Life has come full circle for Fr. Gil Wohler, who serves as a chaplain for senior citizens at the same place where he once worked as spiritual director for a school full of teen-agers. Back in the 1960s at St. Francis High School Seminary in Cincinnati, Gil taught Latin, History and Civics to “young guys who kept you alive and on the ball.” Now that same building is a retirement community where Gil lives and ministers, celebrating daily Mass, serving as confidante and confessor. “They were both great assignments,” he says, “but this is by far the best assignment I’ve ever had. Being here, we’re all in the same boat, and for most of us we realize this is our final stop on the journey. Being in this situation you look at life much more the way it should be looked at,” with non-judgmental acceptance. Throughout Gil’s journey as a friar, fulfillment has come from “being with the people” as a teacher and a vocation director, as a parish priest in Peoria and Cincinnati and as a missionary in South Africa. “I think I went to Africa because I was getting too comfortable here” in America, says Gil, who saw the society evolve beyond apartheid and celebrated its demise along with the rest of the world. The slower pace of his current ministry “gives me a chance to get to know some of the people really well. They teach us an awful lot about how to die – and how to live.”