Only once do I remember meeting John Updike. It happened at a party on the North Shore, hosted by another man of letters and featuring a crowd of other folks interested in the literary world.

On that occasion, I was impressed not only by Updike’s finely-shaped and prominent nose, but by his geniality and the pleasure he took in conversation. What his editors and other colleagues are writing about him after his death makes me regret not having been otherwise acquainted.

Perhaps, however, that would have exposed me to danger. According to report, some residents of the towns in which Updike lived were wary of ending up in unflattering situations within his short stories or novels.

Many of his values resonate in me. Among the sentiments he has left behind, I especially value what he once said about religion. “Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and to get on with the jobs of life.”

This statement feels a bit too hard-headed for my taste, but it does serve to counteract the nowadays fashionable rejection of religious world views.

I like better his view of atheism. In his 1989 memoir he wrote (not altogether felicitously): “Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity .  .  . of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?”

He even liked going to church. In fact, he told someone that part of his reason for moving to the suburbs was the freedom to attend church without being considered weird.

About this experience he told an audience: “It’s not just the words, the sacraments. It’s the company of other people, and who show up and pledge themselves to an invisible entity.”

As a regular churchgoer myself, I feel some of these same sentiments. I welcome the chance to worship with people who vary in age, income, social status, and ethnic heritage. And the liturgy that we join in gives me a sense of poetry and of ritual that makes life richer.

Rivaling his enthusiasm for religion was Updike’s relish for sex. My mother and other mentors of my growing-up years would have been shocked to see me, even much later on, reading novels such as “Couples” and “A Month of Sundays,” to mention only two of his sex-filled works.

These writings are so explicit about sexual activity that, for us of sheltered upbringing, they retain their power to amaze and shock. John Updike believed in sex, it seems, the way he believed in God.

At times, like some of his critics, I have found Updike’s writings altogether too clever. Often he seemed bent on displaying his pyrotechnic linguistic abilities to an extreme. It was as if he wanted to dazzle readers with a manipulation of words that no other author could equal.

But his colleagues and friends testify to his diffidence about his own work. In the current issue of the New Yorker, one of his editors, Adam Gopnik, tells of Updike mailing in stories to the magazine accompanied by a letter commenting on each piece’s inadequacies. During his nearly 60 years of writing for this publication, successive editors would grow accustomed to these superfluous  cautions.

Given the high quality of his work, these warnings took on a certain charm. But Updike seems to have believed what he said, even though generally he thought well of his own work.

Among his literary efforts, he apparently loved poetry best. Though his reputation does not rest on his poetic works, he seems to have enjoyed writing them ─ more than the novels, short stories, and criticism for which he will be remembered most.

Even those of us not close to him will miss seeing his face. It was a cartoonist’s delight, long rather than round, and highlighting a memorable nose. He smiled frequently, displaying broadly somewhat jagged teeth.

Those who remembered his early book-jacket photos were struck by the creased face of the older Updike, crowned with a thatch of white hair.

As he aged, he did not make any claims for having arrived at wisdom. Among his statements on the subject, he said: “Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.” This utterance strikes me as a bit too modest, however, for a man of such human range.

At a recent lunch with students and older people interested in the arts, I proposed that we raise a glass in honor of John Updike. That’s what we did, even though we had to settle, at the time, for water and cider.

A more substantive memorial to the writer would be to read or read again some of his writing. That is the way I plan to celebrate the life and work of one of our country’s most memorable writers.

Richard Griffin