I SHOULD’VE BEEN A BISHOP

Now that I am past the age when a bishop, according to the laws of the Church, has to retire, I can reflect back and assert that I should have been a bishop. You rightly ask, challenging my chutzpah in such an assertion, “Why do you say that?” My answer is quite simple: people have always said that I look good in purple.

Using that same logic I can also assert that I also should have played first base for the Pittsburgh Pirates because I love both baseball and the Pirates. Or, I should have been a published and famous novelist because I love to read. I could go on with all the “would’ve, could’ve, should’ve” assertions, as each one of us could and, perhaps in our reveries, actually do. In doing so the honest truth is that we almost always, if not always, think we would have been the best at whatever it is we believed we should have been.

The real truth is that the past is past and what is important is that I am what I have become. And I have become what I am not because I should have been what I never became but because of the choices I made all along the way. The same is true for each one of us. Thus, when we look back on our lives, no matter how old or even how young we are, we need to ask ourselves if we are happy and satisfied with who we are at this moment in time.

If we are not, then we need to do something about it and not simply wish it were otherwise or lament that somehow we have gotten the short end of the stick because of circumstances beyond our control. Even if that were true, the question that still remains to be asked is “What am I going to do about it now?” Wallowing in our misery and self-pity only makes matters worse and does nothing to make the future better.

On the other hand, if we are perfectly happy with what we have now become, we cannot be satisfied and rest on our laurels. I may look good in purple and I may – may – have made a good bishop; but, looking back, I would not trade any of my experiences for a purple shirt. As for those other dreams, honesty makes me admit that I was a terrible baseball player and would never want to do the work a professional writer has to do.

The truth, I suspect, is that none of us is “perfectly” happy because our admitted, if only to ourselves, shortcomings remind us that we still have a life to live, that we can be better, and that life will go on until God calls us home. In the meantime we can dream about what might have been or what could have been or even what should have been. There is no harm in that. There may even be much good in such reflecting.

For it is in thinking back on our lives, reflecting on the choices we made, the events, controlled and uncontrolled, that helped steer the course of our lives as they are in the present, that we can learn about how the past will help us make the future what we might want it to become.