The sacred smell remains with me in memory, that of the incense as it rose from the altar and wafted its way through the church. During the rite we called Benediction, the priest would swing the golden vessel on its golden chain, toward the Blessed Sacrament as a way of worshiping the Lord. That burning aromatic substance inside the vessel made the building feel even more holy than usual, suffusing the structure where the spiritual life of my boyhood found its focus.

The parish is no more, having been suppressed last year by the archbishop for lack of attenders and a dearth of clergy. But there is no suppressing my 1930s and 1940s memories of the place, with its Latin language liturgies, its pews crowded with families dressed in their Sunday best, and familiar hymns, features of a church flourishing with faith and practice.

The pastor and his curates, their backs turned toward us as they recited the parts of the Mass, showed themselves reverent but businesslike in getting through the rite in time for the next congregation to enter. Those of us receiving holy communion would be hungry and thirsty, when we thought about it, in accordance with fasting rules then in force.

The day of my First Communion, May 31, 1936, stands out as altogether special. At age seven, the age of reason as the church defined it, I qualified for this event, which was followed by a parish breakfast served to us amid much rejoicing. In recalling the occasion here, I have before me a photo of my second grade public school class. My mother wrote all our names on the back, with an asterisk noting those who had received this First Communion together.

Not lightly did we approach the altar rail that day: we had prepared for it over a period of months. That meant studying our catechism, memorizing the answers to questions familiar to virtually all members of our faith community. Preparation also entailed our first confession, as we were shown our way into the dark box where a priest was waiting for us to tell him our sins. I don’t remember any of the awful deeds I shared with the confessor that day.

The boys among us wore white suits, and white shoes and socks. The little girls wore white dresses and veils.

No enfants terribles were among us that day, because all of us were shriven and pure as newly bought sheets of paper. As we approached the altar rail in awe, not without fear of making a mistake, the priest placed the host on our tongues and we returned to our pews united with the Lord Jesus. The emotion of that day has remained in my memory for 70 years, suggesting that the parish was making a durable investment in its boys and girls.

Church in those days was much more than Sunday Mass. Devotions, too, loomed large in parish life, rites like the already mentioned Benediction and confession. Some adult parishioners confessed every week even if they had no axe murders or other heinous sins to accuse themselves of. Pushed by our parents, we children would be there, too, prepared to divulge our transgressions. As I entered adolescence, my most pressing spiritual danger tended to be the photos of women in Life Magazine or the National Geographic, scandalously revealing according to the standards of the day.

Novenas enjoyed great popularity, too, those nine-day sessions of prayer, hymn singing, sermons, and Benediction. Each March, we prayed and sang to Saint Francis Xavier, the 16th century Jesuit who had baptized thousands of Asians as one of the first of his order’s missionaries.

At one stage, the saint’s arm made the rounds of parishes, in a glass case that displayed the sacred limb that long before had brought so many people into the church. Singing the hymns, smelling the incense, listening to the words of Scripture and the visiting preachers, all gave this young boy a palpable sense of what it meant to be in touch with the holy.

But nothing stays the same. People change, along with their institutions. Long life exposes us to shifts in thinking, in taste, and in the way things are done. You find that what seemed fixed in place was not nearly so immutable as you thought. As the ancient Greek philosopher knew, it is impossible to put your foot into the same flowing river twice.

In retrospect, it surprises me that the Catholic subculture held together so tenaciously. That way of being religious felt to me, my parents, and just about everybody else in my circle of friends remarkably stable, immune to the winds of change that would transform it decades later. Of course, in time I would become aware of Catholic provincialism and worse defects, but in my boyhood it all seemed as if it all could last forever.

Richard Griffin

An Arlington reader, who is also a longtime friend, has written urging me to “feature some seniors who are active in more international efforts, not officials, but ordinary people who are looking beyond the U.S., making a difference in alleviating the absolutely dire poverty in places such as Africa.”

I welcome this suggestion and believe that such older volunteers deserve  admiration. Among them are friends and neighbors whom I feel privileged to know. No one of them works in an African country, but what they do for impoverished people in Haiti and two Central American nations merits attention.

This is the fourth winter that Bill and Linda Green, a married couple who live on my block, have spent three months in Guatemala serving residents of one of the poorest regions of that country. To describe their work I have relied on an article written for The Howl, the amateur rag I publish for people in my neighborhood.

