Date: February 27, 2026
For complex reasons, I find myself really feeling for our seniors. This is the peculiar ache of a final year: walking through ordinary days with the quiet knowledge that each one is, in fact, a last. The last Advent Affair — the great party now folded into memory. The last beginning of a Spring semester, complete with the Dean’s reliably corny Dad jokes. The last time gathering in that classroom, with that particular constellation of minds, sitting at the feet of a professor whose voice and habits and holy irritations have become familiar. Each class is a journey. And part of the poignancy of the journey is knowing that one will never quite make it in the same way again.
There is something about the passing of time that only becomes visible when we sense its finitude. When we are younger, the assumption is that there will always be another Advent Affair, another semester, another conversation. But seniors know better. They inhabit a threshold. They laugh, they write papers, they plan for ordination or next steps — and underneath it all is the awareness that this chapter is closing. The ordinary becomes luminous precisely because it will not be repeated. What once felt routine now feels sacramental.
In a strange way, I am finding myself having similar thoughts. The search for my successor is underway. Now I am still going to 2028; so it is not the literal ‘last’ meeting or the literal ‘last commencement’, but I sense it is close. But I am preparing myself for that final year. Learning to appreciate these last moments is part of the gift of this season. To resist either nostalgia or denial, and instead to receive the present as it is — fleeting and full. May God help me, and all who are conscious that they are entering the last moments of a place they love, to find grace and joy in the moment that is given.
The Very Rev. Ian S. Markham, Ph.D.
Dean and President of Virginia Theological Seminary and the President of The General Theological Seminary.Â