LINKS:

A farewell from the magazine editor

Readers recall Father Griff

Eulogy from Father Burtchaell, CSC

Searching for the way, trying not to trip in the dark; will we ever get there?

It’s a cool, drizzly October night in a patch of Michigan woods, all wet leaves and rotting boughs under our flashlights. I’m supposedly night-orienteering with the Boy Scouts, but most of my mind frets anxiously for Griff, who lies dying at Holy Cross House a hundred miles away. My dear old ghostly father, as I name him, will soon be a ghost himself. I want to sit beside him, maybe hold his hand and read him some Gerard Manly Hopkins. Perhaps something of my presence will sift down through the fitful, troubled torpor which has settled on him as he strains not to go gentle into that good night.

But first these boys want to show me their stuff. All they have is a compass and a list of numbers to navigate the dark wilderness. But the one landmark, that big rock at the edge of the clearing, is your best friend, because if you can’t fix your position at the start then each subsequent bearing will be a little bit off course, and each succeeding step a little more off course, magnifying your error, carrying you further away from your goal.

I suppose that Father Robert Griffin, CSC, was just such a landmark for me and countless other Notre Dame students. He would never actually point out the way, but he was fixed and solid, holding a true position from which I knew the possible coordinates. Griff died on October 20, and I feel as if every step of my adult life was his gift. Now that I’m on my own, can I find the way through the darkness, with only his written words left behind?

Death is a bully whose nose should be tweaked, and I hope to be one of the tweakers. I grow weary of fearing death, for myself and for my friends. I become embarrassed for God; death makes such a fool of Him. I want to be present at death’s judgment; I want to hear God say that death must die. I want to be present at resurrections that defeat death’s victories. I want to see the fallen sparrows renewed in their flight. I want to greet death, when he comes irresistibly, with insolence and swagger, as though I were a baggy-pants clown to whom the final snickers belong.

He did look clownish, I guess: surely the most awkward man on campus. Large and heavy, baby-faced even when unshaved, unkempt hair escaping from a shabby cap, elephant trousers flecked with cigarette ash, a cocker spaniel named Darby O’Gill yanking its leash between the ankles, Griff would shamble across the North Quad with a wobbly vagueness, a frumpy black-clad reject from Macy’s parade.

He was University chaplain of the University for 30 years, but it’s almost impossible to identify Griff with any formal organization. His post simply meant that he was the best listener in the world, and he seemed happiest when listening to those on the fringes. He celebrated a Mass for children with mimes and mummers and teddy bear picnics on the altar. He ran a coffee-house-cum-study-hall in the bowels of the student center from midnight until dawn, a haven for insomniacs and the depressed. He spent his summers in the scuzzier parts of Manhattan, ministering to alcoholics and druggies and to the prostitutes whom he called joy maidens.

A missionary to the lonely, nobody has ever loved us so much. Griff wrote once, "You cannot sing a night song until the hour before dawn, when the darkness has nearly ended. Then, when loneliness has worn you out, you understand, in an insight as spontaneous as laughter, that God has been keeping watch." Griff taught us to sing night songs of faith in the basement of LaFortune. Even in his last hours of consciousness he insisted on counseling me on my recently failed marriage, as lovingly alert and keenly sympathetic as when I sat at his feet 20 years ago, righting the wrongs of creation with me at midnight over a cup of cocoa. His was the simple but ineluctably vital ministry of being there.

Faith teaches that there is an eternal heartbeat in me that belongs to God; it keeps me from getting weary when I need to care. Yet sometimes the best I can do is give a professional attention, wanting to care deeply, yet knowing that in all my attention there is nothing really personal. Eventually, with God’s help, I touch the place where the nerve ends quiver; I find the spot where the pain shows through. Then my experience is like that of Thomas, when he put his finger into the side of Christ; a personal bond is established because I know how someone has suffered. Is caring, then, a personal response, a special cherishing of the person cared for? Sometimes not, I suppose, but I’ve never found a person whom I needed to love whom I couldn’t love, if I am patient enough.

Lovely, Griff. Maybe you shall be missed most as the late Laureate of the Dome, for your golden prose interrogated and enveloped and chronicled our lives: dozens of columns for Our Sunday Visitor, Scholastic and this magazine, the stuff of journalism awards, essays collected into two books. But for me your best legacy is the 25 years’ worth of weekly "Letters to a Lonely God" that ran in the Friday Observer. How I delight to follow the gentle movement of your thought, that Senecan amble that takes us to questions and issues via the roads and by-ways of your singular experience. Your speculations appear seamlessly to embrace most of writing and culture — the Gospels, Graham Greene, Saturday Night Fever, Teilhard de Chardin, Henry V, Jimmy Swaggart, Dr. Seuss — always outlining a significant argument, but soft-spokenly, glowing with a lucid periodicity of prose.

Such a lovely stylist, Griff. But what you write! When I was younger I undervalued you, for you have always wrestled so honestly for the Truth, and I was mostly charmed by the style. Some years ago, for instance, you wrote on Tom the gay Catholic, and it’s so loving a response — your critical faculties of discernment are agile and strong, yet you reach out first, and then utter the truth that you must. You grasp exactly the psychological and spiritual dimensions of Tom’s issues, but when you write you give the impression of listening rather than that of sternly preaching. Of course my fellow Griff-groupies and I loved you years ago for this patient attentiveness — but what awes me now as a reader is how sharp an observer of contemporary life you remain, and how true an ear for the voice of humanity you retain. All this, and preaching the Truth besides. You never shunned the hard, urgent topics — gay Catholics, women wanting the priesthood. Always "with it" and relevant, to be sure: but it’s the Gospel you preach, always by reaching out rather than ramming down. Isn’t ours the faith that is built upon questions left dangling in the air? You served as our apostle of the unanswered questions, Griff, and, God in heaven, you did a lovely job of it.

Death, when it comes unexpectedly, must always seem like a horror. But if death comes when you are waiting for it, hoping for it, it must seem as welcome as a mother’s hug. Of it death comes to say: "Not now, not yet. I’ll be waiting someplace up the road, but I don’t want you to be afraid of going home with a friend" — such a death, comforting as a night sky full of stars, must seem like the dark angel at God’s hand, the messenger of his hidden mercies.

Mercies, yes, but they don’t feel like they’re for me right now. "When it is a drizzly November in my soul," says Ishmael in Moby Dick, "I put out to sea," and we have each one our own solitary, exigent navigations which we must make the best of, howsoever drizzly we feel. Orienteering is always tough, so very tough. I wish to God I had a better compass and a clearer path. But once, I knew exactly where I was.

Luis Gamez is a professor of English at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

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