Nativity Catholic Church
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Those Long Summer Nights In the recently named Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, the central character of the book, Reverend John Ames, is writing an extended letter to his young son of seven, about his own life and that of his forbearers. He is doing so because his present terminal heart condition, at the grand age of 76, will not afford him the opportunity to see his child grow into a man, and thus Ames will be denied the ability to share the family legacy with his son first hand. As Reverend Ames recalls many touching and gripping events of his own boyhood, he struck a chord with me when he briefly described some long summer nights:
“We played
catch in the evenings after supper till the sun Indeed, I remember many a boyhood summer, with those ever-so-long-lasting hours of daylight affording us extended opportunities for baseball, as well as kickball and other childhood games. Not caring much for the science of it all, we simply assumed that those extra hours of sunlight were intended as God’s gift to us children for having suffered through all those months of school. And now that we were released from the bondage of the classroom, we were free to run and play as long as we could, sort of making up for all that lost time buried in the books! As I think back on those nights, I can picture my friends and me, much as Reverend Ames recalls, playing baseball well beyond the twilight. The fact that the ball was getting harder and harder to see with the descent of nightfall did little to drag us off the street. In fact, the team who happened to be behind in the score always wanted to keep playing, in the sure hope that with the darkness came the great opportunity for more errors—and thus more runs to score—and thus a last gasp chance for victory! When this turn of events did actually occur, of course it was the now triumphant team who declared without argument: “Let’s quit now…it’s way too dark! Somebody might get hurt!” I can still hear my mother or grandmother’s voice calling out to us, telling us to come inside. Enough was enough, as far as they were concerned, and running around the neighborhood or playing ball in the street after dark was flirting with disaster. We, of course, had no concept of “enough was enough.” It is inherently not in the nature of a child to grasp this very adult admonition. For us, there was never “enough” time to do the things we wanted to do, to live the life we were enjoying each day. We tried to squeeze as much out of every minute of every day that we possibly could, as much as life would allow us—even if it meant battling the dropping curtain of night on the day’s larger-than-life stage of events. We were always begging for more—one more “minute” before we come in…one last television show before bedtime…one more chat on the corner with friends before taking a bath…one more fly ball in the mitt before it bopped us in the head. As children drinking in the fullness of summer nights, we seemed to be caught up in a way of magnanimous living that would never end. John’s Gospel reminds us what the true purpose of Jesus and the Spirit’s presence is in God’s creation and our lives. Jesus proclaims: “A thief comes only to steal and slaughter and destroy. I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly (John 10:10).” Perhaps as adults, we may find ourselves lamenting those days when we embraced life with zest and fullness—the way Jesus apparently intended us to do so. Oh yes, indeed we still may be squeezing out every ounce of daylight we can and carrying on our activities well into the dark, but it seems now we are doing so more out of desperation and despair, ending our days incredibly tired, our energies spent, and wondering how we’ll be able to get up and do it all over again tomorrow. As children, in the glory of those long summer nights, our parents stood wide-eyed and amazed at our unending energies, while we wanted to embrace tomorrow as a long absent grandmother fresh back from a wonderful vacation and bearing lots of souvenir gifts for us! On closer inspection of the Gospels, it is clear that Jesus didn’t simply intend just any kind of “abundance” in life. Jesus’ abundance is always a matter of quality over quantity. Jesus offers a particular kind of abundance, one that invigorates us rather than debilitates us, one that lifts us up rather than weighs us down, one that liberates us rather than makes us slaves to our jobs, commitments, families, and myriad responsibilities. I wonder, in the poignant scenes we so lovingly like to recall from the Scriptures, where Jesus is calling the little children, inviting them to “Come to me,” whether or not these encounters happened on long summer nights. If they did, I can see Jesus inviting them to draw near…and they in turn begging for just “one more minute”…and he in turn gently smiling at their zest for abundant life—and then declaring so aptly, “To such as these little ones belongs the Kingdom of God.”
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