Easter Sunday this year was, for me, a time full of senior moments. No, by that term I don’t mean forgetting but, on the contrary, I mean remembering. For months I have been on a one-man campaign to substitute a positive meaning for the negative phrase that so many people have accepted. In my book, senior moments are times to cherish, not to regret.

These are events, people, and places from the remembered past that continue to provide us with psychic value. This remembrance of things past enriches our lives and make us appreciate the worth of our human experience. Remembering in this way enhances our present lives and reaches forward to give greater value to our future.

On Easter morning I drove to Weston, there to visit some of my old Jesuit colleagues. The expression “old colleagues” evokes three things for me: the number of years they have lived; my being no longer a member of their religious community; and the affection I feel for them.

Though almost 30 years have passed since I left the Jesuits, they  receive me as if I still belonged to them. And, in a sense, I do. We share a history of lived experiences that remain fresh even after the passage of so many years. Over lunch at the Campion Residence, my old Jesuit friends and I laughed about events that happened long ago and still retain power to entertain us and remind us of the bonds that hold us together.

With one of my tablemates, I felt a special tie. Paul Lucey, now 87 years old, was my teacher, 50 years ago, when he was professor of metaphysics at the then Weston College. He gave me an appreciation of the fundamental concept of being that has stayed with me through the years. Scholasticism, the philosophical system that we studied, has largely faded, but some of its basic insights have retained their value, thanks to teaching like his. If I have cultivated and retained a sense of wonder, it is in part due to him.

On a less elevated level we swapped stories of Jesuit characters we had known. One, “Foggy” MacKinnon, a scholar famous for his absentmindedness, was alleged one time to have driven an automobile from Boston  to a convention in Chicago and then to have forgotten the car and returned back home by airplane, a story all my Jesuit friends swear is true.

We also recalled one of Father Lucey’s fellow faculty members, Joseph Shea. His deadly pedagogical practice was to read, year after year, from the textbook he had written. At the bottom of a certain page of this book, students long before had written the Latin sentence “Hic stat P. Shea,” (This is where Father Shea stands up.) Such was his spontaneity that every year he could be relied on to rise at this exact point in the text. And he did in my year. He never did understand why his students all laughed then.

In the course of our conversation, Paul Lucey observed the positive feelings that leavers like me have about their old religious family. That remains true of me because I feel grateful to the Jesuits for all the values, spiritual and human, that they shared with me. My having left almost 30 years ago does not negate those precious experiences witnessed to by my senior moments.

Many of the Jesuits whom I saw on Easter reside in the assisted living or health center sections of Campion. Many of them suffer serious disabilities that have brought to an end their professional work in ministry. One of them, Daniel Lewis, had been teaching at Boston College High School last fall until a crippling illness required him to leave the school. I enjoyed sitting with Father Lewis and recalling some of the experiences we had shared, especially during the year 1964-65 that we spent together studying in Belgium.

Nothing here should be taken to sentimentalize the experience of  the Jesuits in old age. I often felt shocked to see the ravages of disease on men I had known when they were young. I know myself ultimately not exempt from these ravages –  – it’s just that my time has not yet come. In my mind’s eye I could see these former colleagues as they looked decades ago and the contrast assailed whatever complacency I might have harbored.

The Jesuits long ago developed a graceful and meaningful way of describing the retirement of their members. The official catalogue that lists the Jesuits of the United States, some 3500 in all, has a special designation for the work of those who live in retirement. They are described as “praying for the Church and the Society.” Thus their continued existence, no matter the level of their bodily or mental disability, is recognized as of value to their religious family.

Richard Griffin