Yes, we bring this morning the pressures of our workplaces, the concerns of our families, the anxieties of age or declining health, apprehension perhaps at what is just around the corner. All the more reason to open our arms to the season that stretches before us. All the more reason to turn to the blessings of summer and regenerate, refresh, and renew in whatever joy of living may be ours for the readiness.
It has long been my goal to turn summer into a verb. While you and I may not have the option of taking extended leave of the tasks lying in wait in our workplace and our homeplace, we just might consider alerting our senses to accommodate those spaces in our schedules that can, if we choose, remain spaces. It is never too late to play. It is never too late for recess.
Even the awe-inspiring mercurial God of the Old Testament deemed rest and relaxation worthy of its place in the commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai:
"Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Six days you shall labor, and do all your work;
but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God;
in it you shall not do any work."
(Exodus 20:8-10)
In other words, remember to rest; it is sacred time. Take it easy at least one day a week.
In addition to God, my all-time great teachers of rest and relaxation were my father and grandfather. Each modeled well his distinct approach to the art of the time-out.
For my father, the golf course beckoned. After his 60-hour week of toil as a traveling salesman, he was drawn magnet-like to the freedom of the fareway. Even after contracting polio in his 50's, he remained an avid golfer, finding as much entertainment at the helm of his motorized golf cart as he did at the tee. No, I didn't inherit his passion for this sport. Only a few years ago, my clubs went for a song in a garage sale. My father was also a master story teller; he could spin a tale and tell a joke with flavor and gusto. He also ensured that every summer our family took a bona fide vacation--to Minnesota, Colorado, the Black Hills of South Dakota. Of course golf clubs consumed most of the trunk space.
My Grandfather--Granddad Edwards--was another story. A hardworking farmer, he loved nothing more than to take a break from his ever present chores with a trip to the Halfa Store--a tiny general store where he hung out with neighboring farmers and, quenching his thirst with a cold beer, argued politics or spewed weather prophesies. Of course it was great fun for my five-or-six-year-old self to tag along, knowing that he or one of his cronies was sure to spring for an ice cream cone. His sonorous bass moved readily from conversation to song. He relished an evening gathered round the piano to belt out such non-Unitarian standards as "The Old Rugged Cross." I played; he sang. We were all on sabbatical from life's busyness. In the words of Kenneth Patton:
Our eyes reclaim the remembered faces; their voices stir the surrounding air.
The warmth of their hands assures us, and the gladness of our spoken names.
Happy Father's Day, Dad. Happy Father's Day, Granddad!
There are many teachers in the art of play. Children are master teachers. Those we raise and those among us at All Souls are visible and audible teachers of our spirits in need of replenishment. Their very liability at coffee hour stems from their sheer exuberance. Just the other night in Fellowship Hall, our Children's Task Force hosted the Girl Scout Court of Awards, a special time of paying tribute to the scouts for their achievements and the leaders, for their patience and perseverance. While waiting for the program to begin, did these eager Brownies and Cadettes wile away the time sitting demurely in their chairs? Of course not! Their spontaneous energy overflowed in renditions of the handclapping chant, "Miss Mary Mac Mac Mac." Some simply ran about pushing the borders of adult propriety. Were they out of control? No. Were they charged? Yes. Were they inventive and full of spirit? Absolutely! In the unleashing of their playful exuberance, our children are a testament to what lies dormant in our adult selves.
Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the lands!
Serve the Lord with gladness!
Come into his presence with singing!...
For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever,
And his faithfulness to all generations.
(Psalm 100)
This Psalm was most surely written with children in mind, children in a congregation ready to make a joyful noise, a congregation whose voices span generations.
Summer is nature's gift of a time to lift our voices, make a joyful noise, regenerate, and rediscover the enchantment of our lives. Summer is a time to get our priorities straight and let down the guard of our adult selves. From sandcastles at the beach to Shakespeare in the Park to pink lemonade and Italian ices, it is a matter of recovering priorities sacrificed at the altar of our schedules.
"Re-enchantment," writes Thomas Moore in The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, "asks us to search for the lost childhood of the human race and discover, in a larger social sense, what we have forgotten."
He explains: "As we 'grow up,' we get sophisticated out of enchantment and become too smart about the things that cause children to wonder. We try seriously and heavy-handedly to find a world that is different, more conscious, more theoretically elegant than the charming one we knew as children....We may have to return to childhood and recover its truths, its vision, its logic, its sense of time and space, its extraordinary cosmology, and its creative physics...."
Moore wryly observes that his children, "experts in enchantment," would probably wonder why he bothered to write such a book.
