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A memory of Father Griffin, CSC

A farewell from the magazine editor

Eulogy by Father Burtchaell, CSC

Somebody else can claim to be Griff's best friend or favorite Domer. I will not. But for a few years we were amiable competitors trying to assess the Notre Dame experience. He did so with his great talents as a writer capturing the lonelier feelings of being a Notre Dame student. Molarity was too absorbed in its sardonic wit to show any sentiment. If Molarity cut, Griffin healed.

I met Fr. Griffin at Darby's Place. (I went to Darby's Place for all the best reasons. I was trying to date a girl on the Observer staff.) Darby's Place was the purest collegiate experience. It was Notre Dame's late night agora, where university students fresh with ideas and dreams discussed the world. We asked questions and told jokes. Some studied. Other came for the pop-tarts and pizza muffins. Everybody knew your name-. Kevin, Christina, Higgins, Margie, Pat, Mark, Rachel, Tim, Joe and many others Each night would end with the joke of the evening.

As University Chaplain with a cocker spaniel named Darby O'Gil at his side, Father Griffin was the consummate priest: a man of great faith and love, a man of total compassion and ferocious smoking habit; a man of old faith and new tolerances. His girth, much diminished by the time I knew him, was necessary to hold a heart that knew no limits. He was trustworthy, forgetful, and isolated from the demands of the real world. His urchins mass succeeded because in many ways Griff was a child. He was dependent upon every else to transport him, ignore his tab at the bookstore and the University Club, get his cigarettes, and take care of Darby during extended trips with the Glee Club. Perhaps because of Darby and his helplessness Griff was the most accessible CSC we students knew.

When the first new dorm built especially for women opened, Fr. Griffin was part of an experiment. They placed him in living quarters on the first floor as the dorm's priest. It was dramatic move from his Keenan/Stanford home of many years. I believe the test succeed. Once again Griff broke down traditional barriers. He was everyone's ill-kept uncle, the loveable relative who stayed over a little too long. Griff would recall fondly the day he moved in he received a note from Father Hesburgh that quoted "Blessed are you among women." Griff and I became friends during those university years. The friendship continued for many years after graduation. In the summer we would party on the roof of the rectory where he lived in the heart of New York City. Each fall, I would make a trip to a football game and seek him out. (He would go into hiding on football weekends. Catching him as he went up to the radio station in O'Shag was usually the only method to find him.) As the years passed and his health continued to decline steadily, I saw him isolate himself further. When he could no longer be University Chaplain, he created for himself the new role of University Curmudgeon. He felt distanced by the yuppie- priests who were his youngers. And Father Griffin had become a victim of the great love so many students felt for him. All of us trying to keep in touch with him were becoming his greatest burden. He almost never wrote back. It eventually became impossible to call him. His voice-mail was always full.

In his last year in New York, I introduced Griff to my fiancee Gina. Griff was slightly insulted when we did not ask him to perform the ceremony. He spent the rest of the evening unconsciously pointing out couples who did not ask him to perform their wedding and how their relationship ended in break-ups, early divorce or somebody in a coma. I saw him years after that, when he was in still Corby Hall. (We slid a note under his door to arrange a time and a place to meet him.) This last fall, I wanted to show him our infant twins, but our signals got crossed and it never occurred. Somehow, I knew I would not get another opportunity. Griff used to tell the story of a minister in Maine who as a dinner guest would ask to use the bathroom. After an hour the hosts would listen to the bathroom to see what was taking him so long. The minister was splashing away in the tub. In some ways, that minister reminds me of Griff.

(Michael Molinelli is an architect in New York. As a student, he drew Molarity, a popular comic strip for the Observer from 1977 to 1982.)

October's Gift: The Life and Death of Robert F. Griffin. C.S.C.

Patricia Justine Fazzone

When I first met Fr. Griffin in the Stanford-Keenan chapel at Notre Dame in the mid-1970s, he shared with me a gift as lovely as a branch of golden leaves. His gift was the gospel shimmering through his life, transparent like the source from whence it came, from Jesus himself in his welcoming of the children and partiality to the little ones. As I gathered weekly in the chapel with university students and with children who became affectionately known as "urchins and moppets," I entered a story-world ripe with tales of God's abundant love. The message that Fr. Griffin proclaimed was open, honest and nakedly real.

