Three Score Years and Ten

Australians born a century ago could expect to live to a little over fifty years on average; now our average life length is 83 years (even older for women). The evidence is all around us in society: pretty well everyone in our affluent world is living way beyond the nominal “three score years and ten” suggested in Psalms and Shakespeare. Our readings this week focus us on the reality that we will all die, though it seems some people conveniently forget that.

Reflecting for a moment, we realise our lives are but an infinitesimal blip in time and space, so the issue is what we do with our little lives, how we impact the world and how prepared we are for our brief time to end. Both Luke (Luke 12:13-21) and Ecclesiastes (Ecclesiastes 1:2,2:21-23) remind us of the foolishness of accruing power and property, to be left behind when we die, instead of heavenly things (Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11) which we take with us to glory in Christ.

Earlier this year my closest friend was there one moment and gone the next. Indeed, for all our average longevity, we know not the day nor the hour and so, whatever we hope of our merciful Creator, we don’t want to be found, when death comes, to have wasted our lives. 

In our human frailty, we must strive to live authentically in the world, putting behind us greed, evil desires, lies and so forth and instead bravely working in a Christ-like manner: open, loving, rejecting prejudices and biases among our brothers and sisters and calling-out causes of violence, marginalisation, discrimination and poverty. We make our goals “the spirituality of awareness, of choice, of risk, of transformation ….  the embrace of life, the pursuit of wholeness, the acceptance of others, the call to co-creation.” (Sr Joan Chittister, The Time is Now p16)

Deacon Mark Kelly