Autumn in Michigan: has it truly been five years since I last experienced this? Trudging the familiar shortcut to the library across the Freshman Campus and hearing tennis shoes squeak and scuffle from behind the heavy gym doors, my heart is simmering with a nostalgia as piquant as the chili I lunched on before I left. My decision to leave my iPod at home is validated by the sounds that brighten the cold air: traffic whooshing along Chicago Drive, acorns crunching beneath my boots, and especially the rowdy voices of happy children shrieking from nearby yards.
The journey is the span of a city block, but my stride has a noticeable spring in it by the time I'm pulling open the heavy glass doors to immerse myself in the heated fragrance of the library. Running through my mind as I unshoulder my knapsack and dump my books into the return bin are those words of Emily Dickinson: "How much can come, and much can go, and yet remain the world."
The theology of that phrase strikes me, caught as I am in life's pattern of births and deaths, beginnings and endings, advents and leave-takings. How much can come and much can go. Yet "while the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease." (Gen. 8:22) Whatever else happens, the world yet remains, hinged on a promise as beautiful and otherworldly as a rainbow.
Implicit in this verse, however, is the truth that this world will not always remain. Ultimately, even this world of coming and going will go. Oneday it will be swept up into a state of completion: the state for which it groans, awaiting deliverance from the One who was from the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
How much can come and much can go--even this world itself, and certainly my own small life which it encompasses--and yet remains that world. What consolation for my pilgrim soul.
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