20 July 2013
Saturday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Summer, when I was child, was not a day, but a time. Summer was lived outdoors and the immediacy of the world around me distinguished summertime from school time. In the Midwest, summer could be hot and humid, a cold spell, a thunderstorm; all seasonal varieties experienced by children who lived life on the back porch.
The responsibilities of adulthood put me back inside. Our world is filled with air-conditioned cars and buildings and so we scurry from one environmentally engineered space to the next fleeing from summer and its heat which tends to slow everyone down– a sort of forced retreat from the fast pace of the rest of the year.
Of course I would be against “going back” and getting rid of air-conditioning, but I do miss the opportunity summer offered to stop and slow down. The two-week vacation just doesn’t satisfy and I don’t think it would be out of line to enjoy God’s gift of summer and its slowness beyond the period of two weeks-at least for a few moments every day.