Catholic like me: known primarily for his 1960s bestseller Black Like Me, Catholic convert John Howard Griffin also offers spiritual wisdom and moral insights that are still waiting to be discovered.

Almost a quarter century after his death, the extraordinary and courageous life, the spiritual insights, and the rich fiction and nonfiction writing of John Howard Griffin remain virtually unknown. Unknown, that is, except for his modern classic Black Like Me.

In 1959 Griffin darkened his skin with ultraviolet light and medication and spent six weeks living as a black man in the segregated South. Black Like Me, initially a series of articles for Sepia magazine, is comprised of narrative and interpretative journal entries from that journey. Recently re-issued by Wings Press, the book has sold over 10 million copies and has been translated into 14 languages.

As Robert Bonazzi explains in Man in the Mirror: John Howard Griffin and the Story of Black Like Me (Orbis), Griffin's experiment was rooted in his faith. Specifically, he was inspired by the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who had written: "All that can save us is a return of authentic charity and metaphysics, and that some must be prepared to be martyrs for the love of humanity."

The martyrdom that resulted from Black Like Me included death threats, being hanged in effigy in his hometown, a nine-month exile to Mexico, and years of a grueling public life that effectively ended Griffin's literary career.

Born and raised in Texas, Griffin studied in France. An accomplished musicologist, he researched Gregorian chant at the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes. Griffin was a pre-med student living in Tours when the Nazis invaded. He joined the resistance and helped to smuggle Jews out of occupied France, barely escaping himself when his name appeared on a Gestapo arrest list.

Returning to the United States, he joined the Army Air Force and was deployed to the Pacific; in 1945 be suffered a concussion during a Japanese bombing raid, a brain injury that led to total blindness the following year. Griffin was blind for 12 years, during which time he married and fathered two of his four children before his sight was inexplicably restored in 1957.

Blindness required both emotional and spiritual resiliency. Resisting society's "attitude that placed a low ceiling and an empty future on the blind," he quickly mastered mobility training, studied animal husbandry and raised prize livestock, wrote and lectured about blindness and music, and began his literary career.

His spiritual struggle with blindness and against pride led to his 1951 conversion to Catholicism. "There must be a new beginning now--I must become a Catholic.... I must have the sacraments," he wrote at the time.

Griffin's considerable intellectual life was nurtured by remarkable friends and mentors, including the poet Pierre Reverdy, composer Francis Poulenc, and musicians Nadia Boulanger and Robert Casadesus. As a civil rights activist he almost died from a Klan beating--Griffin knew and worked with Dick Gregory, P. D. East, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

He became a Third Order Carmelite and was friends with Nobel Peace Prize winner Father Dominique Pire, Dominican theologian Gerald Vann, Jacques Maritain, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton. A gifted photographer, Griffin honored his friends in Jacques Maritain: Homage in Words and Pictures (Magi) and A Hidden Wholeness (Houghton Mifflin), which includes photos taken by Merton as well as Griffin's portraits of the monk.

After Merton's death, Griffin was the original choice to be Merton's official biographer, but he was unable to complete the book because of ill health. Follow the Ecstasy: The Hermitage Years of Thomas Merton (Orbis) was published posthumously. Between 1969 and 1972 Griffin made almost monthly research trips to Gethsemani Abbey, where, for a week to 10 days at a time, be lived in Merton's hermitage and came to understand the texture and rhythms of the hermit life. He compiled excerpts from his journals, published posthumously as Hermitage Journals: A Diary Kept While Working on the Biography of Thomas Merton (Image Books).

It is understandable that a white Southerner who experienced both anti-Semitism and physical blindness would be drawn to the kind of experiment of Black Like Me. For a blind man physical characteristics are meaningless.

In the just published Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision (Orbis), Griffin relates his encounters with a taxi driver named Wooly who "seemed delighted that I was blind." For months, he showed up each time Griffin called a cab, and then one day he learns that Wooly was fired. Griffin eventually finds out why Wooly, a "hothead," "couldn't get along with anybody." He was, another driver tells him, "uglier'n sin" with a "big scar running clean down his face."

