The Best Years of My Life

That's what they say about university apparently: the best years of your life. Well... I have no intention with taking a gloomy downturn after I get my last degree... but I can't deny that today, the last day of class, had a bittersweet feel to it. Looking back, I think I'm feeling it more than I did at the time, though it was there then too, that delightful, horrid, biting feeling. It's like the feeling of "The Grey Havens"--only in real life.

Half the problem, I'm sure, is that I don't have any exams until Saturday. So I have five days to do... nothing. Seminary has shut down as the Newman students are already launching into their exams--whcih tend to be much more difficult than my own. Meanwhile, my exams are looking (to me) to average a "piddling" on the difficulty scale. Religion will be a cakewalk, Sociology will require half an hour of study, History will be long but easy, English will require some reading, but should be fast and easy, and Logic will require some intense study... but nowhere near even a day's worth.

So... yeah. It's not going to be a study-intensive week. For everyone else maybe, but not for me.

If I had lots of studying to do, or exams looming a bit closer, I doubt I'd be so concerned about this bittersweet end of term... but as it happens, I really don't have anything better to do.

Basically, apart from the occasional wave in the classroom or halls during exams, I don't expect to see most of my classmates until September. A week and a half from now and I'll be back in Olds, and probably won't see or talk to anyone having anything to do with Concordia for four months.

Looking at this with a hint of objectivity, I'm not sure exactly WHY I'm so bittersweet about this. Quite frankly, I have not made a pile of friends at school this year. Not close ones. I could count on one hand the number of extra-curricular events I've enjoyed with my Concordia classmates, excepting my fellow seminarians (well, maybe not... but it's close). I've made one, maybe two, friends at Concordia that, after Concordia is all said and done for me, I'm likely to make time to keep in touch with.

Possibly that's half the problem... it's really only in the last two or three weeks that I've really been getting to know more more people, or so it feels. It's only in the last little bit that the groundwork of getting comfortable with these people, which has taken most of the semester (with my scarcity of classes last semester, I really didn't spend my time at Concordia at all... that as seminary acclimatization semester). Maybe what I'm feeling the pain of here is the irony of only starting to get to know people as it's time to leave.

I hope... I really hope... that the groundwork laid this semester isn't worn away by four months of neglect. I still have two more years to build these relationships up... but I am a slow mover socially. Not always... not necessarily... but often. It took more than a year on the 'Downs before the people I would have mentally listed as friends exploded beyond a handful. I hope there's a precedent there.

Another curveball about this situation, though... is that it's sort of a first-time thing. I've never moved away from a happening social scene before. When I moved from Olds to Edmonton, it was about ten months after I'd last been really plugged into a regular social life in my hometown. There was just the irregular contact with my old circle of friends, hampered of course by my late-night hours.

And, of course, I never moved away for the summer... Rather than being a time of social slump, summer was when people had the time to hang out later and more often (in August, if not July, when people tend to disappear it seems...).

This is, I guess, what the life of a priest will be like... just because you're in one parish doesn't mean that you can't be transferred five hours across the diocese at the drop of the Archbishop's mitre. The priest is a loner. Friends are good and necessary... but not so important as to outrank the vocation.

Going back to the top of this post... remember I used that word "delightful" to describe the bittersweet feeling? I meant it. Bittersweet like this is painful--it hurts. But there is a... how to put it?... magic about it. It UNITES people, even as it tears they apart. If you can feel it, you KNOW you're alive. It is the stuff of classics, bestsellers, and high art.

And somehow... somehow... I'm really not sure how, but it FEELS right to say so... that bittersweet feeling is a forerunner of Heaven. Maybe it has to do with funerals. It's certainly the feeling I associate with funerals. "Gone. Gone but not forgotten. Gone, and we grieve and mourn, and wail. Gone, but we shall meet again."

To quote a song associated with the rite of commendation (from a funeral):

"Every fear shall be undone, and death will no more, as songs of the angels bring you home, before the face the God."

This bittersweet pain... this ripping apart of social velcro, it is, somehow, a foretaste of Heaven. No, that's not Catholic theology. No, that's not even really thought out. It's just where my mind seems to be going tonight.