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A memory of Griff

A  farewell to Father Griff from the magazine editor

Readers recall Father Griff

In searching the scriptures for motifs of our brother Robert's life, one is made aware all over again -- were it needed -- of how ill he fit the gospel sketches of prophetic ministry. He had no ambition to be a voice crying in the desert; he sought by preference the noisy sidewalks of Greenwich Village and the muffled warmth of the coffee house. He was no gaunt, grasshopper-eating prophet bereft of purse or staff, with nowhere to lay his head; he was a homebody. Far from being on the prowl, he was a host who created welcomes. When his overtures gained him no welcome, stalking off in evangelical anger would have been too much of an effort. His character profile was plausibly that of a faithful sheep, but not a sheep who sought assignment among wolves. Badger, toad, rat and mole, the denizens of his beloved Wind in the Willows, were as wild a company as he ever wanted.

Apostolic zeal will simply have to be re-metaphored to describe his ministry, which has been a powerful draw toward Christ and his Church for so many people of every age and station, who all found a comfort from Jesus in the presence of his singular servant Griff.

Robert Griffin, bom in Maine 74 years ago and bred a Baptist, read a book of convert stories by John A. O'Brien as a lad of 13 years and became a Catholic at 19. It would not have been unnatural for the young newcomer to avert his gaze from the asperities of our tradition and fix his eye instead on its consolations. He may well have needed consolations. In the youngish give-and-take of our seminary his weight set him apart as harshly as if he had remained a Baptist all the while. He suffered the particular misfortune to have another Griffin in the seminary, which imposed on him the mortifying nickname of "Heavy" Griffin. Bob was withal a bright and eager student: bright and eager enough to pursue his delight in literature to the neglect of other texts assigned, not to mention other disciplines ... yet still do well enough at grading time.

His uphill days of religious formation labored heavily. With ordination in prospect he undertook a regimen to bring his weight down considerably, which may have served to reassure those who had the yeas and nays to see it as proof of self-discipline. But after ordination, prodigious dosages of Coca-Cola quickly put him in severe need of a carbonated Twelve Step Program -- alas!-in a day when Holy Cross had not yet awakened to such recovery. Coke thus offered Griff The Pause that Refreshes Not.

He was priested at 29, about three years older than his classmates. That was 45 years ago. He taught several years at Father Baker High School in Lackawanna, did some graduate study at Notre Dame and at Boston University, and was then assigned to teach English at Stonehill College. His years there are not remembered as happy. By everyone's reckoning young Father Griffin had both familiarity and fondness for literature, but somehow he failed to awaken either in many of his students. Perhaps it was a lack of discipline: both in him and, thus, inevitably in them. Some thought his antipathy for academic discipline was so strong that it led him to ally himself with his students against his faculty peers, even to the point of supplying them with distinctly unofficial short-cuts. It was a dysfunctional season in his life, without and within, and left him sick in body and spirit. It was at least his Purgatory, and perhaps even Worse. There is only one thing worse.

Eleven years after ordination his superiors could think of nothing else than to send him to our old Community Infirmary beside Notre Dame, just then in the process of becoming Holy Cross House. By whatever name, it was home mostly to ailing men his grandfather's age. And the result was wondrous. He drew himself up to full strength, and swiftly got himself a teaching job at our high school seminary, one lake to the west. There youth did abound, but discipline did more abound, so it was a perfect setting for him to teach at full strength, and his first year there meant learning for them and resurrection for him.

His first year there, unfortunately, would be Holy Cross Seminary's last year. Never fear: that summer he swiftly landed another position in Keenan Hall, where he soon became rector, and remained for 15 years. He might well have joined Fathers Farley, Gassensmith, and Miceli in their fabled tenures as immovable rectors, but by the 1980s he had become the celebrated latter-day Juggler of Notre Dame. There was much more to do than rectify.

His rector's office in Keenan became the campus soul salon. There were plenty of other priests then who daily devoted hours to counseling and the all-purpose grooming of the student soul, but Robert Griffin became the literal successor to the old prefects of religion whose waiting rooms were still full at 2 in the morning, night after night.

They were wise enough not to install him in the serried ranks of official Campus Ministry, and for years he functioned as simply "The University Chaplain," a Prelate Nullius answerable to none. Eventually he became the patron of a practically-all-night student den in the basement of La Fortune Student Center, known as Darby's Place. Bob, for whom our dinner hour had become his lunchtime, lumbered into Darby's when most confreres were going to bed, and presided there till nearly dawn in an atmosphere of simple yet sublime soul-serving: part-Dublin, part-Paris, part-Lothlorien.

