It is graduation season. Pre-school, kindergarten, eighth grade, high school, college and post-graduate programs are celebrating their successful students and wishing them well for the future. A graduation marks a milestone in someone’s life. One phase is finished with the end of the ceremony, and another begins. It is a time to collect our memories from the past few years, and to face our futures, hopefully with confidence. We consciously move on rather than dwindle to an end.
Baxter has never gone through a graduation ceremony. He makes his transitions in life without much thought. He has passed from kitten, to young cat, to senior feline without fanfare or ceremony. It is not that he hasn’t learned some things along the way. He has developed his habits, his likes and dislikes, and his tricks to get what he wants from the repetition of routine and the lessons of trial and error. He just doesn’t look back on these experiences that taught him his life lessons, and he doesn’t seem to anticipate the future and where it might lead. He is a creature of the moment, imprinted with the past but not reflective about it or how it might lead him into the future.
This is what makes us different. As human beings we are meant to reflect and ponder upon our lives. We are not made to live from moment to moment without thought to what we are doing and where it is taking us. Our lives compose a history where what happens holds a certain meaning. However, this meaning is not self-evident most of the time. We have to plumb the experience for its deeper dimension, for the relationships that connect the pieces, for the God who was present quietly but powerfully while we lived through it. We have to become people who reflectively look back on our lives not in nostalgia to relive the past, but in confidence that we will discover a divine providence that will lead us into the future.
Our lives are not just a series of passages from birth to death, marked by the accumulation of years. They are a series of transformations, marked by ever deepening changes in our perspective and the character we bear in the world. As we live on faithfully and thoughtfully, these transformations are marked by grace more than our own talent, power, sin or failure. We see more and more of God’s hand with us, and we become more and more reflections of God’s work and word in our world. Salvation history continues as we understand the history of our lives unfolding in the path of faith.
As disciples, we all have one last graduation to celebrate. The ceremony takes place in a church. It takes a whole lifetime to meet the requirements of its credentials. It is marked with sadness for the good times that are over, but also with hope for the better times that lie ahead. The processional includes our loved ones, as we are led to the light of Christ at the foot of our casket. Marked by the blood of the Lamb from the moment of our baptism, we now join the great company of saints in glory, and we see the point of it all.
Baxter, you don’t know what you are missing. Happy Graduation!
