. In the course of a recent interview, Professor Coughlin singled out several:

  • A device, either handheld or for the shopping cart, to provide personal information about healthy diet, appropriate exercise, and prescribed medications, to help people choose among products in a grocery store;
  • A warning system in automobiles for left-hand turns. These turns –  -requiring judgments about speed and distance –  – are the number one causes of accidents among older drivers, with men better at judging speed, women at estimating distance;
  • For drivers suffering from dementia, their family members, and caretakers, the Age Lab has co-sponsored a guide developed by The Hartford Financial Services Group and designed to prepare those drivers for phasing out operating a car altogether;
  • An electronic data system that will enable people to make a daily check-up on their health. The technology already exists; the challenge is to figure out a system for professionals to respond at the other end.

Trained as a political scientist, Coughlin considers his studies to be a fine preparation for dealing with the problems of later life. “I don’t question whether or not we have the technology for fixing many of these problems,” he says. “What I question is whether society is organized in such a way as to be able to do so.”

He rates MIT’s chances high because it is accustomed to looking ahead boldly. “The real gift MIT gives any problem: it’s not afraid to be innovative.” But technology, as he sees it, is often not the issue. What he calls “the value-added part” is. Coming up with a new widget is easy compared to getting it wanted, marketed, and accepted.

For this, you have to better understand the user. Coughlin is convinced that the baby boomers will demand better-designed goods and services. If a product does not work easily, they will rightly blame the designers rather than themselves, the users.

The lack of effective technology can be seen as part of the reason why so many older people are cut off from the larger community. “Society cannot afford to have 20 percent of its people disengaged,” Coughlin says. They should be demanding a place at society’s table and they would enjoy better health if they did so.

On the contemporary scene, communities are changing. They are now being defined not so much by geographical proximity as by shared interests. The Age Lab director sees new life-long learning opportunities in the future.

The Audubon Society and the Sierra Club, for instance, could provide distance learning for the many people interested in gardening. More people should live near college campuses and every high school should be turned into a community learning center. Staying involved, learning constantly, can add vibrancy to people of just about any age.

Getting new products on the market for people of any age is time consuming. Just to get anti-lock brakes into cars sold in the United States took 17 years. Ideally, it would be advisable to get to utilize products useful in old age before that time comes. No mobile person is going to buy a wheel chair at age 40 but there are other devices, such as the microwave oven, that are useful both early on and later on.

The question of assisting older people to find meaning in their lives is complex but technology can definitely help. “Everyone has to find his own meaning,” Coughlin asserts. “The role of technology is to open the doors.”

Richard Griffin

Islam and the Human Body

“It is important to emphasize here that the attitude, so prevalent in the modern world, that a person’s body and life are his or her own to do with as he or she pleases is totally alien to Islam. Our bodies and lives are not our own; they are God’s.”

These bold words come from a book so new it bears the copyright 2003. The volume carries the simple title “Islam.” Its author is a Muslim scholar, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a native of Iran who studied at Tehran University, MIT,  and Harvard. This distinguished religious thinker is now University Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University.

The Muslim view of the body flies in the face of many modern American ideas. “My body belongs to me,” we say, “and I can do with it what I wish. It is my business alone if I choose, for instance, to undergo expensive and painful plastic surgery to make my face look pretty.”

Many modern Americans suffer from an unfavorable body image. We are dissatisfied with how we look in the mirror and brood about physical defects, real or imagined. Focusing on what we see as shortcomings often undermines our self-esteem. The Muslim teaching about the body as belonging to God suggests a reason for adopting a much more positive view of our physical selves.

Professor Nasr must be painfully aware that what he says applies to the suicides carried out by terrorists and other militants, so many of them Muslim. In another passage, in fact, he explicitly mentions suicide “which is forbidden by Islamic Law and considered a great sin.”

Thus he would absolutely reject the claim made by a few militant fellow Muslims trying to justify the suicidal attacks of the terrorists on September 11, 2001. What these men did cannot be judged as being in accord with their Islamic faith but instead goes directly against its teachings.