Bill, a retired physician, locates the work they do in the central region along the shore of Lago Atitlan, one of the world’s most beautiful lakes. He and his wife Linda, a social worker by profession, have engaged in varied activities on behalf of the local people..

Last winter, Bill saw patients four mornings a week at a local health center; he calls it “a very rewarding experience.” Linda, for her part, assisted teachers of English in the city of Panajachel, and did some therapy and consultation. Together, Linda and Bill interviewed ten non-governmental organizations to investigate “women’s reproductive health and family planning in the indigenous towns around the lake.”

Another couple, Margaret and David Gullette, whom I have known for many years, spend part of each winter serving the people of San Juan del Sur in Nicaragua.  

Margaret, a writer on cultural issues, raises money to support a literacy project for women. Collaborating with two woman physicians, one Belgian, the other Nicaraguan, she has established learning centers that include a free high school for adults, a Saturday school that has enrolled 350 people, and 21 satellite schools in rural areas near San Juan.

David has helped build or reconstruct a school each year, resulting in a total of 17 thus far. The work has attracted students and teachers, along with hundreds of visitors from Newton, which since 1988 has been paired with San Juan as a sister city.

About her work with grown-ups Margaret says: “It gives adults a second chance; it’s like a mission.” David adds: “It has transformed my life; it has been a great midlife gift to us.”

I recommend the project’s web site: www.newtonsanjuan.org.

Another woman who lives on my block, Betty Mahan, has been devoted to good works in Haiti for many years. She buys hand-crafted cards with her own money, has them brought to the United States with the help of various informal contacts, sells the cards, and then gives the money back to the Saint Boniface Haiti Foundation. Founded in 1983 by the parishioners of St.Boniface Church in Quincy, this nonprofit works to serve “the poorest of the poor.”

My neighbor Betty sees her own work as “only a small portion of many in the St. Boniface group with whom God has shared the desperate needs and sufferings of his Haiti children.” This group raised the money to build a hospital in Fond des Blancs that provides the only source of health care for a community of 45,000 rural poor.

Even though she can no longer go to their country, her work on behalf of Haitians strikes me as enterprising and valuable. She manages to raise the consciousness of many Americans, especially those in the parish churches where her cards are sold. Thus she provides an object lesson for those of us unable to volunteer our services on the ground in poor countries.

If I personally know three people living on the same city block with me, there must be a large number of the retired and my age peers who contribute services to residents of other countries. And they must be engaged in a wide variety of activities, some highly professional, others more informal, but all valuable both for the people they serve and for themselves.

Ultimately, efforts of the kind described here, though essential, cannot ever be sufficient to solve the poverty of so many of the world’s people. Every day, an estimated 30 thousand children die from causes that good nutrition and health care could remedy. This situation continues to be a scandal that only governments have the means to resolve.

In a speech at this year’s Boston College commencement, Paul Farmer, the Harvard physician who has become well known for his work with the poor of Haiti and elsewhere, defined hell on earth as “poverty and violence and untreated disease.” Thankfully, many of my age peers have risen up and dedicated themselves to fighting the fires of this hell.

Richard Griffin

“Baseball satisfies people who are seeking some order in their lives. Fiction is another attempt to impose order on chaos.”

This is the way the celebrated novelist, short story artist, and critic John Updike compares baseball to writing. Now 73, with hair turned white above his craggy profile, Updike (like many another) has grown into better looks in later life than he had when young.

The setting where he made the comparison was a perfect fit for the subject. Updike was sitting on a platform with four other writers, high in the sky above home plate at Fenway Park. Taking advantage of the Red Sox playing away in St. Louis, PEN New England (the writers’ group) had staged a forum featuring Roger Angell, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen King, and Michael Lewis, along with Updike, to talk about baseball and writing, and the connection between the two.

It felt idyllic to sit among hundreds of fans in the 406 Club, high atop home plate,  and look out over the playerless field at night. The Pesky Pole in right field looked close enough to touch, and the many corporate signs scattered throughout the surfaces formed a patchwork quilt. At one point, a dark cloudbank full of potential rain moved across the sky, like a fit of pessimism about the home team’s chances for another championship.

The authors joined in celebrating the beauties of the game, as all five have done in their published work. Another writer, not part of the panel but connected by blood with the home team, Leslie Epstein (his son is the wunderkind general manager of the Red Sox), touched on the perils of losing oneself in the emotions of a crowd of joyful, rabid fans.

