The campus is quiet. Our last day of exams is Monday and those who remain are cloistered in the library. There are few people wandering the grounds as the day is misty and chilled. Reading senior theses this afternoon in the hushed concentration of the library, I had a spiritual revelation.

I found the theses of two of my acquaintances. They were seniors my freshman year. I recognized their last names and first initials on the red leather bindings of the senior theses for 2008. I pulled them, curious as to their subjects. One was a novel. One was an analysis of Christian theological teachings with an added personal testimony of the writer. As I read the summaries and parts of the theses themselves, I thought of the people I knew: the novel writer a math major whose decision to date one of the girls in my year was considered scandalous and ill-advised among our mutual acquaintances, the Christian a business major who lead and taught ballroom and matriculated to law school. I had not seen the parts of them revealed before me on the open pressed pages. It was like catching a glimpse of their souls. I found myself handling the pages delicately, as if I might hurt the writer if I was careless. The sensation reminds me of the stories, so popular among people when there are cameras involved, of native peoples being introduced to cameras; how the natives are frightened that their souls will be stolen by the click and flash of the camera. Perhaps the natives see it clearer than we do. The snapshot of our soul is captured moment by precious moment. How much more it was like touching souls then to read the words over which my acquaintances had labored for so long! How much more precious those words are that they should have revealed a new part of their souls to me, their curious and naïve reader!

(I should note I did not plan on a spiritual revelation when I walked into the library today. I thought to find inspiration for my own impending senior thesis. Yet, there it was, a spiritual revelation lurking on the fifth floor folded in the pages of red leather bound, gold-gilded and labeled honors college senior theses. By the way, I left without an inspiration for my own senior thesis, except for the more practical realization that when they say you can do anything you wish for a senior thesis, they really mean it, which I might add doesn't help me a bit.)