Similarly, this scholar would brand as violations of the Muslim religion the attacks in which some Palestinians blow themselves and others up as part of the current intifada or violent uprising against Israel. However heavy their grievances, these people cannot claim the backing of their faith for killing themselves in this way, and certainly not for killing innocent civilians by any means.

One often hears mention of the Arabic word “jihad” used to justify such suicidal attacks. Almost always the word gets translated as “holy war” but Dr. Nasr calls this a mistranslation. The word really means “exertion in the path of God” and has a profound inner meaning that most non-Muslims know nothing about.

Outwardly, Dr. Nasr explains, jihad allows people to defend their homeland or religion from attack by legitimate means. But inwardly, on a deeper level, “it means to battle the negative tendencies within the soul, tendencies that prevent us from living a life of sanctity and reaching the perfection God has meant for us.”

Understood in this sense, jihad has a central role in the life of Muslims. Dr. Nasr refers to a saying of Mohammed in which the Prophet calls this latter use of the word “the greater jihad” because it amounts to “vigilance against all that distracts us from God.”

Islam’s teaching about the body belonging to God and human beings not being free to abuse it is reminiscent of the New Testament’s teaching on the same subject. In the First Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul writes: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price.”

This way of thinking about our bodies presupposes seeing ourselves as God’s handiwork. This amounts to a radical point of view that considers everything human as flowing from the creator. It means considering our physical selves as sacred. It smacks of what Rabbi Abraham Heschel once said: “Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.”

Thus, great spiritual traditions challenge us, not only to resist abuse of our bodies, but also to be deeply respectful of our physical selves. Yes, our bodies  frequently are the source of pain and other afflictions.  But, despite this reality, Islam, along with Judaism, Christianity and the world’s other spiritual legacies, prompts us to look upon our material selves as sacred and holy.

Richard Griffin

On Not Knowing

A story is told about Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), the English man of letters who wrote newspaper columns as well as essays, novels, and poems. In 1909, he was invited to give a talk to members of the London Times book club. After the talk, his admirers in the audience hurried forward to speak with this literary celebrity.

One of them, a woman, gushed: “Mr. Chesterton, you seem to know everything.” “No, Madam,” the great man replied. “I know nothing. I am a journalist.”

This reply gives me some solace for my own ignorance. Being a journalist does in fact offer me a fine perch for appreciating how little I know. As I move from one topic to the next, week by week, opportunities arise for realizing the vast extent of my nescience, if you will allow me knowledge of a somewhat pedantic Latinism meaning “lack of knowledge.”

According to the Chestertonian standard, journalists have got a head start over other people. We can glory in our superiority by reason of not knowing a whole lot more than do our friends and acquaintances. So, if you often find ignorance in this column, please take it as a strength rather than a weakness.

I have often fantasized about being suddenly dropped, like a dead weight, back into the 13th century. Were that to happen, I could dazzle people of that era by telling them about all the marvelous modern inventions we have in the 21st. Hearing of computers, airliners capable of traveling around the world, cell phones (with the social nuisance they often cause), television, indoor plumbing, plus thousands of other devices, would surely stir them to wonder.

But, if these people of the 13th century took the next logical step and asked me how these technologies are made, I would suddenly lapse into uncomfortable silence. The shocking fact is that I know practically nothing about how they work. Like most other people living in this modern age, I remain ignorant about almost all of the marvelous inventions by which my contemporaries and I live.

The advance of years has brought me an increasingly deeper awareness of ignorance. One great difference has come with this increase, however. Unlike my condition when younger, I now feel free to admit ignorance. At last, it does not bother me to face the vast sea of what I don’t know.

Of course, there is a subtle irony about this situation. The irony lies in the way in which acknowledging ignorance comes close to wisdom. Knowing what you don’t know means that you are advancing toward this virtue, so long associated with the aged. By this standard, some of the people who are aware of their ignorance are the wisest.

My doctrine on not knowing, however, should not be understood as a failure to appreciate learning. Learning something new is one of the best remedies for what ails us, whenever we get down on ourselves and the world. In fact, I love to learn and always recommend it to people at every stage of life.

