I owe thanks to the many well-wishers who have sent prayers and good wishes on the occasion of my recent birthday—so many, in fact, that I know I won’t be able to respond to all of them individually. I hope they will accept this as some indication of my gratitude.

Birthdays have long been for me a time to look back and look forward. I never could quite make New Year’s Day work that way for me—too many distractions. This otherwise ordinary day in October does the job better.

I look back with gratitude. I have done plenty of stumbling about in my life and sometimes think that I have done most of my learning by making mistakes. And since I have a good memory for my mistakes, I have had years of opportunity to regret them. But what stands out for me is the grace of God that has again and again managed to get through to me, shift my course, prompt new insight, and revive hope. It has come through friends, through the worship of the church, through music and poetry, through the garden, and through those inexplicable moments when the world becomes new and richer for no apparent reason other than grace itself. Not least, I have received the extraordinary gift of spending a lifetime in the study of the Scriptures, which continue to unfold for me unsuspected depths of meaning and encouragement.

Seventy-five years sound like a great many, and I have been alternating, this birthday, between feeling quite old and not feeling old at all. For one thing, voice lessons, which I started again recently after a forty-year lapse, are giving me new energy. I can once again sing notes that I thought were long gone. (In fact, my teacher keeps telling me I’m really a tenor, not a baritone.) The body is beginning to relearn singing skills it had lost and to develop new ones. So seventy five feels new as well as old.

The world around me, however, sometimes seems to have found new ways of making itself wretched. Not that World War II, which I barely remember, or the Cold War of my childhood was a particularly good period. In the present, however, we have unpredictable outbreaks of violence and suffering in the Near East and other parts of the world, seemingly incurable ill treatment of minority groups in the US, and the flaunting of greed combined with the shortchanging of workers that have taken over the business world. The most distressing thing thing in recent months may be the upsurge of vague resentment, manifest in the Brexit, the Trump campaign, the Putin regime and a hundred other forms. Some of this has its roots in real losses; but much of it is a pose, a mere self-indulgence of the cantankerous. What to make of an increasingly and (often) pointlessly embittered world?

And so my prayers for the world at this point are for a renewal of humility, trust, hope, and love and, for myself, the things that we all hope for on a birthday: health for me and for friends and loved ones and the continuing joys of fulfilling work and for those moments of surprise and renewal that only grace can provide.

Many thanks!