I once knew the nonchalance of what it was to summer. A dilapidated merry-go-round on the school playground just across the street from my house. It was the kind of merry-go-round that someone had to push, but when that someone was someone else, I would lie on my back with my nose to the sky, breathe in the sweet warm air, and relinquish my gaze to the slow motion of the clouds in their magical forms. It wasn't just a wild horse embedded in the clouds, it was a galloping colossus of a wild horse. It wasn't just a queen on her throne up there, it was a queen who rose from her throne and danced across the sky. Once off the merry-go-round, there were dandelions waiting to be linked into elegant necklaces and bracelets and hollyhocks nodding on their six-foot stems ready to be shaped into floor-length gowns for clothespin bodies.
Summer nights brought the magic of starwatching. Perhaps that is why Robert McCloskey's Time of Wonder is a book I read again and again to my children. A family summers on an island off Maine; every day is filled with the discoveries of nature's treasures, but night is a time for starwatching:
"You snap off the light and row toward the dock as the stars are gazing down, their reflections gazing up.
In the quiet of the night one hundred pairs of eyes are watching you, while one pair of eyes is watching over all."
To summer is to let our stars come out and notice them. Nature bids us to rekindle our dormant sense of wonder. Our Greek forbears tell the tale of Persephone, daughter of Zeus and the earth goddess Demeter. Swallowed into the underworld into the keeping of an unyielding husband, Persephone was mourned by her mother. In her grief, Demeter turned the earth cold and rendered it barren. Through a compromise negotiated by Zeus and Demeter, Persephone came to divide her time between Hades and her maternal home, the earth . Every year, upon Persephone's return, Demeter rejoices and permits the earth to once again turn lush with flora and fauna. Clearly this is not a well functioning family or a pro-marriage tale. The image of Persephone rising from Hades speaks to the seedlings in our souls that yearn to break through our ambivalent soil and bask in the warmth of summer sun.
Summer is nature's invitation to surface. It is the offer of a sabbatical, a time for all of life to come to life. We know, in our heads at least, that we are dispensable, but some of us find our inner taskmasters indispensable to our notions of who we are. Must we get serious about play to risk its pleasures? "When we say we're busy," suggests Moore, "we're really saying that we're caught in an emotional complex where our will is trapped and we're not free to do things we might wish for ourselves....it's difficult to imagine being busy and enchanted at the same time."
Nature gives us endless clues. Consider stars, light years away, which ask neither permission or forgiveness to burn and shine. "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet....Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." (Matthew 6:28-29).
Behold Alice Walker's "Revolutionary Petunia"--"Rebellious....Against the Elemental Crush." Or regard the abandon of Anne Pitkin's blue morning glory:
....Of course you don't want it in your rose garden among all the pruned, the decorous bushes. You don't want it in the vegetables, for it will romp through the tomatoes, beans and peas, will leave no room on the ground, or even in the air, for the leafy lettuces and cabbages soberly queuing up in their furrows. It will hog all the sky it can get, knowing as it does what enormous thirst is satisfied by blue.
....the morning glory has been blossoming for so long without permission that in some gardens it is no longer censored.
What does that tell you? See how it opens its tender throats to a world that can sting it, how, without apology for this excess, it blooms and blooms, though even yet it seems surprised.
We are each both resilient and fragile. We are all dependent on the periodic sanctuary that comes from letting go. Play, time-outs, enchantment nurture our will and capacity to continue and to make a positive difference while we are here. To summer is to find days and moments in our days to open our arms to the four winds, to stretch, to bask, to breathe once in the time it usually takes to breathe twice, to vacate, to lighten up. Teachers abound should we need them--flora, fauna, fathers, grandfathers, perhaps a tired reflection in the mirror. Lessons are ample in scripture and mythology and poetry, in stories written for the child inside us, who wonders why we hesitate.
"Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?"
asks poet Mary Oliver,
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"
What is it, I ask, that you plan to do with this wild and precious day?
Carpe diem. Amen.
"Blue Morning Glory"
Anne Pitkin
Voracious, yes. But when you see it,
shy blue flowers blaring like trumpets in spite of themselves, centers star shaped and yellow, when it startles you, early in the morning, all over a white picket fence, say, in Massachusetts, you might think 'triumphal,' 'prodigal,' 'awake.'
Of course you don't want it in your rose garden among all the pruned, the decorous bushes. You don't want it in the vegetables, for it will romp through the tomatoes, beans and peas, will leave no room on the ground, or even in the air, for the leafy lettuces and cabbages soberly queuing up in their furrows. It will hog all the sky it can get, knowing as it does what enormous thirst is satisfied by blue.
Father Michael says Follow the God of abundance.
Says we hurry from the moment's wealth for fear it will be taken. Think of this: the morning glory has been blossoming for so long without permission that in some gardens it is no longer censored.
What does that tell you? See how it opens its tender throats to a world that can sting it, how, without apology for this excess, it blooms and blooms, though even yet it seems surprised.
"The Nature of This Flower Is to Bloom"
Alice Walker
Rebellious. Living. Against the Elemental Crush. A Song of Color Blooming For Deserving Eyes. Blooming Gloriously For its Self. Revolutionary Petunia. Copyright AllSouls 1998.