That discordant comment would become part of a subtext for the evening, beneath a dreamy surface of nostalgia for the game. Ultimately, that underlying theme would prove for me the most provocative part of the event.

Doris Kearns Goodwin sees her career as historian rooted in her childhood, when she would report to her father the results of the day’s Brooklyn Dodgers’ games after he came home from work. At first, she would blurt out the final score, but in time she learned better. In the process, she discovered that she had to tell a story “from the beginning, to the middle and the end.”

Roger Angell credits his father with forging his love of baseball. “Father made me feel at home in the ballpark,” recalls this now 85-year-old New Yorker writer. Since his father was born in 1889, the lives of this father and son span almost the whole history of the game.

Stephen King’s personal link with the game was through his mother. She worked in a Stratford, Connecticut, laundry, the only white woman there. All the workers rooted for the Dodgers because of Jackie Robinson, the man who broke baseball’s color barrier. King’s mother also read to him on summer nights, but she herself was absorbed by Gone With the Wind. This popular classic, with its 1040 pages, prompted her son to ask how long a book could be.

Her answer, “as long as you want it to be,” reminds the popular novelist of baseball. This game can go into extra innings; until you make three outs, you are always up. Similarly, for King, writers “do it until it’s done, until we are satisfied.”

Michael Lewis finds that “baseball is very clean for the writer.” By contrast with other sports, “it’s easy to assign credit and blame, the confrontations end to be either man versus man, man versus fly ball, etc. It’s more transparent.”

Half way through this nostalgia-laced group exchange, Stephen King suddenly asked: “Why is almost every face white here?” The question led to a discussion of why relatively few black people attend Red Sox games. An African American member of the audience rose to answer: because of blacks’ resentment of white people who judge black athletes as simply gifted by nature with great skills, and fail to appreciate the hard work that has gone into their success on the ball field.

Later, Ms.Goodwin criticized major league baseball for the way players are constantly leaving their teams for others that will pay them more money. Even more serious, some teams in small money markets year after year have no realistic hope of making the playoffs.

These and other reasons have made me sour on the game that I used to love uncritically. Money and hype have become such dominant factors in the big leagues that I feel alienated and have not attended a Red Sox game in years.

At the forum’s end I buttonholed both Doris Kearns Goodwin and John Updike and got them to admit that some of the romance has gone out of the game for them also. But I doubt either would have said so in the forum itself, an admission that might have spoiled an atmosphere so worshipful of the game.

Richard Griffin

“Stuart, this is a voice from your past. I am the fellow who grew up across the street from you long ago, the boy you played ball with so many afternoons after school. I wonder how you and your family are now. I just wanted to be in touch with you again after all these years.”

With words like these, I called up my old friend (his name is different) after a silence lasting decades. I did so with an expectation that he would welcome hearing from me and might even propose our getting together for old time’s sake. In the past, such calls to old friends had often produced happy results.

To my shock, my boyhood friend expressed no interest in me whatsoever. He responded to my words with a minimum of his own and made clear his lack of enthusiasm for renewed contact. His indifference to me made me feel terribly let down as I tried to cope with unexpected rejection.

On another occasion I telephoned someone who had been a friend during his graduate school days. We had shared much, Jack and I, and that community of interest extended to his wife. I considered the two of them among my bonded friends and expected that personal relationship to last through the indefinite future.

For a long time Jack has lived in a southern state, far from my own. So when I found an obituary for one of his former mentors, a person whom he had been close to. I telephoned him to share this news and to wonder if he would be coming back to Cambridge for his teacher’s funeral.

Here, again, I met a surprisingly cool response. Jack did not seem to appreciate my having called nor did he express much of any interest in me. The changes that had taken place in my life since we had last been in contact failed to excite any questions on his part. My questions about his own family he answered only perfunctorily.

Another married couple with whom I was once close still live in a Boston suburb near me. From conversation with the woman’s brother at a party, I know that they and their now grown-up children are well and flourishing. Years ago, we had shared varied experiences, yet I have had no contact with them since. They have not called me even once nor I them.

These three sets of lost friends, the two couples and my boyhood neighbor, strike me as examples of what happens during a long life. Along the way, we lose contact with many people who have once been close to us. They may still play a part in our psyches but no longer do we encounter one another bodily. We have passed out of their lives and they from ours, except that we may continue to think of them, as I do.

