A friend of many years standing (whom I will here name Paul) has shaken my inner world by revealing something of his own.

He is a person of strong character and sharp intelligence. In addition, he has devoted his life to community service in ways that continue to inspire me. At the same time, he cherishes his family and is an admirable husband and father.

Paul’s life is notable for continuity. He takes seriously the educational and governmental institutions that have helped to shape his character and his career.

So, too, with the church. From childhood on, Paul has been an active Catholic, well educated in the teachings of the church and committed to helping others in need. Now arrived in mid-life, he has continued his allegiance to this tradition, along with his wife and family.

Recently, however, in the midst of a conversation about the church, Paul surprised me by allowing that he now feels shaken in this allegiance. Recent events have upset his confidence in this institution that has been such a major influence on his life. Nowadays, he is so deeply troubled by much of what church authority does that he has doubts about his place in the church.

This disclosure of Paul’s problems with his church and mine has hit me hard. Coming from a person of such longstanding and solid attachment to the tradition that we share, this news persuades me that the current crisis in the church is more pervasive than I had thought. If Paul is scandalized enough to consider alternatives, then the number of other people who feel the same way must be legion.

I count myself among those who feel similarly troubled. Many actions taken by those in authority within the church bother me also. It grieves me to know that so many Catholics feel torn between authority and conscience

By reason of my now advanced years, I bring to this question a perspective not likely to be shared by the young. They did not directly experience the changes that the Catholic Church made in the 1960s, as I did. Those changes of both attitudes and practice, made by the Second Vatican Council─convened 43 years ago this month─excited many people of my generation and made us hope the Church would stay committed to reform.

However, even before that decade was out, the pope of the time, Paul VI, had forced on the church a decision about birth control that was to prove disastrous. And, in time, the failure of the church to implement the vision of Vatican II left us with disappointed dreams. Even the long reign of the late John Paul II, while productive of much good, maintained a model of one-man rule that clashes with the Gospel and serves the church badly.

The explosive revelation of sexual abuse by the clergy has come as a terrible blow to Catholics at large. For many laypeople, the worst part of it was the failure of the bishops to accept responsibility and take action. In the greater Boston area, people still feel outraged that the Vatican rewarded the deposed Cardinal Law with a plush position at Santa Maria Maggiore, one of Rome’s most prominent basilicas.

Catholics of my age have been long inured to corruption in the church. Many of us learned to live with it decades ago and considered it the price to be paid for the institution’s human fallibility. We even learned how to twist it into an argument for the church’s divine origins. Though Boccaccio’s Decameron, written in the 14th century, was never our bedside reading, we could have found support in its pages for this attitude.

The second of the Decameron’s 100 stories tells of a man in Paris who was considering converting to the Catholic Church. A friend was urging him on.

Before making a decision the fellow wanted to make a pilgrimage to Rome, the heart of the church. His friend urged him not togo, fearing that Roman corruption would surely prevent his conversion.

He ignored this advice, however, went to Rome, and came back home. Anxious to discover if, indeed, he had decided not to convert, his friend put the question to him. The man answered: “Certainly not. Any church that can continue to last through so much corruption must surely be divine.”

I remember hearing this argument, or variations on it, during my whole lifetime.

However, there is a difference between corruption in past centuries and those we experience in our own lifetime. When, for example, you are a parishioner at Our Lady, Help of Christians church in Newton, and see your pastor deposed for makeshift reasons that disguise the abuse of church authority, then it hits you hard.

Many Catholics have given up on the church. Despite my ongoing resentment toward the culture of church authority and my rejection of many values the clerical structure reveals, I cannot see myself ever leaving. It is my spiritual home; it belongs to me and not only to those who wield power.

Richard Griffin

A few days ago, at a street party, I heard a neighbor, my senior by a few years, recite by heart two lines from Longfellow’s “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” words that he had memorized, seven or eight decades ago. The two lines go as follows: “Archly the maiden smiled, and, with eyes overrunning with laughter, / Said, in a tremulous voice, ‘Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?’”

The maiden, in this long narrative poem, was Priscilla Mullins and the man, John Alden. The latter had come to see the young woman on an errand for his friend, Miles Standish, the Captain of Plymouth. It was to recommend Standish as a husband for Priscilla, but instead the woman was smitten with John himself.

The line, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?” was to become famous to great numbers of Americans now of a certain age. And Henry Wadsworth Longfellow achieved household-name status, perhaps the best known poet in the country with a reputation that still flourished when I was in elementary school.

