Years ago, someone suggested I get on the mailing list of Fellowship in Prayer, a journal which promotes the practice of prayer among all faiths and is sent free of charge to anyone who asks.
I was leery; I didn’t want another tract in the mail. But this unusual little magazine won my heart. Paul Griffith was its editor then, and his editorials are what I enjoyed the most. Though decidedly spiritual and, like most of the magazine, Christian in tone, they never seemed preachy. Instead, there was a quiet joy and humility in his words.
He died in 1983, at the age of sixty-one, and later that year, a special edition of Fellowship in Prayer was devoted to his work. These are some of my favorites from that issue.
— Ed.
Human Suffering
I may well be wrong in my impression that people exist who have not had to earn their spiritual lives by means of suffering. It is difficult if not impossible to know enough about a person to be able to make such a judgement on such a matter with any certainty. My impression — which is strong — could easily be nothing but the blindness that customarily accompanies suffering and is indeed one sure symptom of the self-centeredness that seems to be both its cause and its effect.
Suffering is not the style any more. These days, we seem to regard wretchedness of the mind or the emotions or spirit as a disease that we ought not to have caught in the first place, and now that we have it, we ought to shut up about it and try to doctor it with either a pill or a placebo or willpower (“which will cure anything if it’s strong enough”), and even if it hurts, we ought to forget and act as if everything were swell. To know that we are suffering, however, just to put the word to it, offers dignity to our sufferings, makes us less anxious to apologize for them, helps others to see us as something worthier than another neurotic, fool, or case. To see a human being as a sufferer (and we do suffer excruciatingly from the neuroses we refuse to let go of, and from our foolishness, and from our tedious way of going on and on about this or that) is to offer him or her or oneself the sympathy that we can’t work up for a case. All suffering, it seems to me, is the result of our fallibility, our dislike of it, our disgust at it, our despair because of it; and we can never be wholly free of it as long as we are human beings confined to our imperfect skins, characters, and constitutions. All we can do is fight our fallibilities, pray without ceasing, enjoy those days when we are able to be serenely at one with our higher power, and endure as we can the majority of our days when we are back in the coils and moils of our miseries which, it is now clear, we are going to have to fight until our last day on earth.
Now that I am beginning to understand this about my own human nature, I am beginning to understand it about other individuals’ human natures, which I don’t tolerate or forgive quite as easily. On days that I am occasionally blessed with now, when I enjoy a contentment as real as sunshine or some stillness of my soul which I know as well as I do the fragrance of certain flowers, I have found myself being obliged to notice that these days are not necessarily so balmy for others. I react to this discovery with irritation. A selfish reaction. Once I give some thought to it (for selfishness is one of my fallibilities and just like the rest of them it makes me uncomfortable, as if I were obliged to rid myself of it as completely as though it were a splinter in my soul) I am discovering how to cope with it and change it. I extricate myself from that bubble of bliss in which I have been squatting like a connoisseur of all that’s finest in the universe; in other words, I step out of my self-centeredness, I take a good look at the intruder, and ten times out of ten I see that he has forced himself upon me because he is suffering and cannot endure it any longer without some help. Whereupon I offer him what I would want if I were in his shoes — some interest, first of all, that being an exceedingly rare ointment these days, and then some intelligent understanding, and such practical advice as I have available: in short, whatever help I can muster for his benefit. In doing this for him, I find more happiness than I ever did in my stillness, which amounts at best to safety and escape. This happiness does not have the poetry and beauty of stillness. But it does possess all the hard facts and painful feelings of reality, which is God, and not the least of these facts is my knowledge that when I am unserene and troubled again, perhaps by tonight, certainly by tomorrow, the person whose wretchedness I have been sharing will be there to help me with mine. In my stillness I was alone, but now I am not.
This sharing of strength and need is beginning to be a way of life for me. I seem to have joined a fellowship of friends. It resembles family — so much so that I am able to comprehend why certain people I knew when I was a boy addressed one another as “Brother” or “Sister.” It seemed awfully old-fashioned then, really kind of ridiculous, but now it seems wonderful to me, now that I realize we are all here and we are all suffering together.
