A Summertime Soul
The Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
July 18th, 2010


Message: A Summertime Soul

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. If you want to hear what was actually said, you can listen to sermon visit our website at www.uurockford.org. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2010.

The lover of earth cannot help herself,
walking in the fields even as her eyes water,
even as the sneezes begin.
Summer can be like that –
we can’t wait for it to arrive,
and then what do we do?
we complain about the heat.

There is a certain kind of discontinuity in summer time –
when things are different and out of place, somehow.
Last year, in our home, was Rosie’s first year of preschool,
it was just a few mornings a week,
but it makes summer time very different –
you lose a sense of routine,
a feeling exaggerated by the 2-month old baby
who has no real routine at all,
save eat-sleep-lookatstuff-eat again.
Summertime is especially discontinuous for me
because I work a week on at the church,
then take a week of study time to work on my doctoral project,
then back here for a week.
It’s hard to get in a grove.

We don’t have a lot of meetings,
since so many folks are on vacations,
or just not in the mood to sit inside at 7pm
when the sun is still out,
and the temperature is just right for the first time all day.

What about your life?
Is your summer schedule different?
Maybe you travel, go to a reunion or your regular time up north
maybe summer is your busy season,
and you are working harder than ever.
I know all you teachers are keeping busy,
teaching summer school or taking classes or doing other things,
but the regular rhythm is off.

Summer is a discontinuous season.
It is a time when things are different.

But we can have these discontinuous moments at any time –
these times when we step –
or, frankly – are shoved –
out of our grove,
and we notice,
hey, what’s this?

There’s this great little poem by Susan Erickson,
which I think of sometimes when I find myself
outside of my routine.
She writes this:
I confess today I got lost in technicalities.
Like folding an origami crane I paid so much
attention to folding, bending and creasing
the right way, I didn't notice I was creating
a colorful creature with wings to fly and soar.
Tomorrow let me be aware of the miracles that unfold.

Summer, sometimes, can be invitation to not get lost
in technicalities –
an invitation to be aware of miracles,
of the sun’s birthday
and the gay great happening illimitably earth –
to be aware,
to respond to this awareness
by living deliberately.

Let’s have some examples, shall we?
These aren’t stories
so much as they are moments in a summer season.

Take one.
A wedding.
How many of you have been to a wedding this summer
or have one you’ll go to later?
I’ve officiated a few already with some more to go later this summer.
I enjoy weddings.
Some of my colleagues,
they’ve gotten cynical about them over the years,
but that hasn’t happened to me and I hope it never does.
I like when the mother of the groom tears up,
and then the bridesmaid sniffles,
and then the bride laughs.

I like how the wedding ring is just a little too tight
for the groom’s finger – this happens every time –
and the bride has to squeeze.

I like seeing extended family meet each other.
I like the sense of hope –
whether the couple is young or old,
with our without children, or hopes for children,
whatever their gender, their race, their religious heritage –
I like the sense of possibility in a wedding,
the sense of adventure at the heart of it.

I like that people dress up.

When I officiate a wedding, I always try to say something
about how seeing these two people make a set of promises to each other
can be an inspiration and a reminder
to the rest of us
about the promises that matter most in our lives.

For folks who are or have been married – at least for me –
each wedding can be a reminder of their own wedding,
of their own promises to their beloved.

What I like about weddings are the little things,
and I think that’s what it means to live deliberately,

to notice,
to open the eyes of our eyes
and awake the ears of our ears,
it’s about the little things –
it’s about how you keep your promises,
day after day after day,
it’s about tears and giggles,
everyday life.

All our relationships are this way, really:
marriages, children, friendships –
they depend on the faculty of attention,
of noticing, of the occasional discontinuous moment
where we can step outside the routine
and see who we are and what matters most to us.

Not that we have to be perfect –
goodness knows I’m not,
and I’m sure none of you are either –
and I mean that with much love.
Nobody’s perfect,
nobody notices all the time,
even when we want them too.

But it seems to me that to have a summertime soul
means, at least in part, to be hopeful and joyous at weddings,
to celebrate love in all its varieties,
and to see our own loves as worthy of deliberate living.

