Dear Elliot:

I am writing in celebration of your 100th birthday.  To me this anniversary of yours comes as a truly marvelous event. Only one American in 10,000 lives as long as you have. I thank God for having given you this gift of such rare longevity.

That you are now living in Florida, so far from here, frustrates me because I cannot be with you for the occasion. It would be a joy to talk with you face to face about your life at this milestone. Looking back on our conversations when you lived nearby, I relish your recollections of family members and friends we both knew.

You were my father’s best friend, a relationship that still means much to me even though he died almost 50 years ago. At his death in New York City, you were with him, something that served as a consolation to us, his family. He admired you not only as a friend but as a fellow journalist with high professional and personal standards.

One of the benefits that comes with your long life span is that your work as drama critic continues to be recognized and honored. People realize that your reviewing of more than 6,000 plays, along with your teaching and television broadcasting, make a unique record of achievement.

I hope that the annual awards given in your name make you feel rewarded for your many years of hard work. Much to my own satisfaction, a recent book entitled “Eminent Bostonians” includes a chapter about you.

However, knowing you as a person for whom spirituality has always been vitally important, I suspect you do not place ultimate value on the world’s honors. Rather, I have reason to judge that your relationship with God and the interior life are more significant to you than any recognition from others.

I also suspect that your prayer life looms as even more important now than before. Perhaps your later years have brought you spiritual consolations like those of some people in the Bible.

In the Gospel of Luke, Simeon and Anna, two old people, appear when the child Jesus is presented in the temple. Simeon took the child in his arms and thanked God saying  “now you dismiss your servant in peace.” For him, it was the fulfillment of a promise and a moment of spiritual joy.

And the prophet Anna, 84 years old, also praised God for her encounter with the child. For her, too, it was the fulfillment of a lifetime, seeing the child  who was to redeem his people.

Here the Bible presents old age as a time of fulfillment, a stage of life when spirituality can reach its full flowering. Anna and Simeon serve as a model for late life and the rewards it can bring.

However, I know it is a mistake to think of old age as simply a time when good things happen to good people. Realistically, it cannot be easy to be 100 years old. Almost everyone who has reached this milestone has experienced serious physical problems along the way.

I remember you telling me about finding it hard to have lost most of your eyesight. For a man to whom reading was a favorite activity, it is surely a trial not to be able to pick up a book now or to read the newspapers that formed your daily diet at work.

Even more difficult, living with loss of people dear to you is another trial of old age. You have shared with me how you feel about the loss of your dear wife and the deprivation of living without her. No one can take her place, a situation that you have had to live with for several years.

Despite the hardships that come with 100 years of living, however, your birthday is a day of celebration. Members of your family and your legion of friends feel joy at this rare anniversary of yours. Some of the friends are looking forward to an event in your honor tomorrow evening when awards will be given in your name.

I thank God for the gifts that have brought you this far and I pray that you may receive abundant blessings on this occasion.

Richard Griffin