One of the continuing pleasures of my life is to meet young people who are discovering new fields of knowledge and finding joy in exploring them.

When you get older, learning becomes a somewhat different experience. You do not run the risk of becoming prideful because, by this time, if you have any sense you have learned how much you do not know.

The highest form of not knowing is, of course, not knowing God. As the French social activist Madeleine Debrêl once provocatively wrote: “Faith is the knowledge of our basic ignorance.”

The way of negation, of approaching God, by denying in Him everything merely human, is a time-honored kind of theology. “My ways are not your ways,” says God to the people of the Hebrew Bible, words that the New Testament would surely endorse also.

Though God must inevitably be described by the use of human language and imagery, still the spiritual traditions of the world are at one in denying that we can ever capture God in our words. Theologians who know too much about God are not to be trusted.

No wonder that the distance between belief in God and atheism is so narrow. Serious believers and atheists have more in common than they commonly realize.

Richard Griffin

Manhattan Visit

“St. Paul’s will always be in my mind, heaven’s outpost.”  These words, spoken by New York City firefighter Robert Senatore, refer to the Wall Street chapel that was built in 1766. That makes it the oldest church in New York and the only one to date from before the American Revolution.

Miraculously, it survived intact the destruction of the World Trade Center in September, 2001, despite being located only two blocks away.

I visited this small church two weeks ago, on my first visit to Manhattan since the great disaster. This contact with tragedy formed one event in a 48-hour stay in the city; by contrast, my other experiences while there proved entertaining and nostalgic.

When looking at the site of the two towers and later walking through the chapel, I felt anew some of the pity and fear of 9/11/01. In addition, seeing St. Paul’s gave me a new vision of the spiritual dimensions of the response made by so many men and women to unspeakable tragedy.

Of course, the debris of destruction has long since been cleared away and the surroundings of the Trade Center site are now neat and clean. But huge cavities remain where reconstruction continues. A crude cross made of steel beams, erected by a firefighter, stands in mute remembrance to those who lost their lives.

At St. Paul’s, the paper and other trash that once littered the churchyard outside are long gone and the chapel has now become a site of pilgrimage for visitors like me. But evidences of the crisis activity that once filled this space still remain. Black smudges on the backs of the pews, made by the boots of rescue workers, silently testify to their oftentimes heroic labors.

This sacred space became a place of refuge for workers where they received food, rest, supplies, and sympathetic attention. These human services at the chapel turned into a new and vital ministry where people serving others could themselves be served.

On this weekend, I would not see anything else to equal for human interest this area of lower Manhattan, the theater of events that now help define our new century. On other parts of this still-fabulous island, life has returned, if not to normal, at least to day to day existence, New York style.

But for me, being there invariably stirs some of the same magical feelings I had as a boy on my first visit. Then it was the World’s Fair of 1939 where I still remember feeling wonder, as we slowly circled around the General Motors futurama exhibit.

This time, I saw an old  play which evoked that same era. “Dinner at Eight,” written by Edna Ferber and George Kaufman in 1932, is often hilarious but it also creaks by now, with some scenes moving altogether too slowly.

However, watching old pros work their magic on stage always delights me. Notably, the veteran actress, Marian Seldes, whose role allowed her to display the flamboyance at which she is so skilled, vindicated once more the esthetic pleasures of theater at its best.

A Sunday morning walk up Fifth Avenue brought me the subtle joys of being outside on a bracing winter’s day along one of the world’s great streets. I lingered to join children gazing at some of the fabulous window displays in the major department stores. Seeing Herr Drosselmeyer, Clara, the Mouse King and others go through their paces (thanks to hidden electronics) pleased me as much as the kids.

The usual holiday season sounds filled the air, but traffic noises were muted. As one of the taxi drivers informed me, the mayor has levied fines of $500 on them and other motorists who blow their horns needlessly. Mike Bloomberg, the new mayor, is a native of Medford, MA, where, surprisingly enough, he may have grown up on quiet streets.