The reasons why this estrangement happens are probably many, perhaps different in each instance. I often speculate about what I may have done to precipitate the loss of active friendship with some people. The answer, of course, may be nothing. As the circumstances of their lives have changed along with their interests, they may simply have moved on to new friends and other involvements.

But that does not stop me from wondering if, in some instances, I was at fault. My situation is complicated by the fact that 30 years ago I took the radical step of departing from my first career, the priesthood. For those friends accustomed to seeing me as a counselor and spiritual guide, it may have been alienating to encounter me in a different guise. Catholics, especially, could have found it difficult to accept my having surrendered the role in which they had first known me.

As we go through the various stages of life, however, we all experience changes in our tastes, including the people we like to associate with. So my feelings of loss and, in some instances, rejection probably do not merit self-accusation. Yet, I often wonder if I have said or done something that has induced them to stop considering me a friend.

It’s very different when you lose friends to death. Then, despite the physical absence of the person, the friendship seems secured in place. Nothing is going to change the place that this friend holds in your heart except that he or she may come to be even more precious. This experience now marks my inner life much more than in the past.

The loss of friends still alive does find compensation through the new friends one acquires through the years. But that does not stop me from remembering those of the past. They contributed something important to my life despite the ending of our relationship. I still care about them and hold open the possibility that, in some instances at least, they care about me. But, in the absence of any evidence, I must guess at what happened to our friendship.

Richard Griffin

When I heard the learned numbers man talk about Social Security, I might have wondered what all the fuss had been about. He did not even mention the president’s proposal for private accounts─something that struck me like ignoring the presence of an elephant in a small living room.

To hear Stephen Goss tell it, the job of chief actuary for Social Security brings him a lot of fun because it involves making guesses about the future. He describes his role as “not political at all,” but like that of a baseball umpire working behind the plate.

Goss was the chief speaker at a recent forum at UMass Boston. Professor Yung-Ping Chen, himself an expert on the subject, had asked the actuary to present the facts about the current Social Security situation. Predictably, the event attracted few young people, a further indication that this country’s youth do not see that the current debate has far more importance for them than for those already advanced in age

During the Chief Actuary’s presentation, I found little evidence that he takes seriously the fevered discussions about Social Security that have spread across America. To him, solving the problems of this crucial national program requires nothing more than clear-headed analysis and carefully calibrated responses.

In Goss’s view, our national pension system needs some tweaking, but not immediately. He believes Social Security to be basically sound: Not until 2017 will the benefits paid out exceed the amount of tax money coming in and not until 2041 will the system run out of tax funds. Goss does, however, allow that certain problems will require Congress to take action, sooner or later.

This expert on the numbers attributes the system’s prospective problems mainly to the drop in American birth rates. “If women were still giving birth to an average of 3.3 children, then there would be no problem,” he says. But by 1972, the birth rate had dropped to two children per family and remains at that level.

Various economic and social changes in American society have resulted in fewer children, especially among white people. The drop in births is not as great as in some other countries, notably Italy and other European nations; but this demographic change in the United States looms large enough to upset Social Security’s revenues.

Another point emphasized by Goss concerns the ratio between the number of workers who pay into the system and those who have retired and are currently drawing benefits. In 1975, there were 3.2 workers for every beneficiary, a ratio that he calls “extremely stable.”

To people who feel disturbed at today’s relatively low level of workers per beneficiary, Goss says that the inflated numbers during World War II have given them unrealistic expectations. He admits, however, that without major changes, the ratio will drop to only about two workers per beneficiary.

When the question of private accounts finally emerged in the question period, Goss’s  main response to this proposal was to say: “It depends how you do them.” He seemed to favor those plans that would be funded, not from the Social Security trust funds, but rather from the general treasury.

Again, you would not know from the chief actuary that values have much of anything to do with the current debate about the future of Social Security. He seemed content to detail the numbers as if crucial choices, many of them political in nature and reflecting fundamental ways of looking at the world, had no part to play in the national discussion about changes in the system.

Yes, he laid out some of the possible choices: you can lower benefit levels, raise tax rates, increase the taxable maximum, include those public employees currently not participating in the system. And, ultimately, I suppose he would add private accounts.

