Last month I became an octogenarian. I threw a big party to celebrate my 80th year and my fifty -plus years of ministry in this community. About 80 people gathered in my home on that Sunday afternoon to party with me. It was wonderful!
“It seems as though we homo sapiens are possessed by a compulsion to complain,” my friend George Prettyman at the age of 79 wrote in his 1991 newspaper column. “The weather, for one thing. The price of groceries…or gasoline…or fish…whatever. And if there’s nothing better to fuss about, we gripe about having recorded a number of years on our lifometer. Yes, we complain about getting older when it ought to be obvious that the alternative is pretty grim.”
The one thing I fear in this new chapter of life is not that grim alternative which will come eventually. What I fear most is becoming a “grumpy old man!” I don’t want to be a person who always sees the glass as half empty. I don’t want to sit on my duff and complain about the world situation or about the degeneration of the new generation of youth. I don’t want to dwell on the “Yesterday when I was young” as some kind of idyllic time. It wasn’t! In spite of some creaks in my joints, and some “forgetfulness,” I don’t want to harp on that kind of thing either. Nor, do I want to be a person who goes around saying “Jesus will take care of everything” and ignore reality and my own personal responsibility to make a difference.
Let’s party! We’ve been invited. We’re wanted at this party—a “Pourer of New Wine” will be there. Those of us who come to this grace-party will be inebriated—“sanely intoxicated” (as Keating wrote). We will be drinking the wine of a new and heightened life. That’s what I want in my eightieth year—“a new and heightened life!” It can be so, I am told, if I go to the party.
