Summer: Hot, humid and hopeful

When I was a child, summer was magical. My siblings and I spent every day outside, running down the street to our friends’ house, playing wiffleball and cops and robbers in the alley, plucking petals off the roses and leaves off the mint plants, and reenacting stories from our favorite books.

We didn’t have air conditioning at home. So, on the hottest days, a few of us would volunteer to walk to the grocery store. I remember walking slowly through the refrigerated aisles with my siblings, soaking in the coolness until we were pleasantly shivering. Then we’d pay for our groceries and slip back out into the heat, climbing a dusty hill and circling the satellite dish by the Channel 2 building on our way back to our townhouse in Rodgers Forge.

Every once in a while it would be too hot to turn on the oven, so my mother would serve ice cream for dinner. Then we would spend the evenings sitting in the living room with the windows open, listening to an Orioles game on the radio, waiting for a breeze to blow through. We’d collapse into our beds for the night and wake up ready to do it all over again.

Those summer days were full of freedom and discovery. You had time with your family, but you also found ways to test your wings a bit.

Maybe this would be the summer you’d learn to roller skate or ride a bicycle without holding the handlebars or dive off the diving board. Maybe this would be the year you’d figure out the hula hoop or finally master a cartwheel or pump so high on the swing you could kick the tree branches over the playground. Maybe your parents would finally decide you were old enough to babysit for a neighbor’s child or walk to High’s with a friend to get ice cream cones.

There’s something about the summer heat and extra playtime that seems to make children grow especially quickly. So much growth happens during the slower, longer, fuller summer days. And, although some of the magic of summer disappears as we get older and turn our attention more to crab feasts and cookouts and time at the beach, maybe we can still hold onto some of that joy of discovery. Maybe if we approached summer more like children – slowing down, soaking in a little extra time with nature, and letting ourselves dive a little deeper into something that helps us feel more alive – we might encounter God in a new way.

At a time when people are talking about a “new normal,” many of us are craving for “ordinary.” We want ordinary encounters with friends and family, ordinary interactions in our parish, and ordinary rhythms to ordinary days. It’s hard to imagine when what we viewed as ordinary before will be part of our lives again. Still, as we move through what the church calls Ordinary Time, perhaps the richness of the warm, slower summer months offer us something extraordinary in this simple time – a chance not just for rest and rejuvenation, but also for spiritual growth.

Jesuit Father Adolfo Nicolas, the former superior general of the Society of Jesus who passed away earlier this year, spoke about developing “a taste for silence, for this space where only God can enter, where we can hear the Spirit.”

In the quiet warmth of the summer months, perhaps we can find a little time to cultivate that space for God and let him enter into our lives in a new way. Maybe this is the season when the seeds he has planted in our own gardens will begin to grow so that by the time summer ends, we will be renewed and ready for the next step on life’s journey.

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