In the thirties one Howard Johnson owned a drug store in neighboring Wollaston. It had, as they all had, a soda fountain. By way of attracting business, he developed a home-made ice cream of his own, truly a quality product. In no time he had established a reputation for his ice cream. It ended with his selling the drug store and establishing a chain of road-side shops, first with ice cream and then on into fast food and full restaurants, and eventually motels. It was all based on ice cream and a vanilla that became twenty-eight flavors. He was a pioneer in handsome highway facilities.

So also Heinz. He started with good pickles and ended with fifty-seven varieties of prepared foods with his label. The one exceptional item led to all that followed, developed from it. A pioneer in food processing.

Like spiritualities. I was thumbing through Michael Downey's Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality¹ and wondered how many spiritualities there be: I figured a dozen or so: Benedictine spirituality, Dominican, Franciscan, Carmelite, Cistercian and so on. I looked them up. There are some thirty-eight specific spiritualities that he identifies and fully describes.

One is aware that each Protestant sect has a particular emphasis, a certain charism, and one may comment without offense since none of our contemporaries invented Protestantism, but rather inherited it —and note that we would find the lack of consistent orthodoxy troubling. For the spiritualities we speak of are each a specific development with its own characteristics, and yet share the basic truth with all in the Faith. This makes the whole inheritance of enormous beauty.

One grieves that the whole world does not know of this and does not share in it. Is deprived.

And so one reads with great sadness of an epidemic of suicides in our land. A suicide every seventeen minutes, number three among causes of death among young people. More than from AIDS, or cancer, or stroke, pneumonia, influenza, birth defect, heart disease combined. Half a million Americans end in hospitals each year of suicide attempts. World Health puts it at 2% world-wide deaths, more than from war or murder. Since the ‘50's young men are 260% more likely to suicide.²

Depression has much to do with it. Surely it cannot be thought that faith, God's grace, prayer, the spiritual life, would not be at least some answer to such a plague. To face this world without spiritual reference would seem enough to drive anyone mad, to despair, to give up on life. We do not know what a treasure we have in the faith and the glory of a spiritual tradition that does not indeed solve all life's problems, but does offer some meaning to it all.

Or the young turning to "binge drinking." Nearly half of our college students binge drink, that is, fast consumption of several drinks and almost immediate intoxication. One hundred thirteen college presidents publicly admitted that a generation is in peril.

Ohio State U. has been carrying on a serious temperance campaign with inadequate results. Binge drinking is still at 60% among the students. What a sadness overwhelms one at the young, so robbed of a full life, that spirits is substituted for Spirit, and the intoxication of Love is replaced by something as gross and insulting as drunkenness. Granted that alcoholism is more than just a taste for liquor — it is the abandon that grieves one: the plunge into an oblivion that will wipe out the awareness of a world so barren of meaning. It is no accident that the only effective remedy for alcoholism is a combination of prayer and competent counsel. Neglect of the spirit is disastrous for anyone: for those who favor depression or abandonment, it is the ultimate plunge.³ It is not that spirituality alone has the answer. And yet without it, there is no answer. And psychology alone is not the answer. Carl Jung is witness to that:

An ordinary man, not protected by an action from Above and isolated in society cannot resist the power of evil.⁴

It is the combination of the wisdom of this world and that of the next that is the answer. We are both mortal and immortal. Children of this world and of the world to come. To lack reference to both is to miss the whole.

To be heirs, then, to so rich a heritage is grace indeed. To be able to nourish such hunger within us, such thirst, as God alone can satisfy, will not indeed solve all problems and remove all darkness and difficulty, but will for sure give meaning and purpose. And nothing drives one over the edge as does a life of no meaning, a life of suffering with no meaning.

Let the response, then, be hearty, not merely for our own fulfillment and happiness — legitimate enough — but in the wider world of our common humanity, as members of the household of God, the family of man.

That is the meaning of the oil in the lamps, is it not? To let the oil run low, to let the lamps go out, is to live in a darkness that leads to madness, to an abandonment which is not holy. So by our own neglect we are barred from the realms of light, from the divine wedding feast. We exclude ourselves by choice. And choice we do have. And do make.

It is they who seemingly have no choice who are the object of our prayer and concern. We share the light of grace as best we can. And since we know that light is given to all who come into this world, that this light be heeded is our prayer. And that the light of faith, the Gospels and the rich spiritualities of the Gospels be spread everywhere, that the light may be bright enough to enlighten the whole world.   Amen.

¹ DOWNEY, Michael, Ed., The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality (The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN, 1993), passim.
² New York Times Book Review, Oct. 24, 1999, p. 13.
³ New York Times Magazine, Oct 24, 1999.
⁴ JUNG, Carl, Letter to Wilson, 1961.