Last summer I visited my family in Ohio. While I was there my nephew, who is a senior in high school came home with a t-shirt meant to set into motion this momentous life passage we have all anticipated. On the shirt was the message, “ 2020 – A Class with Vision.” At the time it was really just a very clever take on the diagnosis we all hope to receive at our most recent eye exam. We chuckled at the cleverness of it all. But I have been thinking much about that shirt over the last weeks. We have seen the mounting evidence that these young people, who started the school year with the simple hopes of completing not only classes but celebrating all the traditions that catapult them into their ‘what next?’, watch as those events fade into an uncertain future. Will prom happen? Will they be able to walk across the stage to receive their diploma? Parents, teachers, and students wonder how they will mark this passage without the well-practiced rituals they have watched others take for years. This is happening all across our country.

I have no answer to those questions and the outcome likely depends on where the young people live and the creativity of the schools and adults that have accompanied them on their journey so far. 2020 – a class with vision. Certainly, this year is not turning out as they and their families imagined. And yet, what ‘vision’ have they been given for how their life will emerge from this passage to the next? What do they see around them that is teaching them about the world they are walking into, are inheriting? How are they envisioning a future for themselves and those with whom they travel the planet?

This week people have started sharing their senior pictures from days gone by on Facebook as a way to celebrate and be in solidarity with the Class of 2020. I have been struck by the faces of people from many decades smiling at the camera with the hope and possibility that is mirrored in most senior photos throughout time. Oh, the hairstyles can bring quite the chuckle but nearly every face carries the hope of youth and the longing for a future yet to be realized. I venture a guess that most had a vision for what their lives might become. For some it worked out just as they planned. For others, not so much.

As we walk these days of pandemic, aren’t we all in some way a part of the class of 2020? Regardless of age, we are making our way through a year filled with experiences most have never traversed before. Each day carries questions, uncertainty, fear, confusion. The days also contain hopes, possibilities, discoveries, creativity, lessons we had not considered. It is a year that asks each of us to be a ‘class with vision’. Vision for how to live more  simply, more justly. We are called to reach out to help those who need it, given the opportunity to listen  more deeply. And we are being offered the chance to be ‘a class with vision’, considering what the future is we hope to create after this is all over. 

Other signs, literal signs, are popping up to bring us into a greater awareness with high school seniors and what they may be missing. I saw this one on a walk yesterday: #allinthistogether. Yes, indeed. We are all in this together, regardless of age or economic status, gender, education, all the many ways we can think of to divide ourselves into categories. And the truth of the matter is that it has always been so. We are all, after all, spinning on the same big, beautiful planet. Most often, we just don’t remember that, just don’t behave as if this is the case. 

Poet Theodore Roethke wrote:”In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” We may look back on these days as a dark time. We may also look at this time as the time when we began to see. 2020 will not be over for several months. But this learning how to be ‘the class with vision’ will go on for some time. May our eyes…and our hearts…be open to what is best for the whole global village… and our Earth Home.  We are all in this together.