Word to the Wise
Monday, March 31, 2014 - 4th Week of Lent - Mon
[Isa 65:17-21 and John 4:43-54]I will rejoice in Jerusalem and exult in my people. No longer shall the sound of weeping be heard there, or the sound of crying; no longer shall there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not round out his full lifetime; he dies a mere youth who reaches but a hundred years and he who fails of a hundred shall be thought accursed. [Isaiah]
I was once preaching a retreat to some very elderly Dominican sisters and this passage from Isaiah was the first scripture at one of the Masses. They all began to chuckle at the thought of living to a hundred and dying "a mere youth." Isaiah is trying to console the returning exiles from Babylon as they labor to restore what they had left seventy years before. Many of them had been born in Babylon, given the fact that the average life expectancy would have been considerably less than 100! It was probably less than 50! One of the psalms says rather optimistically, "Our span is seventy years, or eighty for those who are strong!" Jesus would have been considered almost middle-aged in his early thirties!
Friends of mine who were undergraduate students when I met them are now confronting the aging of their parents, as well as their own as they see their own children grow up and start families. I am confronting my own aging. At 71 I am aware that I cannot "do as much" as I could even five years ago and so I "cut back" on the number of commitments. (Yeah, yeah! I can hear the chuckles now!)
Lent is a good time to reflect on hopes and dreams both realized and unrealized. Counting blessings and remembering stories brings both tears and smiles. In those parishes where the cemetery is next to the church, I walk there in the mornings and imagine the stories of generations, particularly when it is clear the deceased was a child. There was sorrow at one time when illnesses that are easily treated now were common killers then. Each family has its stories and blessings (and curses) to tell. Isaiah and Lent invite the telling! AMEN