I feel empty and spent. For me, August always seems a sobering time. It’s the end of summer, the days just prior to what feels to be the de facto New Year. We turn our backs to the siren ocean and head inland, not to return until another summer.

We sense the oldness of the green of the leaves. The days shorten noticeably. Vacated locust skins turn up at your feet. Here in Aliquippa, San Rocco Festa signals the fast approaching end of summer. And mists shroud the river valleys in the cooling air of the mornings.

Children leave home, some for the day, some for the year, some to the regions of adulthood. The ones who graduated high school in May stuff cars full of bedding and fans and organizer cubes and head out to enter hitherto wholly unknown worlds; you know that when they return home, it will never be the same. I find it a sadly sobering thing that everything can change momentously in an instant, with one hug of goodbye at the airport. Now a person is there; the next instant, they are so very gone. Or it may be that we are the ones who move—who uproot, leaving dear loved ones and dear loved places behind.

It’s not all departure, of course; it’s arrivals too. As a college professor glancing down the list of names on my class lists—names I do not yet know, but know I will begin to know in a wonderful unfolding way over the next weeks—names of people whom I anticipate will become very dear to me—I marvel at the richness of the possibilities, the potential hugeness of what may transpire between them and me this fall, and in the years to come. The uncanny summer quiet of the halls and walkways of campus is bumptiously dispelled: first the sizeable stream of athletes, RDs, and band people (yesterday for no apparent reason the brass sectional let loose a single Olympic fanfare as they ambled through the quiet halls of my building!), then the full dam break of the first day of classes, joyful reunions interspersed with the faces of bewildered freshmen.

There are other sorts of passages: meeting a looming and momentous deadline such as tenure review. Undergoing surgery or a medical test, then waiting for healing or for the outcome.  Moving into a new phase of one’s life.

What is this human experience, that we (with or without our choice) walk through these immense boundaries again and again? It is almost too much to bear! How can we be so courageous? So insensitive? So determined? How do we possibly survive? This is ec-stasis, a continual moving beyond ourselves. We may grieve, but we may not linger. We are future-oriented, for good or ill. We seem compelled to break camp and move out. A wee bit like Michael Phelps and other swimmers clad in suits designed to reduce water resistance below that of human skin, we unceremoniously slice through seemingly fragile world records and stretch toward the wall.

I have no simple platitudes that would dull the edge of this powerful poignancy or help me contain it in a box. It hurts; it takes me over. My physical body, it seems to me, is not strong enough to bear it. My skin seems too porous, my heart too close to this so easily pierceable barrier.

I only can locate myself in Psalm 84. “Blessed”—blessed!?!—“are those whose strength is in you, who have set their hearts on pilgrimage—in whose hearts are the highways. As they pass through the Valleyof Tears, they make it a place of springs; the autumn rains also cover it with pools. They go from strength to strength, till each appears before God in Zion.” (With this last sentence, singers of the RPCNA Psalter will join me in hearing the majestically marching chords of the 84B setting—my favorite.)

In the bittersweet of the passage—in the goodbye, in the painfully pregnant silence of summer’s end—we may ever find afresh the presence of God. Yahweh is himself a God of passages—going beyond the eternal perichoresis of the Trinity, to create a world, and then to redeem it. In the absence that thresholds the new, he is there—the autumn rains that intermingle with the tears. In this August silence, we may find him, the dear constancy of his steadfast love and delight.

I think, in the end, it’s about hope—hope of an unimaginably glorious return (in both senses). Unprecedented sheaves of harvest come in. Children come home—changed, yes, but wonderfully grown up—in the crisp celebrations of the holidays, with new friends to love and new exploits to celebrate. I who endure the perforation of skin that is the passage somehow become more profoundly myself as I “appear before God in Zion.” The grieving leaves its mark, but becomes transformed in a new wholeness.

There is no guarantee of this. It lies ever in the hands of God. God brings us through fire and water to a place of abundance. (Psalm 66:12) Of course it lies in the hands of God. For when it comes, it is God. We did not know exactly what we were longing for, what we hoped for when we moved out. When we arrive, what we find is…Him (by definition!). Having found ourselves in Zion, we look back and see that what we were longing for was the courts of the Lord. It isn’t only God: human triumphs and transformations are real and good. But surpassingly central to them, when we view them aright, is the One who is Homecoming archetypically.

Count this post as an odd sort of well-wishing, one which Hallmark will never know to how cash in on. From me, in my passage, to you in yours: I mark with you the sad silence of summer’s-end, your labored progression over the sand dunes to the parked car. Savor the highways in your heart. Look for the gracious incoming of autumn rains to make the valley of tears a place of springs. And anticipate rejoicing together when we come before God in Zion.

p.s. Tonight, as I post this, I learn of the passing, yesterday—when I wrote this—of my dear friend, Dr. Russell Louden. All that I have said here now rings with deepest reality. Never did one person so make the valley of tears such a place of springs, nor so long for the lovely dwelling place of God. Thank you, God, for welcoming him home.