RBWords - Volume 21 - Number 1: January 2008
Something to Think About
The beginning of a new volume of RBWORDS is always a reminder to me of the passage of time. I wrote the first edition in January of nineteen eighty-eight. Another reminder to me of the passage of time is the fact that I will celebrate my sixty-fifth birthday this February. I\'ve had to register for Medicare and a prescription benefit program! That requirement caught me off guard when I was reminded to take care of it not long ago by “the powers that be.” Somehow I thought that sort of thing was much further down the line for me! Maybe I thought aging was something that happened to “the elderly.” Perhaps my continual association with college students insulated me from thinking about the fact that time passes for me as well as for them!
Still another reminder of the passage of time is an annual thing that makes the round of e-mail that gives a humorous profile of the freshmen entering college. Many of the lines begin with: “They have never had to....” or “They have no knowledge of......” or “They\'ve never lived without...” Friends gave me a copy of Tom Brokaw\'s book, BOOM – VOICES OF THE SIXTIES. Those interviews with folks from the years after the assassination of JFK, folk music (hootnannies?) and Vietnam War and Watergate brought so much of my own history back to me. Is it really forty years since the Second Vatican Council? Sigh!
Last but not least, I recognize that many things that I once lived quite well without I now cannot live well without – microwave, computer, cell phone! How did I manage before........? A line from one of Oscar Wilde\'s plays goes: “Memory is the diary we carry around with us.” My diary has gotten large and continues to grow. With God\'s help and your continued prayers, this particular edition of the diary will continue to grow for years to come. IT\'S SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT.
It Has Been Said
IT HAS BEEN SAID: “God calls us throughout our life to severe grace, the grace of the cocoon. We are called to separate from the old, to die in order to be born. If we open ourselves to this severe grace, we encounter God in new places: in the cyclone, in the dark, in the crisis that shatters our old confining consciousness. It is this severity that makes us new.”
from FIRSTLIGHT by Sue Monk Kidd