Some Positive Words for the Negative
One characteristic of organized religion that puts me off is the optimism it sells. I am also put off by the glibness of some people’s positive thinking — all that whistling in the dark that they say is sunshine.
I can’t afford such euphoria. It is when I get the delusion that all is well that I am most in danger of straying and of losing my way forever.
Although I am aware that my faith preaches the good news of the New Testament, and though I have recently begun to enjoy feelings of harmony with not only my fellow creatures but also our mutual Creator, I remain leery of forgetting that it was the negative aspect of my life — and only the negative aspects and all the accompanying anguish and pain — which persuaded me of not just the wisdom but the necessity of my letting go, of letting God, of surrendering and finally of accepting. For my own sake I would not dare to forget the negative things.
The bliss that I am now able to find in my spiritual life would be greatly diminished if not extinguished, I feel certain, if I ever let slip from my memory what it was that first battered me to my knees in an attitude of prayer.
Keeping my memory green is a precaution I always take.
This does not mean that I will not tolerate your perpetual smile, your hopes that never stop springing, your faith so deep it is obviously the real foundation of your being. Nor does it mean, I trust, that you look down on me for having had to achieve your sort of serenity the hard way or for being obliged to hang onto it with a kind of anxiety that isn’t at all necessary to you.
It’s only human to crave security, to long for everlasting safety, to prefer happy feelings instead of bad ones.
The only people I know who satisfy such cravings, though, are children.
Even at its best, most of us know, life brings the bad feelings; they’re inseparable from the good. If you are lucky enough to avoid anger and despair, there are still all the other inevitabilities of existence — I don’t need to itemize them. My point is that it is the heartbreaking beauty of the human predicament, so much more deeply colored than mere sunshine, that seems to my taste to be excluded from the optimism I am talking about. . . .
At present I am doing all I am able to do by making my daily effort to find some contact with God even though I am surrounded by the baffling chiaroscuro of life. Its lights and darks seem at present to be prerequisites for the presence of any spirituality. Maybe, with time and the development of some spiritual technique, this situation will change for me. It honestly doesn’t matter to me if it does change. For now that I have a reasonable certainty of maintaining some contact with God, I am able to endure the darks of my life as well as glory in its lights and hold a certain feeling of empathy for the rest of you who, optimist and pessimist, are riding in the same rocky boat I am.
Understanding
Our relationships with others are of such importance to us that often we treat them as the most fundamental elements of our existence — which, after our relationship with whatever higher power we acknowledge, they very well may be. Or seem to be.
When I was young with skin as thin as anyone’s I ever met, I approached others with such fear and trembling that after a few experiences I was inclined to give up the whole process of relationship and go and find a hillside where I could dwell by myself. As I grew older, my hide toughened. My tendency to be afraid was replaced by the expectation of very little or nothing from others, which in addition to keeping me safe from further disappointment was, I thought, very wise of me, very very shrewd. The selected few who passed my exorbitant standards and were admitted to my affection and esteem were, for me, figures out of mythology, heroes and heroines, nothing less, who naturally in the long run always turned out to be merely human, only clay or worse. Realizing the hopelessness of such a course, I finally located the one perfect person on earth and married her. And from that perch and exclusiveness and joint egotism, I succeeded in looking down on the world for years to come.
When this one relationship fell apart, I found myself entirely alone again. This time, however, being in my middle age, without the illusions or hopes of even the most superior youth, no solution was at hand. For the first time I floundered and suffered pain. I almost did myself in. But finally, knowing nothing else to do, and turning in the only direction I had not yet tried, I set aside pride and egotism and asked God for help.
Thus, without realizing what I was doing, I did what was necessary — what was essential — to the beginning of a relationship with God. Before, although I had attended services and uttered a prayer now and then, I was so encumbered with self that a genuine relationship would not have been possible.
