A Time to Move On
Anthony Esolen on Sending Our Children into Eternity (A Graduation Address)
Parents, was it so long ago that you could rock your child here to sleep in the crook of your arm? Can you remember when they had small voices, and could run about all day with a smudge on the nose and never notice?
In my office at school there’s a framed picture of which I am most fond. In my entirely impartial judgment, it is the loveliest baby picture that has ever been taken. It’s of Jessica at a few months, quite bald; but no doubt if she could have spoken then, she might have justly said, with the Bride in the Song of Songs, “I am bald, but I am beautiful!” She has a look in that picture—I am sure you have seen that look from your own children—a look as if she had recently arrived here from another world, and was not entirely sure of the goings on in this one.
I don’t have that picture here to show you, but I can show you this: It’s a sneaker belonging to my son, Davey. His feet are bigger now, but I keep this shoe on the dashboard of my truck, as I keep that picture in my office, to remind me of the helpless and incomparably precious beings that they were, and as any parent would say, that they always will be.
The Parents’ Time
It is a sweet and sometimes sad thing to live as we do, with the bodies we have, subject to change and time. We parents sometimes want to hurry that time along, to get past whatever difficult year we are in. And when our heads clear, we may want to stop time dead in its tracks, because it seems as if we had dozed in the afternoon and awoke, to find that our son was a man, and our daughter a woman.
But God lends time to us; he does not give it outright. We pray for the good sense to use it well, to love the time we are given, and to help our families love it too. You parents have not yielded to others the responsibility to redeem the time: your homes were no flophouses where strangers spent the night, no factories where the workers punched a clock and toiled year after year to produce what?—a scholarship, prestige, status, vanity.
Your homes were homes; and there, as untold generations of mothers and fathers had done before you, you did more than impart to your children the alphabet or the rules of arithmetic; you brought them up in wisdom and understanding. You brought them up in the Lord, and now, as the time nears when they will leave your home, you are rewarded by seeing a little, but only a little, of the fruit that your labor will have borne.
It is sometimes said that children have no sense of time. I have never believed it, and I certainly do not believe it about the young men and the young women seated before us now. For if we do our work right, my fellow parents, our children will notice. They will see that in our care for them we all but repeat the wistful yet generous words of John the Baptist. When John’s disciples reported to him the preaching of Jesus and the miracles he had performed, John said, simply, “He must increase, and I must decrease.”
There is a part of all good mothers and fathers that would like to keep their children small; but another part, a better part, that knows that our children are given to us as children only for a time; and that part says, “They must increase, and I must decrease.” Nor are the children themselves unaware of it.
I remember that when I was about the age of these fine young people here, I used to like challenging my father to ping-pong matches. We had some roaring duels.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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