As priest, storyteller and teacher, Fr. Griffin shared in his writing his vision of eucharist as an invitation to experience God's kingdom of love. In an article written for Notre Dame Magazine, Fr. Griffin wrote:

"It doesn't hurt reverence to tell the youngest Christian what the priest is up to. Let them know that bread and wine are being consecrated. Let them touch the hosts that are to be blessed as their Jesus-bread. Let them smell the bouquet of wine made of grapes that have lain in the sun. Sunshine will be like darkness compared to the glory that will come unseen, overwhelming the substance of bread and wine. Teach them of Christ hiding the immensity of His being in a snowflake of wheat." (Notre Dame Magazine, May 1979)

In being present to the teaching of Fr. Griffin, the child in myself was opening her imagination, senses and spirit to God's kingdom with the spontaneity of a 4-year-old. The liturgy, like sacred play, was connecting me to the central teaching of Jesus that as a child I am loved unconditionally and held tenderly. What I realize 25 years later is that each liturgical celebration was a seedling like autumn wheat planted in Midwest fields. Indeed, a vision for a child-centered ministry was taking shape in my life by being present to Fr. Griffin's teaching and storytelling. And because of his person, presence and empowerment, my ministry and life's work in children's spirituality became intimately connected to three patterns central to his life: welcoming and hospitality, image and story, reverence and mystery.

On an autumn evening in 1976 these patterns came together in a beautiful wav as I stood by Fr. Griffin at an altar in the grotto for a Mass attended by hundreds of undergraduate students. While gentle breezes danced through the sycamore trees and candles glowed in the grotto, I heard words from Fr. Griffin that were sheer gift. He said, "Tonight is a night for mystery and you are the mystery." Fr. Griffin's words touched the place where the rootstock is nourished, the spirit is refreshed and the heart is renewed. Eucharist was thanksgiving and part of our gratefulness was that among us stood a fellow sojourner present with an unabashed openness to proclaim the truth of our being despite his own shyness.

Over the years Fr. Griffin's spoke with me about the mystery and beauty of God's creation in every "urchin and moppet." In 1996, during our last meeting, we spoke about the spiritual nurture of young children. His last words to me were simple and profound. "Teach the families to bless their children."

As I marked Fr. Griffin's 74 th birthday on October 7, 1999, I realized with sadness that this would be the last birthday I would celebrate with him. As I joined friends in many states to keep vigil by prayer, our loving hands held him in the mystery of God's abiding love. Nonetheless, October's gift that had given to each of us this special friend of children felt fragile and vulnerable.

On October 25, 1999, 1 journeyed to Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, for the vigil service and funeral liturgy for Father. Griffin. In the Chapel of Mary, mourners joined voices and hearts to honor the life of this special child of God. We shared symbols and images, story and ritual and by these gateways entered into the story of God's love in the life of Fr. Griffin. Words comforted; stories consoled. During the vigil service, Fr. James Burtchaell, CSC, called Fr. Griffin "Christ's servant, the steward of God's mysteries." In a poignant tribute, he said, "Children, and grandchildren too, will be brought to Griff s grave, and young Holy Cross men as well. Stories will be told them here, some of them more intimate and life-giving even than what we may now be exchanging among ourselves. There will be more than a chalice and a grave to keep the priesthood of this good brother of ours active. He was much loved; he specialized in the tales of God." (Excerpt from eulogy delivered at Stonehill College, October 25, 1999)

At the funeral liturgy the next morning, we entered into a tale of love and mourning for Fr. Griffin and received a fuller image of the way in which he expressed in his life God's shyness, sensitivity and compassion for the little ones. Liturgy, the form he loved and honored, gave us a opportunity to return to this child of God the love that we had received from him when he celebrated Eucharist. As I joined two other women in the opening of the white pall and the covering of the coffin as it rested in front of the altar, tears streamed down my face. I saw them fall on the cloth and become absorbed in the fabric not unlike the way in which the tears he felt for suffering children became part of the weave of his life. We opened our hands to the sacred action of touching tenderly the gift he was and is to us.

As we walked down the pathway to the cemetery, I became aware of the autumn beauty that enfolded us in our last sacred action together as a community of love for Fr. Griffin. Encircling the coffin, we stood in the strength of the sacred story he had lived. I gazed upward toward a sky filled with the kind of clouds that children draw when they are connected to the fullness of life and they see beautiful shapes and with spontaneity express their reality. In one moment of stillness, I listened to the leaves in the trees and they seemed to be dancing. It was an October day that Fr. Griffin would have loved for its beauty, the kind of beauty that is graced. I understood that October's'gift is enduring and eternal.

(Patricia Justine Fazzone is a Consultant in Children's Ministry and Family Spirituality at St. Ignatius of Loyola Church, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.).

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