IT WAS the last day of school at St. Athanasius. The hulking buses had just pulled away, their passengers whooping and pummeling each other with joy.

Fr. Shudda walked up to the third floor. He was conducting a final tour of inspection. The hushed hallways resonated with emptiness. Even the teachers had left instantly.

Things were unusually orderly. It was as if it was the first day of school and not the last — the last day for good. St. Athanasius was bringing its educational enterprise to a close. On Monday, June 28th, after the odds and ends were removed, Scaramucci Bros. would start demolition.

He walked into Mrs. Binzer’s science class. She had already left. A chart depicting Neanderthal man morphing into a human being still hung on the wall. Mrs. Binzer was a nice woman. She was a Lutheran who really knew her stuff when it came to science.

Fr. Shudda was so old he remembered the time when the Mrs. Binzers were industrious virgins with starched wimples and hidden, mysterious necks. He remembered — from his own distant childhood of course — when the classrooms were cram-packed, the desks lined up in tight rows like infantrymen on a battlefield, each one occupied by a victim of Original Sin.

He walked over to the metallic windows. These banks of cheap glass had let in frigid breezes in January and waves of heat on tropical days in September. Would he miss it all?

Fr. Shudda had long ago embraced change.

He looked toward the rectory and remembered that day when an especially distraught parishioner had visited him. He didn’t want to be like her at this moment. There had been other inquiries from diehards.

“Father,” she said respectfully, her eyes appearing to hold back a fountain of tears, “I don’t understand. I feel, I feel desolate …. as if I am offending Him.”

“Desolate.” It was melodrama like this that really bugged him.

She was complaining about the liturgical renewal. The marble altar had been trucked to a local quarry. She refused it as “renewal.”

“It’s not really different,” Father said. “We still say the Our Father, don’t we?”

After a while, he couldn’t help it. He began to despise hold-outs. It was as if they expected him to do something when he had no power at all and when he had vowed obedience no matter what. They were malcontents and he was glad when they finally drifted away, replaced by the kind of people he preferred — those who were loyal instead of questioning and excessively pious. He preferred these good and decent people — the sort who seem to have never faced a serious temptation to sin in their entire lives and dutifully confronted the tedium of parish life with untold hours of voluntary labor.

They were loyal and decent — and so was he.

He closed a window that had been left open a crack. A bee had entered and was pinging against the glass. Below in the parking lot, where boys were once separated at recess from the girls and where ravenous students attacked soggy pretzels, the demolition company had set up orange cones to keep cars away.

He remembered hunger from his own childhood. “Golden Boy.” That’s what his mother, bursting with bright visions of his future, called him. As the years passed, he had acquired, through the continuous encounter with birth and death, happiness and grief, a patina of wisdom. It attracted people. There was wisdom in his gray hair. Wisdom in his creased brow. Wisdom in his dignified bearing, which he had never given up through it all. Why bother with theological debates when wisdom was enough? His loyal cadre stood by him through thick and thin. What kind of cruel God would deny anything to these faithful servants, even if they did have difficult marriages and couldn’t afford many children?

St Athanasius High School was closing for good. There weren’t enough bodies to fill it anymore. But it wasn’t the end of the world. Change is God’s will.

The uplifting, golden light of a June afternoon illuminated the classroom, as if to say a fond farewell. Would he miss it all?

Fr. Shudda closed the classroom door and walked to the battered cement-block stairway, painted a tired blue. He descended the steps for the last time. He had always hoped to spruce things up, but the opportunity had never presented itself.

He would remember these stairs fondly. He would remember the echoing laughter. He would remember girls who shrieked for no reason. He would remember boys who jumped from the top landing and others who straddled the banisters. He would remember thousands of students who had left for adulthood and barely gave him a thought afterward.

But the truth was, he had long ago dispensed with nostalgia.

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