When I received help in answer to my prayer, it came via so many people, people I neither knew before nor, frankly, would have cared to know, that my eyes were opened. In the novel state of humility created by desperation, I was open not only to communication with higher powers but to friendships and kindnesses and courtesies which, in retrospect, I see as His will also, despite the human agency by which they were delivered to me. I was treated with such understanding that gradually I began to trust where I had always doubted, and to have faith where I had previously always known I would have to act or else. . . .
This revelation — and it was that — amounted to a revolution in my life: in my thinking, in my feeling, in my behavior, in my very hopes and very dreams. It could not have happened without the understanding given me by others. It could not be continuing if, while receiving this understanding, I was not slowly learning to give it to others myself. I have the joy of it, and although I keep on meeting up with misunderstanding from some others, I am confident that eventually such a thing can be erased entirely.
After Surrendering: Accepting
It’s as possible for a schizophrenic to give up the wasps’ nest of fear and delusion which he has clapped over his head as it is for an alcoholic to put down the bottle for good. The neurotic can set aside his anxieties and false convictions as if they were news-magazines of a bias to which he does not care to subscribe. . . . Such events are getting to be everyday matters in the modern world. Having worked such apparently irrational changes within ourselves, we are starting to urge others to achieve like surrenders and the peace that comes when suffering ends. The so-called “miracles” of the Bible keep on happening. And the indication is that they will become both more frequent and more widespread as the ancient concept of self-surrender comes to be understood and applied to themselves by men and women living today.
I have said it before, but I cannot say it too often: the most valuable feeling to the working of such a profound change evidently is willingness — is desire pitched to the extreme of a longing that must have its effect on the least cell in our anatomies, let alone our spirits. The willingness does not seem to have to be positive — for or toward something infinitely better than what we suffer. Willingness to get rid of — or give up — what is making us miserable is desire potent enough in many instances.
Perhaps I have not said it before, but I should have: the requisite of willingness is a person’s honesty with his or her self. It is necessary really and truly to know what has to be given up. This is exceedingly difficult for most people, those anyway like myself who find it hard to see anything other than what they wish to see, who know only what they think, who think only what they hope. . . .
There is nothing sadder to watch — or, I might add, more tedious — than a person who is suffering, who is undeniably, consciously, even vocally downright miserable, who refuses to see what his or her suffering consists of, and who therefore is doomed to repeat these miseries from here on until the end. This is where the tedium enters in, for there is nothing more tiresome (even though we love them) than people who clutch their crises, disasters, and glooms to their bosoms and will obviously spend the rest of their lives that way — like flies inside purely imaginary traps. If that is what they want out of the one life they will ever live, we can, finally, only turn aside and let them live it in that excruciating way. Having crawled through a lot of my own days in this fashion, I am able to sympathize with their misery — and I am able, too, to perceive the egotism of their suffering. For that is actually what this suffering is: an arbitrary, almost unbelievable substitution of what we think/hope/desire in the place of the reality with which God makes us a present every hour of the day and night. This egotism, incidentally, must be the source of the tedium we feel while watching helplessly over our fellow-sufferers: the human imagination is so limited and repetitious as compared to the kaleidoscopic razzle-dazzle contained in the cornucopia of reality. . . .
I suppose, once again judging by my own experience, we concoct these boring little pipedreams of ours out of fear, lack of courage, lack of any trust whatsoever in God. . . .
Pipedreams, as you yourself may know, have a way of tripping us up, however. Substitutes do not satisfy. Finally the tedium of existing inside the imaginary glass bells of our neuroses gets to be one of the chief features of our ersatz existences. All these false-alarms and drummed-up cries, all these depressions in which we loll like sultans growing fat, all these desperations that we sing over and over like the same cats on the same roof every night — all of them pall. I have a theory (not proved) that we always know exactly what’s what, that for one perverse reason or another we choose suffering even while we glimpse the joy of the world, that we deliberately deny our knowledge of God’s immense reality because we prefer the picayune but entirely controllable little universe that we have created in opposition. If this is so, it certainly gives us a taste of the meaninglessness of the dream as compared to all the rich full flavors of reality. Sometimes such meaninglessness becomes the painful source of a decision to surrender. We starve ourselves into submission, so to speak.