The poem quoted above was not the best known of his works, however. “Listen my children and you shall hear / the midnight ride of Paul Revere” were words that even more schoolboys and girls in the 1930s would have known by heart. When my age peers and I were young, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ranked as our poet laureate, the almost-official celebrator of our national history.

Like many other eminent literary figures of the past, Longfellow has long since gone out of fashion. He is now regarded by critics as a writer who produced some fine poetry but one whose sentimentality and uneven literary quality limits his attractiveness in the modern era. Still, it offered me pleasure to reach down from my bookshelf an edition of his complete poems, a volume acquired by my mother long ago.

The incentive to look at Longfellow again has come from a new friend. Ivan, a faculty member at Notre Dame, has spent parts of the last two summers in Cambridge, in order to research material for a book on Longfellow. My friend, surprisingly, is a native of Patagonia, the extreme southern region of Chile, and teaches South American history.

Ivan is studying the works of Longfellow that are connected with the Spanish language. As professor of modern languages, first at his alma mater Bowdoin College, then at Harvard, Longfellow developed fluency in French, Italian, and Spanish, in addition to other languages. Most of us who became familiar with his poems long ago never realized what an accomplished teacher and scholar he was.

This renewed interest in him recently moved me to visit his house on Brattle Street in Cambridge. Though I had attended concerts on the lawn several times, I had not been inside the house for many years. Going through it, with a knowledgeable and enthusiastic park ranger as guide, proved an enjoyable experience.

Before it became Longfellow’s, the mansion was famous for housing George Washington when he first assumed command of the Continental Army. In 1835, Longfellow moved in as a boarder; he did not own the house until his marriage. The father of Fanny Appleton, his bride, gave it to him as a wedding present.

Walking through the rooms and hallways, I felt a mixture of emotions. The Victorian charm of the furnishings and the memories of another era evoked by the memorabilia touched me agreeably. But hearing again about the horrific death of Fanny, surprised by fire that caught her dress, and the way Longfellow never quite recovered from this event, created in me a renewed sadness.

We did not see the upper floor where this tragedy took place; insufficient federal funding for the Longfellow site has reduced staffing and made extended tours impossible. But the main floor is full of tangible reminders of the poet and his era. The “spreading chestnut tree” that once protected the village blacksmith survives in a wooden chair in Longfellow’s study. The chair was a gift from the children of Cambridge, and many of them came to visit him and to sit in it.

We know that Longfellow wrote charmingly  about his own children, We were happy to recognize, on the dining-room walls, the portrait of the three daughters─“grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, and Edith with golden hair”─who invade his study in “The Children’s Hour.” We should also remember that this happy home was the center of considerable intellectual and literary activity. Abolitionists and transcendentalists gathered at the poet’s table, and his own work of composition and translation brought consciousness of a wider world to a young nation.

Memorizing Longfellow is not longer a staple of grade-school education, but a visit to the poet’s house helps us to realize why he was a towering figure in his own time, and why he should not be forgotten by ours.

Richard Griffin

Sterling Alam, an Attleboro resident retired from AARP, has read (or, at least, scanned) all 700 pages of the so-called Medicare Modernization Act, the legislation that will bring us the new prescription drug program starting on January 1, 2006. You can be assured that hardly any senators or representatives in Washington can make the same claim.

Alam says he found reading the bill difficult, not merely because of its legalistic language, but because “there were so many things to object to.” For emphasis, he adds: “I think it’s one of the worst bills ever to pass Congress.”

That puts him in the same corner as me. I still seethe at members of Congress for having passed, in late 2003, this politically motivated legislation, favoring vested interests and harmful to American citizens at large. And, typically, the Bush administration has given the new law a euphemistic name─Medicare Modernization Act─ that suggests progress rather than a step backwards.

It also irks me that Congress has failed to accept a single one of the many proposals for improving the program.  

Surely there is something absurdly wrong with a law that, among other provisions, forbids Medicare from bargaining with drug companies for lower prices, even though the Veterans’ Administration has been doing so successfully for years. Also the ban on Americans purchasing prescription drugs from Canada (or any other foreign country) counts in my book as an arbitrary restriction of personal freedom.

I hope that you are not as confused as I am by what you have heard thus far about Medicare Part D (another title for this program). Right now, I do not know what, if anything, to do by way of response to the oncoming plan. Nor does it console me that hardly anyone else seems to understand how to deal with it.

However, in the effort to discover what information is available now, I

tapped into an online Medicare site (www.medicarepartd.org). There I filled out a questionnaire designed to show unnamed officials how to help me.

