These memorable words said of Jesus by the forerunner John the Baptist contain the very germ of love. To be able to stand aside and watch someone you have helped take the stage is a great privilege as well as a joy. Your work has been completed, and now you can watch the career of your charge with well-deserved pride, an emotion not to be deprecated if it is lightened with humble thanksgiving to God that you were chosen to help in his or her development. But in the Baptist's statement there is something else added: an acknowledgement of his own diminishment as he fades into the background of events, while all attention is fixed on the spiritual prodigy.

The greatest love, as Jesus says in John 15.13, is the supreme sacrifice of laying down one's life for one's friends. In fact, death is considerably easier than the slow giving up of one's possessions, so that one moves from power and worldly importance into the shadows of oblivion, there to find a final rest with the lame and the blind, the dispossessed and the discarded of the human race. And yet, strangely enough, there is a peace among the derelict that the rich and important of the world lack, of which they know nothing. So it is also at the end of the day, when the shadows of night fall and all our plans and hopes are extinguished in the comforting oblivion of innocent sleep. Sleep always brings us back to our childhood innocence, even when our daytime activities have been far from exemplary.

The drama of John the Baptist and Jesus is repeated in the lives of all caring parents. They give up their comfort, financial security and emotional stability in the cause of their children's welfare. The children grow through the glorious innocence of early childhood to the boisterous inconsideration of adolescence and the self-centred strivings of adult life, which culminate in the rearing of their own family, as the cycle is repeated through the generations. The parent, at least in the mode of life of most developed countries, is something of a burden on the adult offspring, useful for caring for the very young when called upon. A cynic would also mention the final will and testament.

Any real parent, however, would laugh at this sad history, despite its factual accuracy. The joy of procreation, the supreme creative act of all living forms but invested with a special glory in the birth of a human soul, lies in the sharing of life, the participation in the growth and development of that soul to a full adult stature, and the movement out from the limited security of self-concern to involvement in something outside oneself where one can give of one's essence without reservation. One is indeed most fully oneself when one has laid aside one's self-image in burning service for one's neighbour. Whatever the future may hold, one has a stake in the life of that person, a concern that will far outlast the present time and endure until all is consummated in God.

And so the Baptist's name is eternally linked with that of Jesus; he played an essential role in preparing Jesus for his ministry by providing the baptism of repentance whereby he fully identified himself with the people he was to serve. Later, John's type of baptism was to be replaced by the more perfect baptism in the Holy Spirit of Jesus and his successors. We all have to learn that love knows when to relinquish no less certainly than when to nurture and protect. This test of humility comes to those in charge of religious communities no less than to powerful executives in the world of secular affairs. This humility becomes a humiliation only if we do not accept retirement gracefully and cannot avoid meddling in affairs that are no longer our business. But there is one consolation: a person grows more in stature for the life ahead when there is time for submission in humility, than when all revolves around his or her direction.

Give me the grace, Lord, to stand down when the time is right, and unfailingly to support my successor in personal encouragement, loyal service and constant prayer.