Passings

Two passings I note.

The first--my son's transition from the high school life to college life. I'm participating in an orientation session for new students and parents at University of Evansville. College represents the 'peeling back' of yet another layer of youthful innocence. It is a kind of felix culpa. Innocence is an unnatural state, and one from which we must to be weaned. Nevertheless, as all parents know, it is also a painful loss.

The second passing--the death of a good friend, Eunice Glazebrook. I suppose death is the ultimate loss of innocence, it being the full and final elevation from mortality. Or is it? Can we ever be perfect or complete? Will not the next phase of our existence require another process of growth and a corresponding loss of innocence? Is that not the human lot? Self-transcending finitude, as our existentialist friends would say. However, unlike the existentialists, I don't think we are 'beings toward death' (sein zum Tode); I think we are 'beings toward infinity'. We will never reach absolute and perfect self-definition. The process of self-clarification must continue. That's heaven for me--never reaching closure!