76!

 

Another birthday!  

I'm now 76!!! 

At this particular point on life's trajectory, one has obviously only a very limited number of birthdays left. So it behooves one to cherish every one of them. After all, as Saint Augustine wrote in one of his letters:

As you look ahead in life you begin to realize that all of us are going to die someday. In your infancy you look forward to being a child. When you are a child you look forward to being a teenager. As a teen you look forward to being a young adult. In your days of young adulthood you look forward to being middle-aged. When you reach middle-age you look forward to old age. But when you finally get old you realize that there is nothing more to look forward to in this life. There is no age after old age (Ep. 213, 1).

That said, on one's 76th birthday one ought above all to be grateful - and certainly I am genuinely grateful -  for having lived this long, indeed for having lived at all, and for having lived so well, such an interesting, fulfilling, and in at least certain respects privileged life in this remarkable period of human history. I am grateful too to all those who have been a part of my life - living still or already dead - my parents and sisters and other family, friends and colleagues past and present, fellow Clergy and Religious, former parishioners in the places where I have been fortunate to serve. As Saint Augustine also said:

Signs of love coming from the hearts of friends shine through eyes and mouth and speech and thousands of gestures. They make one out of many, bringing hearts together like bundled kindling. (Confessions 4.18.13)

What a wonderfully uniquely complex journey it has been - and still continues to be!