In response I received an electronic report of several pages adapted to the information I had provided about my own drug situation.

It begins with an announcement of what they call good news and bad news. The allegedly good news is that Medicare will spend 724 billion to assist us with our prescription drug costs; the bad reveals that only four percent of people understand the program “very well.”

From the response, several pages long, I learned some facts about older people who qualify for “extra help.” If you are single and your income is below $14,595 and your resources  $11,500 or less, you will automatically become eligible for Part D. For couples, the figures are $16,862 and $23,000. (Another official Medicare web site gives somewhat different numbers.)

Some other people, however, will be given the subsidy automatically. These include those on Medicare with full Medicaid, those on SSI (Supplemental Security Income), and people covered by the Medicare “Buy In” program. Still, even these groups will have to enroll in a Medicare drug plan if they are to use the subsidy.

Massachusetts residents who are enrolled in the state’s Prescription Advantage program will continue to enjoy the benefits they have now. In addition, the state will provide some help with expenses, such as premiums and co-payments, that are required by Medicare Part D.

Those of us enrolled in Health Maintenance Organizations can reasonably expect to become part of Medicare Part D while continuing to enjoy the drug discounts provided by our membership in the HMO. But, when I called the HMO to which I belong, they could not confirm this or tell me anything more because they are still talking with Medicare authorities.

For information, advice, and counsel about this complicated program, I suggest calling the state-sponsored SHINE program. Counselors can be reached at (800) 243-4636 (AGE INFO). It might also be prudent to save all mail that deals with Medicare matters. You might want to attend some presentations made in an area near you; information about them is available at the phone number noted above.

Many of us already know about the “doughnut hole” which will require individual subscribers to pay prescription drug costs themselves, once they have reached $2250 in total expenses. That requirement lasts until expenses mount to $5100.

The new plan issues drug discount cards, but these will do nothing to discourage increases in costs for individual drugs.

A longtime colleague in the service of older people and their families assures me that the new plan is “frustrating right now for everybody.” This lawyer reports that “all the advocates are dreading the fall season.” And speaking of the intention of the movers behind the prescription drug program, she says with chagrin: “They are privatizing Medicare.”

Another person involved in the field offers simple advice: “Don’t panic.” That seems to me wise counsel, one that I am adopting myself, despite my angry emotions at what is being imposed on us.

Richard Griffin

For several days, I simply could not remember my colleague’s last name. His first is Bob ─ that I knew. But a quick mental run through the alphabet did not reveal even the letter with which his last name begins.

Later, in conversation, when a mutual friend also happened to be searching for my colleague’s name, I suddenly blurted it out. And I did so with complete confidence of having it right.

Almost everybody complains about memory lapses. Worse than forgetting names, we cannot remember where we put our keys, our hats, our notes. Spending time searching for any one of these objects can make us feel acute frustration until we find them.

My favorite anecdote involving such a lapse featured a member of my former religious community whom, for his absent-mindedness, we called “Foggy” MacKinnon. This scholar reportedly drove his automobile from Boston to Detroit for a professional conference, and then took an airplane back home! Sure, the story may be apocryphal but it does communicate the sometimes drastic inconvenience of forgetfulness.

In preparation for giving a workshop on the subject of memory in mid-life, I have been reading a fascinating 2001 book called “The Seven Sins of Memory.” Written by Daniel Schacter, it combines the latest psychological science with a humanistic approach based in daily life and good literature.

What Schacter calls “sins” are the following: transience (forgetting over longer or shorter periods of time), absent-mindedness, blocking (you know the word or fact but it remains out of reach), misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence (you can’t get rid of a certain memory). He sees these defects in memory as the price we pay for the marvelous powers that memory gives us.

In addition, Schacter considers each of these “sins” to have compensating advantages. In general, forgetting preserves us from being overburdened with the recollection of events that we no longer need to remember. Bias, for example, might make us cherish an inflated idea of our own accomplishments, but that condition is far better than underrating our own worth.

If you wish to do better in remembering names or other facts, the way toward improvement goes through what Schacter calls “encoding.” This means that the name is registered in the brain sharply enough that it can be recalled when needed.

My own surprising ability to remember names has come about in part by my practice of first repeating the name aloud when someone is introduced. Then, I have retained the habit of associating the name with something or someone else.

You say your name is Ben Jones. Well, I spent a year living in Wales where just about half of the population seems to be named “Jones.” As for “Ben,” that suggests to me the youngest son in the Hebrew Bible.