My stroll down Fifth Avenue was not entirely frivolous. Partly to escape the cold, I dropped into St. Patrick’s Cathedral for Sunday worship. As usual, I was impressed by the astounding variety of people assembled in that sacred space and, for that time at least, achieving a unity that I found moving.

A reunion at lunch with a cousin also brought pleasure. I think of him as a young man but, like so many other people, he has entered into advanced middle age. When you stop seeing people for a while, that’s the sort of thing that happens.

This cousin knows the New York opera scene and also, with surprising versatility, the pop music scene as well. He loves Wagner and yet had a hand in the writing of the Broadway show Dance of the Vampires.

The occasion for this 48-hour visit to the Apple was a family wedding. It turned out to be a blast, provoking even the likes of me to fairly frenetic dancing. But that’s another story that has already entered the annals kept by my extended family.

Richard Griffin

Visit to Ground Zero

Last weekend marked my first visit to the World Trade Center site in Manhattan since the devastating attack of September, 2001. Like most other Americans, I had raptly followed the awful events on television and the other media. But actually being there, I discovered, makes a difference.

By now, the rubble has been cleared out of the huge craters where the great buildings rose. Chain link fences allow visitors to look inside but not to enter. My gaze was drawn to the awkward cross made of steel building fragments constructed a fireman to commemorate the people who died. It serves as a stark reminder of their bright lives and of what they meant to others.

The surrounding buildings show no obvious signs of damage at this time and business has resumed, though at a much lower level. Vendors stand on sidewalks nearby selling photos and other memorabilia to tourists. Down in the excavation workers continue to rebuild underground systems.

One block away, on Wall Street, I also visited St. Paul’s, the oldest church in New York, dating from 1766. George Washington worshiped there on the day of his inauguration, and at other times as well, since New York was still the seat of the federal government.

Before the events of September 2001, St. Paul’s Chapel was already a national landmark. It has always boasted a simple beauty of design, a classic building both exteriorly and inside. Now it would take on new standing because of its response to the tragedy.

After narrowly escaping destruction, this church was reborn on September 11; it quickly became a center for providing food and respite to the emergency workers at the site. Visitors can still see the black smudges on the pews where exhausted workers lay down to rest with their boots on. Wisely, the church authorities have left these marks as a sign of the dedication of people who worked themselves long and hard.

St. Paul’s thus became the site for various forms of ministry over the next several weeks and months.  Meals were served, healing conversations took place, clothing and needed gear were provided, and people were given a sense of a community of caring.

So the rich background of this oldest New York church took on an additional layer of history. Now, in addition to being valued for its association with the beginnings of the American republic, St. Paul’s will be associated with the events of September 11th as long as the structure endures. If every church is a holy place, this place is doubly so by reason of its invaluable role in responding to a national tragedy.

The building would have been leveled by the blast that leveled the twin towers except for the force being absorbed by an old sycamore tree that stood in the church yard. According to information on a panel outside the church, the building could not have withstood the physical forces that destroyed the twin towers. As it was, the church exterior was covered by ash from the great fires and the church yard and burial ground overlaid with papers and other debris.

Can one see in this escape the work of God’s providence acting to safeguard a spiritual resource for the community devastated by so much loss? Whatever the answer, the ministry of St. Paul’s continues and now envelops tourists who come from all over the world to relive the events of that fateful day.

As I walked slowly through the interior of the church, I felt the sacred character of the place. Along side aisles of the church, colored banners are hung as tributes from people who live in other parts of the country. They give testimony to the devotion people at large feel toward those who died on September 11th  and to those who worked to recover their bodies.

Something stirred within me as I reflected on the dire events of that time as well as on the generous responses of both those in the rescue forces and those who ministered to them. This was an outpouring of charity, the greatest of spiritual gifts and the sign of God’s presence. I felt glad finally to be in this spot so many months after the dire events commemorated here.