"Wooly had been on the defensive against people who drew back from him in horror. It had soured him until he apparently hated the whole world because the world could not see beyond his deformity .... This explained his jubilation that I could not see, that I could not see him as others had, but that I saw beyond his scar just as he had seen beyond my blindness. ... With me, he had been like any other man; with me, he knew that his face could not blind me to the quality of his heart."

The posthumous publication of Her mirage Journals, Scattered Shadows, and Bonazzi's Man in the Mirror allows us a privileged look into the quality and greatness of John Howard Griffin's heart. The man who was admired for his commitment to social justice is revealed in these books as an authentic contemplative in the world--a vocation that is not about adopting a pseudo-monastic lifestyle so much as it is living in and by faith and obedience to the Holy Spirit.

Griffin was an intellectual Catholic, devout but certainly not naive about the church. A loving, happy, and grateful husband and father, he had no patience with "theological speculation about marriage by men who have never been married."

"The worst," he wrote about theologians, "is when they imply that we could really reach great spiritual heights by the practice in marriage of a kind of celibate and monastic asceticism, keeping always in mind that you maintain the proper hierarchy of values in loving God more than you love each other and in being willing to drop everything if God calls.... I was asked by a priest in an interview not long ago what I would do if God faced me with a choice between him and my family. 'If I ever suffered such an illusion,' I told him, 'I would know I had cracked up and gone completely wacky.'"

Throughout his life, Griffin was plagued by the financial insecurity of supporting a family of six on a writer's irregular income--which, in his case, was exacerbated by his lifelong ill health. He went through a period of paralysis brought on by spinal malaria, the ravages of severe diabetes, osteomyelitis, high blood pressure, and heart disease. When he died in 1980 at the age of 60, his wife said he died "of everything."

At the time of his conversion, Griffin regretted that "I have left matters of judgment and decision up to me, when they should be up to God, to a constant awareness and adoration of the divine. Why do I resist? Why do I confuse my shame of unworthiness with a sense of humility when I know it is pride?" Yet by a continual act of will he turned his attention away from himself and to God, achieving a fully formed Catholic personality that was shaped by daily acts of self-offering and the docility of faith.

He understood that no matter how much objective good he was capable of, he needed to act from an authentic spiritual maturity if his work was to be efficacious. "My own strengths must be abandoned to a point where I even appear a fool in public. If I fail to love them that hate me, then no other victory can compensate for it.... My appetites cry for the esteem of men. And yet the deadly battle lies here ..., we must avoid the temptation to value the accepted goods of the world, in particular the ideas that it is beautiful to be praised and to be credited with this quality or that merit."

Because there was almost nothing ordinary about Griffin's life, it is easy to overlook his spiritual example. But we need contemporary witnesses with what he called the "longing for spiritual poverty, the longing for nothing except what God chooses to work in and through me."

"St. Benedict taught not to murmur against anything that might be sent," Griffin recalls in Scattered Shadows, "but to give thanks for it because it would destroy self-love, and leave the way clear for the love of God. And that is the beauty of faith. You can conform to the highest levels no matter who you are or what you are."

In Black Like Me Griffin records his fascination with a young white man who "had escaped the habit of guarded fencing that goes on constantly between whites and Negroes in the South." He concluded that this "attitude came from an overwhelming love for his child, so profound it spilled over to all humanity." It is a conclusion that can serve, as well, as Griffin's legacy. His "overwhelming love" for God was not about sentimental feeling but the willingness to embrace a costly commitment.

"The man in love with God," Griffin wrote in his journal, "is assailed by satanic impulses of a depth unknown to most men ... until a point is reached where the two forces threaten to tear him apart." It is at that moment that a person must make a "brute act" of abandonment to God's will.

There is a passage in the 18th century Jesuit priest Jean-pierre de Caussade's Abandonment to Divine Providence that talks about "the way of pure faith" that "enables us to find God at every moment. ... Yet so wonderful and dark is this road that we need great faith to walk along it."

John Howard Griffin's life was marked both by redemptive suffering and by an undeniable lucidity and spiritual health that suggests he had embraced this "wonderful and dark" road. His love of God "spilled over to all humanity," into a love of neighbor that was rooted in faith, and thus was fruitful even when he had no human gifts left to offer. It sustained him through a long and painful dying, and it remains to give courage to those who would follow his example and offer themselves as clay in the potter's hand.

By RACHELLE LINNER, a librarian and writer who lives in Boston.