A recent birthday has given me cause to reflect upon the mystery of life, and in doing so I have remembered birthdays that were ‘significant’ for me. My list does not include the childhood ones that were exciting because they included presents and cake. As for the ‘rite of passage’ ones, my 16th was special only because it entitled me to become a Licenced driver. Beyond that, only two birthdays have really made me feel older.

My thirtieth was one of those. For the first time, I realised I was no longer ‘young’ and hence no longer what every parish seemed to crave in those days, “a nice young priest who will be good with young people and will revitalize the Sunday School and the Youth Group”. Well, even before thirty I was not able to turn back the pages of time! But the birthday did tell me it was time I grew up and started acting my age. My dad used to tell me that when I was misbehaving as a child … “Act your age!”. Well, isn’t that what I was doing? I was a child! But what Dad meant was, “Act older than your age”, and that’s what my 30th birthday told me too.

Ah, but now about my second ‘significant’ birthday … a month ago, I turned eighty.

‘Eighty’ didn’t sneak up on me the way ‘Thirty’ did. I saw it coming because I remember Psalm 90: 10 that states, “The days of our age are threescore years and ten, or, if men be so strong, they may come to fourscore years”.

So, the birthday sounded to me like the Train Conductor who walks through the car announcing “Next Station Eighty! End of the line! All passengers must detrain”!

Yes, upon my arrival at ‘Eighty’ I abruptly became what I never imagined myself being … an octogenarian and therefore a target for all the cliches and elder slurs even I had often used so insensitively. Suddenly it could be said of me that I had attained a man’s full life expectancy, that I had exceeded my ‘Best Before’ date and was past my prime, over the hill, a fossil, an old duffer, an old geezer, an old … well, let’s not belabour it any further. You get the picture.

That fragment of wisdom from Psalm 90 is a double-edged sword. It tells me I have been blessed to the maximum. I cannot disagree with that. But it also implies quite clearly that I am not entitled to anything more. Well, I think I knew that too. Yet by now an entire month of days has accumulated since my birthday, so for some inexplicable reason it seems I am still being blessed even beyond the limit, that I am the beneficiary of some additional time even though I am not entitled to it. That awareness is the spur that is making me reflect on the elusive and perplexing mystery: the meaning of life.

One of the things that has taken me quite by surprise now that I am old is that I don’t have the slightest desire to be young again. That is strange because perpetual youth has always been touted as such a treasure. My grandmother always chided me about ‘wishing my life away’, hankering to have the same privileges and prerogatives my older sister had. She told me to enjoy being young because it wouldn’t last. And she was right. Then in school I learned about the Spanish conquistadores who waded about in full armour in the alligator-infested Florida everglades searching for a Fountain of Youth. I also have a vague recollection of an old movie in which a man makes a pact with the devil, his soul in exchange for his youth restored. And even now, I am aware that scientists are intent upon increasing human life expectancies significantly by counteracting the natural aging process.

But I don’t want to be a hundred and fifty years old!!!

I am already far behind in the struggle to keep up with the avalanche of ever accelerating change. The eight-year-old car I am driving now already has more computerized gadgets than I can understand or use, so enough already! And please stop trying to disengage the aging process. It has been a blessing. It has enabled me … well, all of us … to mature from one phase of life to another without being trapped forever as young and naïve parents, or as fathers and mothers of teenagers, or even as young priests who, instead of accumulating fifty years of experience would only be able to achieve one year of experience repeated fifty times.

Please understand that I do not relish the prospect of dying. But it has some advantages. For one thing, there are fewer and fewer people still alive who can remember the dumb things I said and did when I was young and foolish. There were some such things, but please forget I mentioned it. It won’t help you to know of them, and I would prefer you don’t.

But perhaps most of all, the prospect of facing the final curtain has reminded me that life as we know it in this mortal flesh is precious precisely because it is fleeting. There is a wonderful intensity about it precisely because it is everything we have. Losing it is not a merely relative misfortune like surviving a dip in the Stock Market. Life matters supremely! It counts! It’s worth dying for!

One of my favorite movies is ‘The Legend of 1900’, about an abandoned child that was found by a stoker in the boiler room of an ocean liner on New Year’s Day of 1900. The stoker named him ‘1900’ and raised him as his own. Having no nationality, 1900 spent his entire life aboard ship, repeatedly criss-crossing the Atlantic without ever setting foot on land. Yet he lived a full life, even becoming an astonishing piano virtuoso. Only once did 1900 have an opportunity to disembark for a tour of New York city. As he ventured hesitantly down the gangway, encouraged by his friends, he gazed with bewilderment at the prospect of a life with no constraints, where roads go on for ever and where cities expand without limit, and he found it devoid of meaning or appeal. So, he turned and made his way back up the gangway to his life that was defined by boundaries.

I believe that movie was based on true-life events, but even if not, it conveys the profound message. Life is precious because it will not last forever.

I know what I have just said seems to contradict our Christian hope of everlasting life, but I have not meant to do so. I have been speaking only about what we know of life in this space/time continuum, and we cannot even imagine anything other than that. When my time comes to die, I do want to do so as our burial liturgy says, “in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ”, and I have every confidence new vistas will open for us to know.
Dale