But he paid little attention to the human meaning of the choices. To me, the decisions ought to reflect the values that Americans consider important. And, given the divisions among us, these moves will not come easily.

For me, solidarity among old and young ranks high as a value. So does the responsibility of our government to take care of members of the community who cannot care for themselves. I support preferential options for the poor and for the disadvantaged to the extent that such options are feasible. And proposals to cut back on the Social Security income of us members of the middle class strike me as unfair, to say the least.

Schemes designed to establish private accounts, even when advanced under the euphemism of “personal accounts,” are ways of privatizing a system that should remain public in every part so that the general welfare can be best served.

The common good, not the welfare of Wall Street investment bankers, must remain the measuring stick when making changes in a system on which so many Americans depend for financial survival.

Richard Griffin

I can point to almost the exact spot on Concord Road in Weston, Mass. where, in 1955, my best friend told me devastating news. His message sent me into emotional shock that, for a time, changed the way I looked at my world.

David confided to me that he was about to leave the Jesuit community in which he and I had lived for the previous six years. We had both entered the novitiate on the same day─August 14, 1949─taking on the challenge of a life marked by austerity and separation from our families and from all worldly activities.

It did not take long for me to recognize David as the most stimulating young intellectual I had ever known. At age 19, he already displayed a dazzling range of knowledge, especially in literature and the arts. For our vow day, an event that marked our formal entrance into the Jesuit order, he wrote me a poem that showed both rare literary skill and spiritual insight.

Intellectual that he was, David also cared deeply about the spiritual life, and would make it his task to integrate the two spheres. In both, he strove passionately for  excellence.

During those years of early adulthood, I benefited from my friendship with David, learning from conversation with him about issues that arose from our studies and our contacts with visiting Jesuit scholars. Thanks in part to him, I enjoyed a vibrant intellectual life that balanced some of the austerity of our monastic existence.

With typical passion and lucidity, David detailed for me on that day in 1955          the reasons why he was leaving the Jesuit society. Chief among them was a conviction that he could not pursue the intellectual life under the burden of a narrow orthodoxy that had become the norm for American Jesuits at that time. He spoke of one of our Jesuit professors of English, a disappointed old man whose early promise had never matured. David dreaded finding himself in the same situation.

He never did. After he left the Jesuits, his scholarly career was brilliant, marked by excellence in both teaching and publication. He was also known to be a kind and generous colleague and mentor.

The great gift of his life was his family. A happy marriage, three children, and more recently two grandchildren, broadened his outlook and enriched his personality in ways that he would not have foreseen as a young man.

Last month, David died, a few months short of his 75th birthday. Death came to him in a hotel room in Lisbon where he and his wife were vacationing. At first, the news seemed unbelievable to me; I had visited him in Villanova only a few weeks before, at which time he seemed to have no notable physical problems.

Losing friends to death has become a significant part of my growing older. One after another they have died, classmates and others who I thought would be mourning me, rather than me them. With reluctance, I have learned to look death in the face as people who are dear to me leave this world.

As I stood before David’s body, just before his funeral, our 56-year history of friendship came flooding over me. In particular I gave thanks for that last visit in which we and our wives had rejoiced at coming together again. As usual, conversation with one another flowed fast, with David setting its pace.

Before leaving, I assured David that we would not allow a long time to elapse before getting together again. That was a promise death would not allow us to keep.

At his funeral, a eulogy was offered by one of his colleagues from the English department at the University of Pennsylvania. Admiringly, he applied to David what the poet Tennyson once wrote: “He wore all that weight of learning lightly.”

The colleague also recalled the electric quality of David’s conversation. A particular phrase, delivered rapidly, struck me and those others who knew him well as typical of the man: “You understand what I’m saying.”

We could all assent to the English professor’s conclusion: “Truly, we will not see the likes of David again.”

The Catholic funeral liturgy gave expression to the faith that my friend continues to live, in a transformation that we can imagine only with difficulty. For myself, I have never been able to believe that death brings a definitive end to human existence. Like that of every other human being whom I have known and loved, David’s life was too rich ever to cease entirely.

Seeing a friend dead continues to be a sobering experience, of course. But I do not consider it to be the end. The older I become, the more I want to believe in life ongoing beyond death. But just because I want to believe it does not make it untrue.

I am waiting and hoping to be surprised.

Richard Griffin