Summer Amnesty

"Summer is a mood--a space cleared. We need this amnesty of a plotless 'now': a time when we feel and be rather than think or do."

--Melvin Maddocks

Yes, I said to myself, that is what I want: forgetfulness, at least a short period of it. I want to forget about this troubled world for a brief time. I want to forget about my problems. I want to forget about grief and sorrow. I want to forget about mortality. I especially want to forget all of the things on my "to do" list.

Even oblivion has its momentary attractions.

But also I like the hint of intentionality which accompanies the idea of amnesty. An intentional overlooking. Meaning, to me, a conscious decision to lay our burdens down. A "plotless ‘now’ . . . when we feel and be rather than think and do."

From a theological point of view, "pardon" sounds pretty good, also. Forgiveness. Forgiving ourselves for all that we have failed to accomplish, for all that we have failed to say, for all of our shortcomings, for being who we are, or, more futilely, for being who we aren’t. Granting ourselves amnesty: pardoning ourselves or others, giving ourselves and others a break, forgiving and forgetting at least for some limited period of time.

I happen to think that in this respect, the Europeans have it all right, and we here in the United States have it all wrong. In Europe, a summer vacation of four to six weeks is the rule for everyone, and not just the exception. It gives folks the chance to really "stop and stare," as our previous hymn encourages us to do.

It takes one or two weeks just to slow down and "disengage" (another of Maddocks’ words) from our work-a-day lives!

We all need time to decompress and to recharge our psychic batteries. We need a break from what the poet Wordsworth, in the early 19th century, presciently called "getting and spending": "The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. . . ," he wrote, not knowing how much truer his words would ring for later generations than for his own.

"Resting" and "waiting" are the other words that Maddocks uses to describe the summer amnesty, with the "passive" goal of bringing us deeper understanding and "a sense of grace that never comes from the most devoted and intense activity."

I sometimes wonder if we Americans even know how to do it. Do we know how to rest and wait? Or is the Protestant work ethic so deeply ingrained in us--especially in us Yankees--that we can never take the time simply to "stop and stare", to feel and be?

Even that spiritual hero of mine, Henry David Thoreau, seemed to beg the question, when he wrote, "I wish to begin this summer well, to do something in it worthy of it and of me. . ." [my emphasis]. The idea, dear Henry, is to do nothing in it, worthy or otherwise. Are we even capable of such a letting go? Or must we always accomplish something, anything, even in our leisure?

(Cellphones and laptops and palm pilots, by the way, have not made our task of letting go any easier. But it still can be done.)

In actuality, Henry David was apparently pretty good at stopping and staring. A famous anecdote has him answering an inquiry about where to find Indian arrow points by bending down and picking one up directly in his path. Who among us would even notice? His friends noticed a disinclination in him to the call of a steady job. Even his writing career was not terribly successful during his lifetime, a reality the humor of which was not lost upon him, as a story he told about unsold copies of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is evidence. Most of his contemporaries chalked him up as a failure.

Meanwhile, he was doing odd or menial jobs, making pencils in the Thoreau family business, paying undue attention to Emerson’s wife Lydian, and reading and thinking and observing and writing Walden, perhaps the greatest American spiritual classic of them all.

We need the opportunity, if not the excuse, which summer offers to take a hiatus from our normal routines: ". . . the lofty open pause of summer," Arnold Kenseth calls it in a little prayer:

We give thee thanks
For this good day and all our yesterdays;
For good days and bad days,
For days of hope and days of despair,
For days of losing and days of finding.

And we praise thee especially
For the lofty open pause of summer:
A pasture running to a hill,
A pool and a deer,
Many birds in the mornings
And their soft talk in the evenings,
And sleep drifting in
After the games and the run and the people.

Under it, over it all, most gracious one
We hear and touch thyself.

Writing in his famous Divinity School Address, delivered in mid- July of 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote,

In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers.

It is almost as if his attention to and appreciation for the "luxury" of simply breathing deeply is the catalyst for those ultimate questions of being and reality. How can we even ask them if we don’t stop long enough to savor the fact of merely being alive? (Did I say "merely"?) For "what am I?" and "what is?" are still the questions we long to answer. And not tomorrow, at some uncertain future date, but today, in the here and now.

The problem for us seems to lie in our inability to remain rooted and mindful in the present. As the British poet Philip Larkin has written,

Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy,
Something is always approaching; every day
Till then we say. . . .

"We welcome summer, and not simply for the freedom from writing the weekly sermon," writes my colleague John Buehrens.

Well, at least we preachers like to think so. But as to whether we will make good use of the summer remains to be seen. The discipline of the Sunday sermon is not such a bad thing, after all, but even the best preacher runs out of gas eventually and needs to refill her or his metaphorical tank. And unlike the real thing, there is a price to pay if we don’t fill this one.

All of us need our periods of dormancy in order to reclaim what our Young Church chalice lighting calls "the energy of action." We need to give ourselves a break, literally, in which to let our subconscious restore itself and prepare us for the challenging days of growth which lie ahead. As long as we are alive and conscious of being so, this will always be the case. Our purpose in life, as someone has said, is "to grow our souls." We ignore that purpose at our peril:

What is this life, if full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare . . .
No time to see . . .
No time to turn at beauty’s glance. . . .
A poor life this, if full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

My wish for each and every one of you is that you will taste a bit of that summer amnesty, that you will take the time to simply feel and be, and that you will relax into the "plotless now" that summer offers to those of us willing to let go and let be. May you be, if not oblivious (and given the nature of many summer activities, perhaps better not to be), at least some of the time forgetful. May you find pardon for all that troubles you or holds you back from being the person you long to be. And if you cannot find all or even any of the answers you seek, may you at least come to live more comfortably in the questions, as the poet Rilke once suggested we should all learn to do.

Meanwhile, may you be blessed by gentle summer breezes, in all your comings and goings, until we meet again. God bless! Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock