The Race of Man

 

 

To the OCS graduating class of 2025:

I am going to miss your Senior Chapel. I have a doctor's appointment that would be difficult to reschedule. I scheduled it long ago when I thought your Senior Chapel was to be held on Tuesday of this week. I am so sorry I won't be there. I feel like a bad mom. I have a few words for you, the last thing I'll ask you to read, and an array of pictures so you'll have a little digital photo album of our year together to which you can return as needed in the future. 

One-hundred years ago this spring, on April 10, 1925, The Great Gatsby was published. Most readers I know have an obsessive relationship with this novel; they either love it or hate it. I think Fitzgerald would appreciate that. The novel is, after all, about obsession.

Fitzgerald’s use of color is masterful in Gatsby, and most students of the novel recall discussions of the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Green is symbolic of Gatsby’s money, of his jealousy, truly of all the things that consume him and lead to his demise. But that’s not all. There are also lines like this: 

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow fast in movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with summer.

Fitzgerald suggests, I believe, that there are choices before us. Gatsby and those with whom he surrounds himself make astoundingly poor choices, but green does not have to mean greed or jealousy. It can mean renewal, rebirth. This is, in fact, nature’s use of the vibrant color. We are surrounded by it now. It is the color of the robe you'll soon wear as you graduate.

In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis tells the reader that God, “. . . cannot ravish. He can only woo.” But His wooing is extraordinary, and it is on full display this time of year. The academic year does not align with the calendar year. We began our time together in August of last year, and we end it now, in a new calendar year, in springtime, and I think it works so well, at least for someone like me who enjoys the symbolism.

These lines are Homer's, from The Iliad:

Like leaves on trees,

the race of man is found,

now green in youth,

now withering on the ground;

Another race the following spring supplies:

they fall successive, and successive rise.

You are this spring's supply, green in your youth, in your flowing robe. Soon, when you put on your green robe again for the final time as an OCS Eagle, and when you see the green of spring, now and in years to come, remember you have choices. God gave us free will because He wants us to choose Him; He chose us before the creation of the world, but He wants us to come to Him freely. Make good choices. 

Green is the fulfillment of God's promise of renewal. Green is the color in which He chooses to bathe creation when it is at its most beautiful. Green is a reminder of His promise that even when you are no longer green in your youth, when you are the leaves withering on the ground, He is still there; He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Your lives are about to change in significant ways, but He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. If you ever feel you’ve nothing to which to cling, cling to that.

I know you will all look lovely in the morning, and I hate I'll miss it. Senior Chapel is when I cry a lot and say my internal goodbyes, so I typed this up in part for myself in lieu of a public cry in the morning. I will be in my room all day Thursday and Friday grading essays and finalizing your grades. You are welcome to come see me and even to sit and stay if you need to work on something like, hypothetically, computer science that you've put off doing for many months now. 

All my love,

Mrs. Z