For Darby's Place a Darby was required, in the form of Darby O'Gill (initials: D.O'G.), an intellectually challenged cocker spaniel. When Darby was called to whatever finality the Lord held in store for him, his name and rank passed on to successive cockers whose IQ and S.A.T. scores climbed at the same angle as the academic excellence all around them.

Griff by then was caught in a three-dimensional vicious circle: to wit, the vicious sphere of his enlarging self, fed on daily restaurant dinners some thought were paid for out of the collection basket, to the point where he no longer dined with the brethren at Corby, because he could literally no longer walk the distance. He was missed there, in a special way by the smokers.

He had begun a column in the campus newspaper, The Observer, entitled "Letters to a Lonely God." He was soon invited to be a regular columnist in Our Sunday Visitor. His byline there was "Everyday Spirituality." Many of his tangy essays found further publication in his books: In the Kingdom of the Lonely God and I Never Said I Didn't Love You.

Griff had a logo: a silhouette of himself and Darby walking side-by-side. This same sight was often seen in the flesh on campus of a late afternoon and had, perhaps, its apotheosis in the Foxboro Stadium where Notre Dame and Boston College were locked in their first mortal combat after years apart. Amid that Irish sound and fury, Griff the New Englander and Darby the Midwesterner ambled amiably across the druidic turf, in a shared aloofness to the tribal violence. To a thoughtful onlooker the sight suggested how this remarkably complex man could be simultaneously Mick and meek, dominant and delicate.

Bob soon became the tenured celebrant of two polar-opposite liturgies. In Keenan- Stanford Chapel of a Sunday he was impresario of the Urchins' Mass, which rallied scores of youngsters (and their parents). Part Captain Kangaroo, part Mr. Rogers, part Fulton Sheen, he presided from a large wooden stump. The music was environmentally appropriate. Young souls were impregnated with enough subliminal mystagogy to make them eventual catechists when it would all come to the surface in verbal form a decade or two later. At the offertory hosts were offered, not on the paten but on the multitude of hands, whereupon they were also presumably transformed, as were their bearers, into Christ multitudinous. One-time visitors swooned, at either end of the ideological spectrum.

By wondrous contrast he also became the regular celebrant the previous eve, at the late afternoon Saturday Mass in Sacred Heart Church. This was an old-fashioned Stillmesse conducted sans modulation of voice, sans eye-contact, sans homily, sans song, sans everything but collection (since so many Saturdays brought revenue-congregations crowding into that liturgy with the flat EKG).

Griff also ministered to another mixed-age audience on the air waves. His "Children's Hour" broadcast a melange of music and moral tales that ranked it with the minor fairs and mystery plays of the Middle Ages. As always, his "children" of the hour included many with Medicare cards.

For a quarter-century he was the faithful chaplain to the Glee Club, traveling with them on tours foreign and domestic, ignoring their extra-territorial high-jinks, and presiding at their marriages.

The seniors elected him their Senior Fellow, just as their predecessors had elected the Big Names. Alumni fondness took him out to Notre Dame events hither and yon. When the University finally tried posting a few priests in the new women's dorms, Griff duly moved into Pasquerilla West, and the graft took hold.

During the vacations at summertime and Christmastime, it was his custom to take up residence at St. Joseph's Church in Greenwich Village, his staging point for entry into the life of the street people. When, after many years, there arose a new pastor who knew not Robert, he simply flew a little farther and befriended the street people of London, in the country whose poetry and fiction had plucked at his soul since schooldays.

Griff s bull market years were steadily progressive, and wonderfully long. He kept adding new ministries just when needed to keep him limber. It was in the Village, however, that he met a heftier Providence when he was stricken one day by a small heart episode. Any heart event in a man that great is a great one, beginning with the manpower needed simply to hoist his gurney into the ambulance. It was never widely known just what the prognosis was, but he came home from that summer and began to shed weight. He let us know the day he passed 300 lbs. on his way down, which made some suspect he had passed 400 a few months earlier, without a press communique. As the shrinkage continued, he began to resemble nothing so much as a Barnum and Bailey tent halfway dismantled. He turned out to have no shoulders, which created a severe angle of repose in the place where they should have been. One day I told him he looked fearfully yet gallantly gaunt, and that he needed some new clothes. He admitted that he was already in the 220 lb. range, but aiming at 185 for the fulfillment of his life's ambition: to wear a Notre Dame blazer (thereby bonding him sacramentally with the Glee Club after all those years). I couldn't say on oath that he broke 185 at that time, but the sacred vestment was finally purchased and handsomely worn. A new Griff, and a new Griff era, had come to full bloom.

After good years of this amiable notoriety, with no sense of retreat or avoidance, he then began to withdraw from various enterprises. It seemed that as Griff eased out from under his creative commitments, his character stood strong without them. His reading, which made literary second-rates of us all, was invigorated. His published writings became less frequent, and more pensive. His lighter timetable allowed him more time to groom those compounded affections and friendships that had multiplied over the busier years. These latter years left less in his appointment book but more in his biography.

