Senior Reflection: Colin Jung
Dear Exeter,
Perhaps it is a silly thing to write a letter to a school, but I find myself unable to fathom what it is to leave you. Because I belong to you. And in a sense, I always will. But I will not belong to your halls and paths, your sunrises and silent winter nights, your long walks and whispered conversations—except, perhaps, in memory, which fades with each passing month.
I cannot think of a part of me that was left untouched by you. But I will vainly try to explain what you have taught me. After all, one of those things I have learned is that a few specific things are worth more than anything in general.
I remember that in my first year, a graduating senior I deeply admire wrote a reflection about what Exeter had taught him. I did not understand it then, but I understand it now. I will relay it to whoever reads this, in case the reader has not read the original—though I will fail to do it justice.
In the famous scene, Pontius Pilate looks Christ in the eye and asks him “QUID EST VERITAS?” (“What is the truth?”) No answer was given him in the scripture, but some medieval monks were said to have discovered one by rearranging the letters in Pilate’s question into: “EST VIR QUI ADEST” (“[It] is the man who is before you”).
We are often tempted to look somewhere else for the truth, especially us Exonians. We look in books and equations and labs and organizations and laws. We look for it in the future, in college degrees and prestige and jobs and wealth and fame and power. But we will find it is not there. It isn’t that we aren’t looking far and wide enough. It is that we aren’t looking close enough. The truth is in loving the person before you. The truth is in loving your classmate, sitting around the table with you. The truth is in loving your clubmate, no matter how much she might annoy you, or bother you, or even hurt you. The truth is in loving the student who looks up to you (for reasons that are hard to comprehend) when he looks to you for advice and guidance.
What a fool is the one who abandons the truth, who is right before him, to look for it somewhere else?
At Exeter, I have had the privilege of having so many people “before me,” especially in my clubs. So many have told me how I have taught them about debate, or writing, or theology, how I’ve touched their lives. In truth, these people have taught me more than I have ever taught them, and changed my life more than I have ever changed theirs. They have taught me what it means to love (poorly, but I promise, earnestly) and what it means for that love to be my first priority. They have taught me how ennobling that love is—how it inspires me to be a better man, day and night, in everything I do.
It is the kind of love that frees me from all my fears, because it weighs upon my heart more than fear ever could. There is a silly idea that so many people have—that the way to be free is to belong to no one, to be alone. On the contrary, I have learned that we have no choice but to belong in this life—either to the things we fear most, or to the ones we love most. Love with all your heart—let yourself belong to the ones you love. You will find freedom under that sweet yoke.
But Dear Exeter, you did not only show me how to love, but you showed me my love, the One who makes my heartbeats flutter, then stills my anxious heart with an abiding love that fills me with courage enough to face the whole world and then face it all over again. It was one of yours that brought me to Him. It was one of yours, who, by the example of his life and humility, brought me to the one who inspired such a beautiful life in him.
I have learned that the object of the truest love is not a concept, nor a feeling, nor another broken person like me, but love itself. Love is the God who is the essence of Being itself, who is the ultimate reason for all that is, who holds all things into existence by His sheer love. Love is the God whose love burned so bright that it demanded to be requited, despite our finitude and brokenness.
Love is the God who knew that in our pride and ignorance, we could not love someone so far above and beyond us, and so therefore became the least among us, born in a manger among beasts and their hay, died, battered, on a cross between thieves . . . so that our hard hearts might be able to love Him, who loved us from the beginning of time. In short—truth is love, and love is that man before Pilate, who could have commanded armies of angels but chose instead to be humiliated unto death, that in such humility, he might be lovable to us.
Dear Exeter, you have taught me of such love, in which I pray I shall remain until my dying breath, and for eternity thereafter. For it is written.
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments dependeth the whole law…”
(Matthew 22:37-40).
Pax Et Bonum,
Colin Jihoon Marie Jung
