As the final week of the academic year is upon us, the sight of finalists is a familiar one – that mix of exhaustion and elation at stepping out of the last exam, ready to be showered with cheap bubbly and silly string. It is a time of endings, which brings both a jubilation and a poignancy, and not infrequently a little stress about what the future may hold.

I have become rather too good at goodbyes over the years. I’ve moved house every three years for about fifteen years, but have grown to find that endings are always also beginnings, and so they move me on in life in a helpful way.

This sort of pattern of personal growth – of the chance to leave things behind, and to let new things shape us – is at the heart of the Christian experience of confession and forgiveness. Whether it’s the chance for corporate confession at the Eucharist each week, or a particular journey of forgiveness we find ourselves walking at a point in our lives, acknowledging and naming our past failings is a vital step to drawing a line under them. It enables us, we pray, to find a new beginning, one that takes the best of all we have been in the past, and can try to break free of the worst.

Much like many of our undergraduate finalists, we may not know where that new beginning will take us, or how hard ‘moving on’ will be. But we know we cannot go backwards and recycle the past, for the little goodbyes of life, whether to people and places or to sins and shames, are the deaths that give birth to new life.

So long thy power hath blest me,

sure it still will lead me on o’er moor and fen,

o’er crag and torrent, till the night is gone,

and with the morn those angel faces smile,

which I have loved long since, and lost awhile. – John Henry Newman (1801-1890)