73

On retreat in Algeria on Holy Saturday 1950, as the Easter bells were already ringing from Oran's Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, the future Pope Saint John XXIII (at that time, the Apostolic Nuncio to France) wrote in his Journal this passage, from which I quoted in this space when I turned 70 three years ago:  

When one is nearly seventy, one cannot be sure of the future. ... So it is no use nursing any illusions: I must make myself familiar with the thought of the end, not with dismay which saps the will, but with confidence which preserves our enthusiasm for living, working, and serving.  … As for my soul, I shall try to make the flame burn more brightly, making the most of the time that remains as it passes more swiftly away.

Some sober and sensible thoughts to consider on my 73rd birthday today! 

A lot has happened of course, since I first quoted that passage - not least a world-wide pandemic, a catastrophically imminent reminder of mortality, which totally upended my final 10 months as a pastor, forcing me (like everyone else, young or old) to face unique and unexpected challenges and to acquire hitherto unnecessary skills (like live streaming and holding zoom meetings). If old age didn't already activate a certain sensibility about one's life and destiny, the experience of this past year has further forced the issue.

One constant, of course, is the coincidence of my birthday falling on the Solemnity of the Annunciation. The day the Church commemorates the Incarnation, has always given my birthday an added focus. The Incarnation is, after all the mystery at the very center of Christian faith, our otherwise incredible experience of God's option for radical connection with his world. The divine self-communication, the Word of God, has become part of our world, adapting himself to us in a genuinely human historical life - lived, as we humans all must live, in a particular time and place, with all the specificity that requires - in order to be and reveal God's solidarity with us, precisely in our vulnerability. The Incarnation is the sacred centerpiece of God's action, for the sake of which the world itself was created.

There is also a tradition which links this day with the crucifixion as well as with the Incarnation, reflecting, I suppose, a very classical fondness for symmetry. In 2016, when I was only 68, Annunciation and Good Friday fell on the same date, something not scheduled to happen again until 2157. When it happened in 1608, the English poet John Donne wrote: "This Church, by these days join, hath shown Death and conception in mankind is one." (From Upon the Annunciation and Passion Falling upon One Day 1608).

In patristic and medieval tradition, since at least the 3rd century, March 25 - then the date of the vernal equinox in the Julian calendar - was thought to be both the anniversary of the Annunciation, the Incarnation of the Son of God as Son of Mary, and of the Crucifixion. This represented the kind of spiritual and symbolic thinking that our ancient and medieval ancestors so loved and understood. (The traditional Roman Martyrology reflects this in making March 25 the anniversary of the death of "the Good Thief.") However fanciful and historically uncertain, this idea underlines the profound fact that Christ's death completed his mission in the world, overcoming the human race's historical alienation from the God who created us in order to be in solidarity with us. Now, having lived and died in solidarity with us, the Risen Christ, seated forever to intercede for us with his Father, invites us to live now forever solidarity with him.

Meanwhile, the advent of another birthday invites me to reflect more upon my new experience of life in retirement. Coincidentally, I recently read an article by a British priest (Thomas O'Loughlin, of the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton and professor of historical theology at the University of Nottingham), evocatively titled: "Ministry, vocation and life: a reflection on resigning oneself to resignationRecovering our sense of the real difference between life in Christ, vocation and ecclesial function." (To access the actual article, go to:https://international.la-croix.com/news/religion/ministry-vocation-and-life-a-reflection-on-resigning-oneself-to-resignation/14011).

The occasion for O'Loughlin's article is the curious case of Fr. Enzo Bianchi, the charismatic founder of the Italian ecumenical community at Bose, recently forced out by Pope Francis. "A charismatic leader grows old – the effluxion of time – and a new person must take over leadership," O'Loughlin suggests. This and other such cases, he argues,  "should remind Christians of a more fundamental truth. We have always said that we recognized that ministry and vocation within a person's life are distinct, even if often overlapping. But, in fact, we have not really believed it!"

It is this customary conflation of ministry and life under the rubric of "vocation," which contributes to the situation in which one's work is one's life, which is what makes retirement so problematic and even painful for so many. While I don't actually agree with everything O'Loughlin argues in his article, I do agree that, with the contemporary institutionalization of retirement in Church life, we are very "slowly recovering our sense of the real difference between life in Christ, vocation and ecclesial function." He cites the unique example of Pope Benedict's resignation in 2013, whereby "he demonstrated that his own vocation as a human being is distinct from his ecclesial role." He calls this "a far more important demonstration of this forgotten aspect of our theology than if he had written several encyclicals on the presbyterate!" And, while I do worry that papal resignations pose problems for the Church, I see his point. 

On the other hand, we live in an era that drastically devalues lifelong commitments - whether in marriage or religious vocation. And the world and the Church are all poorer because of that. All the more reason, then, for a more nuanced treatment of this issue, one which balances the lifelong character of vocation with cultivating an age-appropriate approach to the ministerial component inherent in one's vocation, an approach that recognizes that vocation is, first and foremost, the call of a person to a life, which includes work but is more than work, a call which perdures regardless of the transient forms the work may take. The practical problem, remains, of course, of discerning anew how to continue living the fullness of one's vocation in increasingly limited circumstances, in a world in which secular society offers only two models, both problematic, the active life entirely all about work and the retired life largely all about unproductive, pointless leisure.