This is a season of saying goodbye. In a few weeks a good friend moves back to Australia, where he is from. Even with modern communication possibilities, it’s a challenge keeping in touch with folk in Sydney, with the near day-long time difference. Another close friend – a Discourseman no less! – has upped sticks for Sydney already, this time with the promise of return after a year of letting off steam. But while a year may fly by, it does so only because life itself flies by; we manage to get an awful lot done in the short time God allots us. Again, modern technology promises much in keeping us connected. But my world here moves on, and it does so at its own speed, with not so much as a passing consideration of happenings half a world away, save for the odd intrusion of a catch-up over a FaceTime call.
Perhaps most painfully, one long-standing friend prepares to move to China, where his fiancé is from. I can’t sugar-coat this one. It’s unclear if he’ll come back; what’s more likely is that he will, albeit in a few years’ time. Ours is a friendship built on the closest of shared experience – communal, spiritual, educational – and those sturdy bonds of love that can only be found where successive layers of crises and triumphs have together deposited their adamantine residue. But he will be gone, and here I must remain. I will miss him.
It feels like mine has been a life of saying goodbye. First there was my boarding school, where I had to become accustomed to a double existence: life without family in term time, and without friends in the holidays. Now, staying in my university town, most of those dearest to me have moved to pastures new. I see them briefly, here and there, but it is often bittersweet, tinged with imminent farewells – or as one poet has put it, “taxed with forethought of grief”.
One in particular I miss dearly. The peaceful happiness of our times together are met in force only by the sorrow of times apart. It is the sorrow of an imprint, a memory, just enough joy lingering on to make all the more complete the loss of its true object.
I have learnt to cherish this sorrow, pained as it is. Times away from home growing up taught me not to mourn, but to forget: to forget the family that might have been there, and the friends I might have shared those laughs with. I carried that forgetting, my first impulse in the face of loss, beyond my schooldays, and for years found it all too easy to say goodbye. Harder was to love, to commit, to remain by someone’s side. And yet that is what I have longed for – what we all long for. And so I have taught myself to remember: to feel the pain of each passing moment of joy, the weight of each farewell. It is the price we pay for grasping at the eternal, and it hurts more deeply than anything else I know. But without it we lose our humanity.
For the price of love, as we have been reminded so much of late, is loss, and the grief that goes with it. We may not all be called to die for love. But there is a sacrifice that love demands of us all: a broken heart. This side of glory, no love can last. Too often it ends in rejection and disappointment, a gamble we all must make. And in the best of cases, death snuffs it out: as the scriptures remind us, we are but the flowers of the field, there in a moment and fading away in the next.
Here, surely, is proof that the classical doctrines of God are not merely the abstract wranglings of theologians. Ours is a world of constant change; of generation, yes, but also of decay. No matter how indelibly eternity is inscribed upon our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11), our essence is mutability. As in Plato’s conception, we do not possess being in the truest sense, but belong to the world of becoming. God alone is, and is immutable, unchanging, and timeless. And that is good news.
Hence the comfort of the old hymn. It ruminates on the symbolism of the closing of another day, another chapter of our lives consigned to the past:
Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away.
Change and decay in all around I see.
O thou who changest not, abide with me.
After weekends away from my boarding school we would return to evensong in the college’s chapel. There, invariably, we sang these poignant words, penned by Henry Francis Lyte. They always felt apposite, coming off the back of departures and fond farewells. But these were but a foretaste, a gentle inkling of the corruption of our world, that this hymn so aptly articulates. All is change, and all will be changed; God alone is unchanging, and he will endure.
So we live for him. There is no other option: he alone can bear the weight of longing that rests upon the human heart. He alone is worthy of our labours, our hopes, our earnest desires. And what is done for him will last.
But the decay, the constant deathliness of our world, teaches us another lesson too. Let us live this fleeting life with joy. Everything around us is not only a gift, but a passing gift, like an elaborate trial subscription of whose end date we have not been informed. So we must receive it as we would with any gift: with open hands, taking the blessings as they come, and letting our cares and anxieties fade away in the light of eternity. Then one day, basking in that light, all will be complete, and all will at last endure.
The Fourth Discourseman
The Four Discoursemen 