Age is just a number...or is it?

Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, Friday, 19th June, 2020

I have seen the faces of parents to whom a child has just been born. The sheer joy and thrill, the outpouring of love from every fibre of their being was ever so uplifting, so invigorating, so life affirming that one could not but be carried along with it. I have been with a Mother when her child has been still born and I have seen the devastation, the heart break, the surge of grief. I have been with those who have just had a child born with a physical or mental abnormality and seen the double struggle of joy and delight with the anxiety and perplexity, yet in all cases with love.

In many of the above cases I have been a part of their life in a minor way and followed the path of those children. Joy and heartache, delight and anxiety, rejoicing and fear as the children grew to be teenagers and adults. All the daily happenings and realities from bullying at school to struggling with academics yet making and enjoying friends. The problems of addiction and distraction in to ways and relationships the parents find hard to condone or accept yet also celebrations of all sorts of milestones and achievements. Universities, careers, marriages: all with the usual ups and downs of living.

Then I have seen the children become parents not only to their own children but also, as it were, to their parents suffering cancer, dementia, loss even divorce and senility.

Today I reach the biblical life span of 3 score years and 10. My parents are dead as is a beloved brother . Do I celebrate or bemoan this day? Personally I am so grateful for it...my ups have been high, my downs have been deep but I have relished it all. Of course there have been days when I have cursed the day of my birth yet days of ecstatic gratitude for it also. This is life and the old cliche nudges me....you only have one.

I am particularly pleased that it is also Juneteenth day and also the feast day of the Sacred Heart. It is the heart that counts. My heart has been touched by all my joy filled memories and by the kindness of those who have remembered it with me.

So I am 70: now to be outrageous and live more exuberantly and abundantly. In fact I might actually relish being a curmudgeonly 'old fart'!