Schacter also explains that memories are not like simple records stored in our brain that we pick out of the file ready-made. Instead, they are complicated sets of mental realities with contributions coming from various parts of the brain. And they are not just literally replicas of the events; instead they are larded with emotions, imagination, and other forms of experience.

Researchers can now actually see changes in the brain as people exercise their memory. Various parts of the brain are perceived to register these changes when we engage in certain mental functions. And the brains of women operate somewhat differently from those of men.

How about the effects of aging on memory? Professor Schacter writes: “Aging does not produce an across-the-board decline in all memory functions.” Nor does he hold the conventional view about our memory systems losing brain cells as we age.

This observation comforts me since it takes me considerably longer to do the Sunday crossword puzzle than it used to. Now I might need every day of the week to finish it and even then I may fail to complete the whole puzzle.

Of course, I am painfully aware that not a few of us are afflicted with dementia, the disease that has not yet yielded to research efforts to break through and solve.

Perhaps the best way of dealing with memory issues is to take good care of your brain. This means doing all the things that are good for one’s body overall. Physical exercise, good nutrition, and control of blood pressure certainly count. So do spiritual activities, along with friendships and close family relationships.

Paul Nussbaum, a neuropsychologist based in Pittsburgh, asks how we would like to have a three or four pound computer at our disposal for use during every waking hour. The human brain qualifies, except that it is far better than any computer. In fact, you could say, with some truth, that it is the most complex entity in all of creation.

The next time you forget something, you might want to remember, not how fallible memory is, but rather how awesome is the power by which we can recall past experiences and let them enrich our lives now.

Richard Griffin

“Dentists are not covered by Medicare; eyeglasses are not covered by Medicare; (nor) podiatrists. Does anybody really think we don’t need a healthy mouth to be healthy? That we don’t need healthy feet? They tell us, everybody tells us, to go out and walk. What are you going to walk on if you have a bunion pushing against the side of your foot?”

In ringing, almost prophetic terms, Barbara Ackermann thus explained why she had come to Faneuil Hall this month for the rally in favor of universal health care. She was one of some 200 elders who assembled at that historic site to advocate legislation to cover all Americans, young and old.

Ackermann, a veteran of municipal and state political involvement, feels deeply about this issue. She cannot understand how our national government can leave more than 40 million Americans uncovered.

In the statement quoted above, she was refuting the commonly held view that people over 65 already have universal health care coverage. Admitting that her own financial situation gives her special access, she and her husband spend some $17,000 each year on health care not covered by Medicare.

“You don’t have to add to the worries about health care how you’re going to pay for it,” she tells fellow advocates. “It (coverage) seems normal to me, and it seems outrageous that we don’t have it.”

The driving force behind this rally was the Massachusetts Senior Action Council, a group of elders who are actively concerned with health care and other issues that affect the well-being of our society. I asked Ralph Hergert, the dynamic new director of the association, how he could put so much energy into a cause that, at the moment, seems hopelessly lost.

Chuckling, my old friend responded: “I believe in impossible ideals, that we need to work on them every day.” Like the other leaders present, he knows what the odds are, but he feels determined to push ahead for something of such vital importance to the community he serves.

Among those other leaders were two congressmen, John Tierney from Massachusetts’ North Shore area and Maurice Hinchey who represents a New York district near the Hudson Valley and the Catskill Mountains.

Tierney thinks that a grassroots effort is needed and calls for working from idealism. “This country was built on idealism,” he said. But he also offered a pragmatic reason: “The cost to businesses, forcing them to be uncompetitive with others, it’s all coming to a head.”

Hinchey also struck this same note: “For Americans to be healthy and strong, we need a system of national health insurance now. It’s important for our economy, we are at a disadvantage – General Motors spends more on health insurance than on steel.”

Longtime advocate Sterling Alam, now retired from AARP, was among those in the audience. In asking him questions, I discovered how he combines a certain skepticism with hope. “I think the single payer is something we are going to do eventually, when things get bad enough,” he told me.

Union organizer Rand Wilson outlines the three basic elements of any comprehensive health plan. Access, quality, and cost are the issues that it must address. Does everyone have the right to treatment? Is this health care excellent across the board? How much do people have to pay for coverage?

Another viewpoint on health care came from April Taylor, who works with African American residents in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. She sees the need for not mere coverage but what see calls “culturally competent health care.” In her experience, some service providers have a poor understanding  of culture, class, race and gender.

Ms. Taylor points to national statistics that suggest black people have their limbs amputated more often than do other people. Instead of getting life-saving drugs, too frequently they suffer this drastic surgical intervention.