Take two.
Something like Mary Oliver’s walk through the fields.
We were gifted with a membership to Anderson Gardens,
and Rosie loves to walk over and explore –
especially to feed the fish,
and cross the bridge at the base of the waterfall –
and, even though it is hot and muggy,
even though we, like the poet,
might sneeze in this irrepressible seizure of summerlove,
it’s good to get outside.

To ride your bicycle on the country road,
to take a canoe or a raft or a sailboat or a paddle-boat
out on the river or the lake
to stand in your own yard and hold your arms out and pray for a breeze
to splash at the pool
to walk, hand in hand, down the shaded city street,
to go to the outdoor market,
see your friends and buy some corn and some cheese, to be outside.

To say thanksgiving for most this amazing day,
to be outside and say thanksgiving.

I don’t want to disparage the other seasons,
which have their majesty and wonder,
but summertime is a lovely time to be alive,
to notice things,
to pay attention.

A summertime soul, in part,
is this: to be warmed by the sun,
to enjoy the mix of heat and shade,
wind and sun.
To live deliberately in the natural world –
to remember that we are part of this world,
not its masters or even its occupants,
but a member of the family of living things.

Take three:
One of the fun things about having an infant around
is that folks come to visit you,
and you aren’t really expected to entertain them.
But nonetheless, we try to do some fun Rockford things,
especially when folks come to visit for the first time.

When my sister came to visit about a month ago,
I wanted to make sure she had a good time.
When she came to visit us in Colorado Springs,
years ago,
we drove from the airport through the big-box zone –
much like you do here when you come off the exit at State St. –
and I think she decided that we lived in a cultural wasteland.
She lives in Seattle, and I wanted her to see that Rockford,
smaller as it is, is a cool place too.
So we went to Anderson Gardens,
and we rented a paddleboat out at Rock Cut,
and we went to the City Market –
and we took a day, since she had never been,
and went into Chicago, did the Art Institute and walked up Michigan
to the Hancock tower,
had a drink at the bar at the top,
though it was too cloudy to see anything.
When I took her back to the airport,
I was pretty sure that this time,
she wouldn’t think we were living in a wasteland.

Summertime is tourist season,
and this is another way of having a summertime soul –
to be a tourist,
in your own town,
or nearby.
There’s plenty to do – parks and restaurants, museums, theater, and more –
to see a place as if a visitor,
to hit the highlights and see the sights.

Thoreau says he means to live deliberately,
to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,
and a summer time soul, I submit to you,
is a way of living like this –
with deliberateness and with the faculty of noticing.
That means seeing what is around you,
experiencing it,
living in the place you live with a spirit of adventure and risk.

I guess what I’m trying to say today
is that the summertime soul is the embedded soul,
and the soul that takes its embeddedness seriously.

We are in relationships –
with those we love, with our families and our friends,
with our fellow church-goers, with our co-workers and our neighbors,
we are in these relationships,
but these connections require our attention, our cultivation.
They require attending to the little things
that make our human encounters worthy and beautiful.
They require making and keeping and renewing our promises.

We are part of the world around us,
in all its fullness and vibrancy,
are embedded into this natural world of sunshine and rain clouds,
fields of grasses and summer sneezes,
and so get out into the world,
live in it, attend to it, notice it,
and sing praise and thanksgiving that such a gift as this –
life, growth, everyday miracles –
that such a gift as this is presented before us.

We are embedded into a community –
a community with hope and vibrancy and possibilities,
and it is wise and fruitful to attend to these places where we live,
to celebrate them, to see them with optimistic eyes.

I’m not against Thoreau and Oliver and cummings,
but there is a way in which they are each a little too individualistic –
I, myself, will confront life into corner,
and so on –
that’s the legacy of transcendentalism, I suppose -
a sense of the individual’s majesty.
In this summer season, I hope you might take their impulse –
the impulse to discover, and praise, and notice, and love –
and apply it to not just your life by yourself,
but to your life with others in the world.
For however many days of summerlove remain,
I hope we might dive headlong into being connected,
to cultivating those connections.

Notice when things are different than usual,
take these openings as a chance to ask good questions,
and reach out,
and make promises,
and make a home in the world as it is,
to open the eyes of your eyes,
and the ears of your ears –
which is to say, to open your soul,
to give thanks,
to laugh and weep and – most of all- pay attention.

You never know what might happen next.