Once we have made the decision to give up, there is — astonishingly — nothing to fret about, nothing to do. God fills the vacuum left where our egotism festered and scabbed. He directs. He measures out to us our days and nights, tribulations and triumphs, joys and deaths. There is nothing to be afraid of, let alone to worry about — nothing at all. The sensation of His support is an actual physical one as well as emotional and spiritual. The really and truly amazing thing about it is that it is reality and all we have to do to obtain it is to accept it.
I have a theory (not proved) that we always know exactly what’s what, that for one perverse reason or another we choose suffering even while we glimpse the joy of the world, that we deliberately deny our knowledge of God’s immense reality because we prefer the picayune but entirely controllable little universe that we have created in opposition.
Rebelling against the Spirit
It is a well-known and usually forgivable human trait — a person’s believing that his answers to the questions of life and eternity and God ought to be everybody else’s too. At its worst this impulse becomes fanaticism. Ordinarily it is nothing but a harmlessly egocentric yet fundamentally generous desire to save the world the pains we ourselves have had to endure while on our various ways to our answers. Look, the impulse seems to say, this is what I have come up with, it works for me, how foolish of you not to try it yourself.
And there is the opposite attitude. This is the feeling, also common, that my answer is mine and only mine and I am going to stick to it even if yours works better or so you say. Stick to mine, so uniquely of my own manufacture, I shall — even though it may not be perfect, has in fact some bugs in it, and, frankly, leaves me with a couple of thousand unanswered questions.
The second attitude is the one I am prone to. Lately, with the help of friends, I have come to see that questioning is my preferred and habitual way of living mentally and emotionally and even spiritually. It is natural for me — if it isn’t natural, it sure has been drilled into me by my folks, teachers, and all other purveyors of the laws of our land. But suddenly I see that it has become a trick of the mind that I have developed in order not to let go, in order (as long as I can keep it up) not to let God.
There are those special God-blessed individuals who appear to have been born with special aptitude for the spiritual life — Dostoevsky reflected the attitude of the world toward such people when he called his Prince Myshkin “the idiot.” But most of us are not specially blessed, and we are obliged to learn to want the spiritual life for ourselves, each of us at his own time and at his own pace.
Learning to want the spiritual life does not, in most of us, mean that we undergo some dramatic or drastic episode on the road to Damascus. On the contrary, it seems to be a process as slow and mostly unnoticeable as the erosion of the earth and its hills and rocks. Then suddenly enough erosion has taken place for it to be visible — from a certain angle, that is, and momentarily. When the moment is over and we have regained a more normal position in our lives, the vision is gone. But the memory lasts. It does not linger on, as love is popularly supposed to. I can feel it radiating inside. It is like a hunger that requires satisfaction.
What I am taking note of is the discouraging fact that once I have lapsed back into a routine angle of vision I have to repeat the cycle of irritation, exasperation, weariness, and fatigue that led somehow to my first glimpse of the spiritual life. I am not immune to the depressions and despairs of others who are part of my daily life. I cannot keep myself from reacting to the general crossness of the people I have known for years. And, although I am discovering that when the day is over I am able, with privacy and reflection, to relocate that certain angle from which I first saw the spiritual life, I am rebelling against the apparent necessity of going through the preliminary erosion again and again and again. True, my confidence in being able to return to that precious angle of vision is a boon, wonderful just in its unexpectedness. But a revelation a day or a revelation per week is not in itself a satisfaction for the hunger I am aware of. A revelation, it seems to me, is only a first step — a miraculous peek at what lies ahead.
