A prayer for the newly retired

By Kent S. Collins

After the retirement party, the gold watch presentation and the office packing, go home and pray. Pray to the god you believe in, or maybe just to the sky, and say something like this:

Grant me the integrity not to squander this precious freedom that comes to me with retirement. Man and woman haven't had freedom with pay before. I have it. With the privilege to speak, to shout, to come and go, to fight, to work, to dream, to do --- all without jeopardy to my pension or my freedom. I pray that I can comprehend what this unprecedented gift means. I pray that I can use this gift to make at least one square foot of this world better.

Grant me the physical powers --- the hormones, the glands, the spirit or whatever it is --- to fight off the laziness that comes with this freedom. Grant me this, that I may kick the narcotic of security.

Grant me the understanding to smile at the youngsters who move in to take over the job or career I have mastered so long. They work desperately for success --- and the money and glory that success brings. So, no less, did I. Guide me to toleration of the indifference or scorn they have for someone who went before them. Quiet my stomach as it rebels against the affronts to my dignity, my achievements, my efforts in my work that now seem to be cast aside.

Grant me the realization that goodness, if I am ever to achieve it, must come now. It isn't later than I think. At retirement age, I still have some potent years to be good. Help me to discard the shadowy techniques I have employed to mold my career and keep my job, to give up striving at somebody else's cost, to end the envy, the distrust, the vanity, the bitterness, the hate. I pray that these ugly things that can add nothing to retirement be cast from me.

Grant me the curiosity to investigate at this late time the great religions of the world. Surely there is more to them than the ritual, more than the thunder, more than the mysteries of the Great Beyond, more than a swap of asphalt for Streets of Gold. What? Surely the religions that have served mankind so long have something more meaningful than all this, more important than being usher next Sunday or being elected to the board of deacons. What? Grant me the curiosity to find out.

Grant me, I implore you, the power to believe. In my retirement years it isn't sufficient that I believe in the stability of the U.S. dollar, the survival of the insurance company that issues my pension check and the price of cabbage at the grocery store. I need something more. And I would ask that I be able to walk out on my front porch on an afternoon when the sun is setting, to mull for a bit over the great issues of mankind.

Grant me what I have asked here. I can't promise in return to paint a picture on the ceiling of a church chapel, or lie under a tomb in Westminster, or be cause for a presidential library in an American small town. But I will do something. I will have the stuff to make a payback. Amen.

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Copyright 2002
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