Richard Griffin

Perricone, Cosmeceuticals

The faces of the people in the studio audience are positively worshipful. Television cameras focus on them frequently as the smooth dermatologist tells them how to beat aging. They seem to believe everything he says, no matter how far-reaching his claims.

Dr. Nicholas Perricone has become a public television star in cities across the country. His programs, “The Wrinkle Cure” and “Healthy Aging: the Perricone Prescription” have probably been watched by millions, especially during fund-raising periods.

During its recent drive for money, KQED, the San Francisco PBS channel, reportedly devoted four hours of prime time to Perricone programming. No wonder another writer has called his tapes “the best fund-raising gambit these stations have ever had.”

WGBH, Channel 2, our public television station in Boston, has featured this same medical performer as recently as last month. Presumably he helped this station; I am sure he also helped himself at the same time.

If my words here seem negative, you’ve got it right. What we see operating here is a conflict of interest being sponsored by a public entity. To say the least, one must distrust doctors who have a vested financial interest in their practice.

Yet Dr. Perricone unabashedly hawks his skin care products as remedies for the “disease” of aging. Many beauty shops around the country, notably the 80 stores in the Sephora chain, with outlets in Boston’s Prudential Center, the Burlington Mall, and the Chesnut Hill Mall, carry his creams, lotions, and other products in which he has a major financial interest.

Sephora’s web site lists Dr. Perricone’s  Prescription Starter Kit, a $210 value available online for $150, as one of its top sellers. The high priest of skin is not growing poor while he doubles as a physician/television star.

He is doubtless not the first physician to assume an ethically awkward posture. What is surprising, though, is that public television should choose to abet him.

In response to this criticism, John Abbott, Vice President of WGBH for TV Stations, defends the choice of the Perricone programming. His purpose was “to bring in a range of viewer interests.” Deftly finessing the issue, he says: “I tried to watch it like Joe Everybody.” Listening to Abbott, one would never have guessed that fundraising had any role whatsoever in the decision to air Perricone’s programs.

Apart from ethical issues, however, I distrust anyone who peddles simplistic remedies for human well-being and happiness. Or anyone who says, as does Perricone at the beginning: “Aging is a disease” and “Aging is optional.”

Our lives are too marvelously complicated for a person of any wisdom to say, as Perricone does, that his approach will guarantee positive results: “If you do that, you will have a long healthy life. More important, you will have a good quality of life.” The length of our life and its quality depend on a lot more than health care.

And Perricone’s pedagogy stirs serious objections in me. His explanations are long and complicated, replete with pharmacological terms that are obscure to educated lay people. Does this qualify as good adult education? Is it acceptable practice to tell the general public that they should all take certain treatments?

At his web site this doctor presents himself as a “pioneer in the field of appearance.” Such a field is new to me and, I suggest, bears an instructive double meaning. Magicians, too, are experts in “appearance.”

Another coinage favored by Perricone is “Cosmeceuticals” a designation he puts after his M. D. He counts himself among the “world’s foremost anti-aging specialists,” a claim that, in my opinion, does him little credit.

In explaining his formulas for the war against aging, this much-hyped physician favors simplicity. “If the program isn’t simple,” he pronounces, “there’s something wrong with that program.”

Admittedly, Perricone does prescribe some good practices. For instance, he urges careful control of what we eat and proposes diets that control intake of fat and carbohydrates. He also recommends physical exercise, especially because it boosts the immune system.

However, another Perricone promise is of more dubious value: “You will never be a burden on anyone,” he assures those who follow his plan. Can you imagine this being a human good?

As must be obvious by now, I do not believe in fighting against aging as such. For me, it serves greater happiness and fulfillment in life to accept aging gracefully. Science and technology, though they bring us marvelous benefits of many kinds, cannot assure us of happiness and fulfillment. Fortunately, human life is much more intricate than that.

I also find repugnant some ideals of Perricone and his tribe of anti-aging crusaders. Again, the promise of never being a burden on anyone else seems to me not only unrealistic but humanly abhorrent. Sharing one another’s burdens, after all, goes far to build relationships that enrich our lives.

Richard Griffin