Bob's middle years had been so fertile with accomplishment, and grace-strewn, that we were tempted to think of this later, quieter, follow-through as decline, subsidence. We regretted his eventual death decision as a fright, not a homing. Now I think it otherwise. That long and gracious turn had brought him, as we must now say, "finally," to face the Lord at closest quarters. Diabetes slowly tracked him, patiently afflicted him, ever-so-gradually began to deplete him. I believe, though, it was only his body and not his sweet spirit which was on the wane.

Several months ago his eyesight was wonderfully restored by a first cataract surgery. I visited him several weeks later and was surprised to find him already in his serious reading mode, with four or five books in progress at once. Not only had he resumed his vigorous reading tempo: he was urging the surgeon to have at the second cataract earlier than planned. But other surgeons were telling him he must allow some amputation of a bony diabetic infestation. He ducked and dodged, not wanting to die limb by limb, but they came on still stronger, and told him just when he would die otherwise. And thus did he die, "otherwise" as always, this grand man whom God had drawn to such elegant and gracious maturity. Several of us had urged him to accept the surgery. This is some of what I wrote:

If that surgery relieved you of the mood-depleting effects of diabetes, it seems to me it would rank right up there with the cataract operations, not to mention some of the stuff they did to bring you practically back from the dead whenever you chose to hit the pavement in the Village.

I may have told you of my persistent impression that the Irish regard the doctor exactly the way the Italians regard the priest. They never call him until it's too late, and then they wail to make the angels weep, for having waited too long. I have been called to the local hospital countless times at 3 a.m. to attend to a patient just deceased, along with his or her family, and invariably they are Italians wailing the paint off the walls because they purposely postponed calling for fear it might spook their papa. And I have seen Irishmen walking around with enormous growths sticking out on their faces, refusing surgery for fear they would find out it might be serious.

I don't want to inflict this stereotype on you, but I wish you would hand over the toe and be more yourself, for our sakes. I can only imagine how many people write or come by (God help them if they try the telephone) to have the blessing of your kind attention. I say "I can only imagine how many," but I need not imagine what it is to come myself for that blessing. I have such fine memories of great fraternal moments with you, in various places we can both remember.

So give over the toe, for the sake of your ongoing ministry. Some of my most blessed moments have been when I gave over things. Isn't that so for you?

But Griff refused, and knew from the outset what we knew by the end: that he was thereby holding out his hand to be grasped... by the Lord alone.

Nevertheless, his is an ongoing ministry. This man of two funerals will have thousands who love him asking for four, or eight, memorials. Over the years be has told many whom he counts dear, in various ways, that they would bury him, but in the end his body has come home to his Community home, where he is so clearly and surely a brother to be proud of, and fond of.

Griff liked to visit our elders in Holy Cross where their bodies lay in our cemetery. He was especially thoughtful of those who enjoyed little place in our memories. "Sometimes," he felt, "all the history you know of a priest is his chalice, the date of his death and his place in the cemetery." This is what he wrote:

Seminarians would point out to me, as a Notre Dame student, a chalice which they kept freshly polished. "It belonged to Father Joe Cavanaugh," they said. "He died of cancer last year. He was only 36."

Father Cavanaugh belonged to a team of young theologians Notre Dame had recruited to keep the University Catholic. As a postulant in the Congregation of Holy Cross, I decided to pray to Father Cavanaugh as a saint: he had been much loved: he had specialized in the science of God; he had been called home early. As long as his chalice gleamed in the gloom of the sacristy, I thought, part of his priesthood remained active, so I polished the chalice as faithfully as the other seminarians. I trusted him to help me survive the terrible ordeals that stood between me and ordination. I located his place in the cemetery so I could make a daily visit to his burial place.

("In the Shadow of the Dome," in Reflections In The Dome, ed. James S. O'Rourke, IV [Notre Dame, IN: Juniper Press, 1985], 191.)

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 lifegiving 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; and, even at 74, he was called home early.

He was Christ's servant, the steward of God's mysteries, and he was found trustworthy. He fathered many in Christ Jesus through the gospel; and we trust he has received from God the appropriate commendation. Some of us, after having prayed for him, have now begun to pray to him. He lives, my great-souled brother, maker of a maelstrom of ministries -- he lives, as never before. We need, I think, to cheer him on his way, and not begrudge him his grander going home. "All is swallowed up in victory."

(James Tunstead Burtchaell, C.S.C.
25 October 1999
Chapel of Mary, Mother of the Church
Stonehill College: Easton, Massachusetts.)

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