These advocates have two specific goals in mind. The first is proposed legislation in Congress. HR 676 currently has some 50 sponsors, Congressman Hinchey among them. But even he admits that “in the current environment it has absolutely no chance.” He believes, though, that we can and must change that environment.

The other initiative is a Massachusetts constitutional amendment for health care. This citizens’ initiative needs over 70 thousand signatures before qualifying for a constitutional convention. Sponsored by an agency called Mass-Care, it would ensure that every resident of the commonwealth would have access to affordable health care.

One speaker revealed that the number of uninsured in this state is at an all-time high, and the problem continues to grow worse. There is pressing reason to move forward on both fronts, national and state.

AARP would seem to be a strong ally. In “Reimagining America,” a newly published agenda for change, it states that “the U.S. health care system needs to be transformed to ensure access to more affordable, higher quality care.” This change AARP calls “America’s highest priority.”

Those wishing to get involved can call the Massachusetts Senior Action Council at (617) 442-3330.

Richard Griffin

A front-page newspaper photo shows sick old people, mostly women, lying on flimsy stretchers, with their legs exposed, or on the baggage area conveyer belt as they await evacuation from the New Orleans airport. How heartrending to realize that they have been deprived of dignity, security, community and almost everything else in the last days of their lives!

This image, one of thousands shown by the national media, reveals what residents of that city and other parts of the Gulf coast have endured since the storm hit. Unfortunately, it also reveals what it can be like to be poor and disadvantaged in America. These are the people left behind, literally and figuratively.

Televised interviews with those able to talk have shown many faces of poverty and deprivation. They have been residents of a city where the official poverty rate has reached 28 percent. Most of them are people of color, with low levels of schooling and few if any financial resources as backup for themselves and their families.  

The bad effects of inadequate medical and dental care were obvious in the faces of many shown on television. Many adults are clearly overweight and have bad teeth. Surely they belong to the group of some 40 million Americans who lack health insurance and thus go without their basic health care needs receiving attention.

Yet these evacuees have resided in an area that qualifies as a center of great wealth and industry. Many of this country’s exports of farm products and other goods pass through New Orleans on the way to other parts of the world. Similarly, many imports enter through the same port city. And the revenues from the oil and gas industries based in the surrounding area and the tourist business amount to a huge treasure.

This wealth, however, has not benefited the poor of New Orleans to any obvious extent. They have continued to live as a kind of underclass, cut off from the many of the goods that most middle-class people take as their right.

This revelation of another America has come as a shock to many of us who enjoy the good things of life. No one acquainted with the way things are for the poor is surprised except, perhaps, for the sheer extent of deprivation among the people of one beloved city.

Nor should we have been surprised at the woeful failures of our national government to have anticipated the crisis and to have responded promptly and adequately. Among other factors, both failures are the fruit of federal policies that starve human welfare for rigid ideological purposes.

For me, the havoc of Hurricane Katrina itself also belongs to the great mystery of the natural world and its potential for destruction. As we have witnessed memorably in this still new century, that world has not surrendered its awesome power to the control of human beings and presumably never will. We do well to respect the ability of nature to surprise us with its violence.

Despite considerable theological education, I confess no more understanding of what this world’s cruelty means than anyone else. This is why calling it a “mystery” makes sense to me: there is more to be understood than we can ever understand.

Similarly for the evil inflicted by human beings on one another, in this instance the shootings, lootings, and other violent crimes committed by some New Orleanians against defenseless others.

Long ago I learned not to be surprised by the enormity of evil in the human family. Early on, my religious tradition imbued in me the idea that there is something fundamentally askew in us all, a perversity that can lead us to prey on one another.

The industrialized mass slaughter of the Jewish people and others by the Nazis and the butchery of millions of his own people by Stalin, in my own lifetime, have also made it impossible for me to underestimate human savagery.

To these two great mysteries, the world’s evil and our own, I will add a third. How can it happen that some people can live their whole lives escaping the natural and human evils that prevail over so many others? Through no virtue of our own, we have been exempt from the immediate effects of wars, persecutions, dire poverty, and other cataclysms that have engulfed the world’s people at large.

This, too, is a mystery, too much to understand. How is it that, if you were born in a certain place, at a certain time, in particular circumstances, you inherited an exemption from these widespread ills? That has been my fate thus far, something that also leaves me to wonder.

These three mysteries confront me as I look at the world and my own life. Moving into the latter stages of this life does not diminish the power of these mysteries but continues to provoke the same questions over and over.

Richard Griffin