Why I stay at the first step, I am not sure. It could possibly be a simple craving for revelation, for the exotic taste of it. I might, like my cats, feel that if one can of tuna is good, two are twice as good. I suspect, though, it is plain laziness. . . . It is becoming clear to me that if a second step is ever going to be taken I am the one who will have to take it — by my will, my efforts, my strength. The one thing I have learned by the age of fifty is that as long as there is life there is obviously going to be the need of exertion on my part. I used to think that when St. Paul urged us to pray without ceasing he was being a zealot. I think now that he was merely stating the facts. How I am going to achieve this monumental task at the same time that I “let go,” I am sure I don’t know. I have arrived at a paradox. Or a riddle.
It occurs to me that something has to give if I am going to solve this situation. I see that the only element in it that will give is myself. So I inspect myself to try and find out what can be changed, and I realize that instead of getting up in the driver’s seat, which is my characteristic response to any job that I must do, I must finally let go. It always comes back to that.
I have rebelled before at the difficulties of doing this. That kind of passivity (which, naturally, is how I see it) scares the daylights out of me. I ask myself why it does. Why? I guess it is really that I don’t have any trust in God. This is irrational of me. Because up until recently I have had no relationship with Him whatsoever, let alone one that could cause a trauma. The fact is I know who He is but I’m not sure He will remember me. The fact is that deep down I expect Him to cut me dead. Why? I am going to have to do some heavy self-analysis to figure this out. . . .
For openers, then, I can see that I am rebelling in more than a single way. I can see, too, that I am rebelling basically because I lack trust, I am afraid. That is as far as I’ve gotten. . . . Except that, as a result of that first glimpse from that certain angle, I can now imagine myself crossing the street one day and going up to Him and introducing myself loudly and clearly. Providing, of course, I ever find the nerve.
Egotism
In a certain mood I am inclined to think that enlightened egotism is the best we can hope for from ourselves and our fellows. Not because it is ideal. But because, egotism being what it is, ineradicable except by bona fide saints, there appears to be no other real possibility. I can think of no one more egotistical than the people who suppose that they have rid themselves of it.
We are raised to be egotists. It is what our society says is right, and so my mother’s household revolved around me and my brother, his did around his children, and so doubtless would mine if I had had any. What wonder, therefore, that when we grow up — I should say, when we grow older — we are apt to think we are the center of the universe, that without us it would not exist, and that everything that happens in it does so because it is our desire that it happen. From this point of view, we proceed, most of us, to set forth on a lifelong quest to maintain this notion, do or die — to keep the flag of self aloft.
It has been my experience that we are willing to go to any lengths to protect this idea of our preeminence. In making this desperate effort we miss the reality of life, spirit, and God. The majority of us find them only when by some literally fortunate stroke of disaster we are forced to surrender our egotism. Some people I have known, many of them specially intelligent and gifted, have preferred to do away with themselves rather than with their idea of their unique importance.
The grown-up — that is to say, those who have grown wiser as well as older — maintain their equilibrium, I have observed, by divesting themselves of self-concern as it rises in them. Self-concern must be part of our very biology and chemistry, for, relax an instant, and there it is: back. My impression is that grown-ups fight their egotism for the sake not of being virtuous but of being comfortable. They know that it is their fixation upon themselves that causes their worst and most chronic miseries. For example, what more than anything else makes me egotistical? Being uncomfortable. When I am that, I become a fanatic in my knowledge of what matters and what doesn’t, what is important and what is not. . . .
In my own struggle with egotism — which it would be egotistical of me to regard as much much worse than yours — I have found one reliable source of help. And this is the immeasurable superiority of reality as it is by comparison to what I would wish it to be. The marvels of fate and fortune, let alone those of birth and death, are far beyond my meager powers of invention. If I open myself to such richness of experience, I find I forget all about myself. And this seems to be the best possible solution of all.
Our thanks to Fellowship in Prayer for permission to reprint. The magazine is available by writing Fellowship in Prayer, 134 Franklin Corner Road, Lawrenceville, New Jersey 06848.
— Ed.
© Copyright 1983 Fellowship in Prayer, Inc.
