My heart yearns for the sunny days back home in California instead of these long, dark, wintry nights. Like so, my mind turns to the happiness of the previous years. Instead, memento mori greets me everywhere. It is my senior year, the utter contrast of how I imagined it. This is also my third semester of isolation.
My first semester was when students evacuated from campus last year. I remained and saw the ghost-town this world became. However, the months before this were filled with frequent celebrations of loving friends, profound closeness, and intimate community. Yet, abruptly I found myself in a single dorm with no one to laugh with, smile at, or hug. There I was in utter silence. I prayed every day, longing for a touch, a smile, a noise.
I hoped my senior year would lighten up, but attempts for togetherness have often been unsuccessful. One morning last semester my life felt like it was cascading, and I spent Thanksgiving in isolation with COVID-19, strep throat, and asthma.
Although I have had a heavier course load with twenty-one credits before, this semester has been the most emotionally difficult, giving me the least time with friends. Another major change is that my roommate suddenly left this month, and most of my days are without a real conversation. I consistently ask God, “Are you calling me to be in the silence, the desert and seek You there, Lord? For this is surely barren.”
During the day, I teach kids who are laughing and playing only to meet the stark, haunting silence of my room and the yearning for loved ones’ company. Being off-campus where I know nobody reminds me of the world beyond Boston College. It reminds me that next year my friends will be gone. This was once a place of love and community. Now it seems to be where I am stuck, longing for that cherished time with those dearest.
By the time normalcy returns, my life will have changed. My friends and I will have graduated, moved, or entered into their vocations, hindering communication. Living together on-campus facilitates intimacy. Even though I know our lives now are probably the most aligned and integrated they will ever be and that once we graduate, we will travel different paths, the circumstances force me to forego opportunities of being with them.
Though, amidst this, God is carrying us. This pandemic may be the best way right now to know that He is with us, sharing our pains and sorrows. I think of Jesus crying, “Father, why have You forsaken Me?”, nevertheless entrusting Himself into the Father’s hands. The least I can do is unite myself with His thirst for love.
I think of St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier, close friends who bade farewell forever. St. Benedict and St. Scholastica, twins, prayed together annually. When St. Scholastica sensed her death, she begged her brother to stay, violating his order’s regulations. Refused by her brother, she begged God, and her humility won. I beg with her. St. Therese knew grief at a young age when her mother died and knew it many more times when her sisters left for the convent. She became ill and was cured only by a vision of Mary. I empathize with her, and I beg for the grace to love like these saints.
Everything is God’s endowment to us since it is an opportunity for us to become Him. “The Son of God became man, so that we might become God” (CCC 460). These times of isolation remind me that God is the only constant, and the best way to be together is through prayer and in the Eucharist.
Featured image in the Public Domain
Lourdes Macaspac, graduate of the class of 2021, wrote for The Torch as a C101 writer during her first three years and as a Faith Feature Columnist during her senior year. At BC, she majored in a bunch of things, enjoyed giving her time to service, and cared greatly for her friends. Through the fleeting sweet and sometimes chaotic moments, she rediscovered the meaning of her life: sanctity.
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