It’s February and all the pretty white stuff on the ground keeps me inside and liable to reflect. I’m well past ninety-four years of life and I’m living with sixty-odd brother Jesuits whose ages  are scattered over the eighties and seventies, two decides that I’ve already gone through.

Being kept inside means ruminating about , well, things. So, first, I find that time goes faster than it used to, and  I go slower than I  used to. I also find that “everything is changing” is barely half-true because  I learned long ago first in French: “The more the things change, the more they are the same.”  

Still, outside me nothing is like it was when phones had wires and  operators, when we had to check car tires constantly, when a big box was the new radio, and the only “screens” we had were those in the windows with flies stuck on them. We still have phones, cars, and windows—different, but the same.

Then, my nineties find me resting in the sense that my self is not separate the way stars are separate but my self is just one of many, united with all the other selves around me the way the night sky has a gazillion individual stars but is somehow  all one thing. As I got up to my nineties, we has replaced me,  and loneliness has lessened until it has practically disappeared.

But not every development has been to ward communion. There are those days—not few though not many except when they are happening—when I feel like there is something in my head that ought not be there, when I feel like a dry drunk must feel, just all entirely out of sorts and living as one big wish that it would get over with. I understand suicides though I have never thought to join them. 

I think I have learned to cherish the differences among us. After all, we are made like God, and in God, there are three Persons, who are truly one unendingly conscious God, but simultaneously entirely separate Persons who are utterly distinct in their Selves. I see more clearly in my nineties that that’s how it is with us. The more I appreciated how different I am, how utterly individual, the more I appreciated how alike we are. Together.

But life is not thinking, it is a splendid interweaving of thinking, feeling, and doing,  every day, all through the years.  So as the years passed and I reached the nineties, I had grown in the awareness that much of what happened in my life is what I decided would happen –but most of what happened had been  way beyond my deciding.  In all  human thinking, feeling, and doing, God our Creator is much more active than ever we could be, more intimate to me than I am to myself (as Augustine said, in Latin), and God is  doing that out of and for love.

And as for decisions, I learned the hard way what the pope put in his easy way: “there is often a small price to be paid in solitude, but steps shared are steps that are safe, gradual, irreversible.”  I learned to talk with close friends about decisions. We were not given the gift of language to sit silent . Or to create atomic bombs.  We are given the gift of language to learn to love one another more and more deeply and to love growing together even in talk.

As this was going on, oddly, solitude changed from something like a drink of water to a drink of scotch and soda.  Being alone is not thin  any more but  thick. And as I began looking toward death, I have grown deeper in the sense that my self is the same as it was when I was wearing diapers and set about learning how to be me. It’s a grace to feel that the more I become me, the more I am the same me  as I was before all the schooling and practices and experiences.

Then I had to learn to be easy in the thought that my self is  now as eternal as God is because before I had anything to do with it, I had had been baptized into the Mystical Body of Christ , which exists in time and beyond time, forever. One beautiful grace attached to that is the recognition that I’m not responsible to get this e done. It’s been given to me, day after day and steadily, whether I was thinking about it or not. I am going to live forever with all the saints in the Presence of God.

Meanwhile, growing old  has  been the gift of outgrowing self-centeredness, egotism, being afraid of what others know about me,  enjoying radiant friendships, and being afraid that I am who I am. I did a lot of sinning as I weaved through the decades into the nineties, with  a sinfulness that seemed in earlier decades the most significant thing about my self. But now, my sins seem to have less to do with me and much more to do with God—who has most mercifully and graciously let me know that He does not consider these affronts to His holiness anything t to get stuck between us or anything that will keep us from being together all through this day and all the tomorrows to come.

Tomorrow is not something I need to feel concern about. It’s not that there’s nothing I can do about it but it’s rather that it’s been all along a tomorrow  that has rested in God’s hands and will bring to me and in me what God decides to put there.   

A humbling truth is that it takes less of everything to keep me going in the nineties: less food, less fuss, less action,  less thinking, much less being important. And the sum total of all my experience is that I have learned to appreciate what a  four-letter word puts as rest. Life comes to rest. I am the same as all the rest. My time has been wonderful and the rest promises to be even better.

AS for this rest of what s to come to us, we need to be clear that we are not going anywhere. This is home. We are of this earth and we belong here.  Jesus said it: (Matt.24:44) “So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him., He’ll come, here  to the earth,  with His angels—maybe those same angels who have been guarding our  life on earth through all these years. Like everything else God  makes, they are friendly. Amen.