To Our Seniors by Phil Collier

TO OUR 2011 SENIORS

by Phil Collier, 11th-12th Grade Bible Study Leader

What is it about a high school graduation that makes us stop and take stock?  Grabs us by the throat and sometimes brings tears?  Is it the ceremonies?  The celebrations?  A sense of achievement? 

All of those things, I suppose.

But at a deeper level, it is a rite of passage.  A changing of Seasons.  The western equivalent of a Native American’s vision quest, receiving tribal scars in Africa . . . or even an aboriginal walkabout experience.  All of these rites of passage share something in common.  We humans are at the mercy of time, birth and death. 

A high school graduate is reborn as an adult - - one of us - - sent either into the “real world” of work or the shocking independence of the college experience.

Exciting!  A new identity.  New friends.  Freedom!

But everyone asks the graduate – what are you going to do now?    What a wonderfully nauseating question.  All of a sudden, you are compelled to choose a degree program, a job, a career . . . .  Or to try and defer these choices for as long as you can.

But like it or not . . . you are a new person . . . an adult. 

You are no longer a child.

That’s the other side of this moment.  We have a dim sense that we have lost something.  Not suddenly, but ever so gradually.

To paraphrase Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 - - 

   for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

   This is a time for you to be reborn. 

   It is a time to weep for what you have lost.

   It is a time to laugh with your friends and to dance like crazy.

   And to live with the spark of the Divine God that will carry you into tomorrow.

May the peace of Christ always be with you.