Slipping out of Silence

Yesterday was the last day of classes. Today was the last official day for the teachers. Both slipped away in odd silence. There were a few "see you next years!" and "have a good summers!" but far and away people simply...left.

The end of things ought to be heralded by trumpet blasts, with bangs - not with wimpers. Or rather, not with nothing.

I'm reminded - as no doubt I've written before - of my last day as a college student (the classes I've taken since don't really "qualify" as part of the nineteen [NINETEEN!!!] years of non-stop schooling). The only requirement I had remaining me was my senior thesis.

I finished it the afternoon it was due. I printed it up. I collated it. I walked up to the main school building on campus and, for some reason, didn't take the usual door but the (for me) rarely-to-never used side door. I walked up the unfamiliar stairs. I walked down the deserted corridor, turned about at seeing it from the other side. I knocked on my professor's door out of courtesy, but true to his posted hours, he wasn't in.

So I left the summary report of my nineteen years of schooling in the mailbox on his door.

And I left.

And that was it.

No parties, no parades, no sound of thunderous applause for the years I had put into the system, nothing to mark the end of the only life I'd known. Just...silence.

The end of the school year, now, coming at it from the opposite end as a teacher, is hardly as momentous. I'm concerned about closing grades, about exams, about cleaning my room, about pestering guidance to learn what I'm teaching next year, about making sure I take home valuables, about the jobs I'll have this summer, about remembering to actually do prep work this summer for next year. But still.... There never seems to be closure.

Where are the ending credits? Where is the muted montage, filmed in slow-motion, with many smiling faces and silent laughs and hearty claps upon the back, while some ethereal voice sings the closing song to the accompaniament of a simple acoustic guitar? Where, in fact, is the single face long-desired who opens wide His arms and says, "Well done."

I suppose I feel the lack of endings because I'm constantly expecting the ending. Not morbidly, by any means. But expectantly. Impatiently. Perhaps this is why God so often keeps Himself hidden in earthly things: were we to glimpse Him, we should never desire Him to hide again. Were we to visit His perfected earth, we should find little pleasure in the corruptions of this once-Eden. No wonder so many mystics felt so distant from God at the end of their lives - besides being so close to His cross, they could not see Him - they had glimpsed our God and found anything less than absolute communion to be despised.

But God doesn't desire us to despise this earth, nor to abandon it in despair. There is still good here, Mr. Frodo - and it's worth fighting for! This is a mystery: that to achieve His Kingdom we must fight the long defeat to bring His Kingdom to this world which long ago rejected it. I suppose this is redemptive suffering: to know that temporally our cause is lost, and yet that our cause is temporally lost means that we are eternally victorious. This is the mystery of submission: dying to one's self to attain God's eternal life. This is the mystery of humility: to cry that I can do nothing outside of God's providence, and then within His will to strive anyway.

This is how Jesus was able to pray, "I have not lost any of the ones You gave me." None of us are lost, because we have been granted eternal existance - however, we can make that existance a Heaven or a Hell. We can strive fruitlessly against God here and then and so make the mercy of existance a torture, or we can come to know Him, love Him, and so live the most sweetly ever and infinitely with Him.

I only wish that there were fanfares at the end of temporal things. Is this silence Hellish or Heavenly? Have humans stifled sound on this fallen earth, does our irrational fear of death include those smaller deaths? Or are there no good-byes because, in some ways, we hope for that time when the word is expunged from necessity? Silence is the perfectest herald of joy - but there are some silences which are full of sound, and others which are simple voids. I feel the void, now. But I shall fill it up with laughter.

Mood: Strangely but sweetly philosophical
Music: La Luna, Sarah Brightman
Happy Happy Joy Joy: Going to FanzillaCon tomorrow, which Dad is working at! Hoopla! God is good and provides! He gives us rich food to eat and silly movies to see for three days in a row!