“Summer of 2020 in God’s Country" And so, now we must contend with summer’s end. Our children return to school, and we to our labours. But this summer’s end is an anxious one for many as we try to prepare for the unpredictable behaviour of the Covid-19 virus. Perhaps some of us even pine for the uncomplicated, easy joys of summers past? But what of our children, the children themselves who are returning to school? What do they anticipate? Are their minds filled with excitement and wide-eyed expectation? Or are their thoughts perhaps burdened with silent fear and anxiety? We can better understand our challenges as experienced adults, but what do our children see and understand? What are they experiencing in their minds and hearts? The great American Pulitzer-prize writer, James Rufus Agee, a quietly devout Christian, wrote a poetic reflection about a balmy, summer evening when he was six years old, living in Knoxville, Tennessee, lying with his family on the cool grass of their backyard, taking in the stars and listening to carriages and horses trotting by on the cobblestone streets. It was the summer of 1915. In child-like terms he writes, “It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently, and talking gently, and watching the street. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt; a loud auto; a quiet auto; people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling along. On the rough, wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they each seem like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist; he is living at home. One is a musician; she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me.” On a commission from the celebrated 1940s soprano, Eleanor Steber, accomplished composer, Samuel Barber, would write his beloved masterpiece for soprano and orchestra based on James Agee’s reflection called, “Knoxville: Summer of 1915”. It is a popular, perennial favourite on many summer-stock stages and concert venues. The scene he captured is now long gone, fading into the past when porches lost their popularity to the relief of Air-Conditioners and Television sets in the 1960s. Yet, this work beckons us to put down cellphones and remove ear-buds, to ponder something we seem to have lost. What is it? It is 2 things: family and community, that wonderful sharing when people come together, smile, tell stories, embrace, and laugh with abandon. Also, when they help and correct each other. The Holy Spirit glides into our lives like the fragrant mist of evening coming off the warm lake, mixed with dew from the vast, yellow fields which ground us in God’s hands. But there is a hint of sadness in Agee’s story, and in the strains of Barber’s music. It seems we have more in common with Agee’s summer than just the nostalgia of an early 20th C evening. A year later, Agee’s father would die in a car accident, and soon after, he would lose loved ones to the Spanish flu pandemic. Agee went on to produce narratives on poverty and man’s inhumanity to man during the depression, trying to correct and inform his community. He would die of a heart attack in the back of a taxicab in NYC at only 45 yrs of age, perhaps longing for that summer of 1915 when family, community, mother and father were good to him. Agee ends Summer of 1915 with a prayer, and a wish to know who he is: “May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father. Oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away. … After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, not now, not ever, tell me who I am.” Clearly, an existential question. So, will we tell our children who they are? Will we tell them their best friend is Jesus, with them every moment of their lives? Will we teach them to be charitable, thoughtful, kind, generous, responsible? Will we define right and wrong for them, gently correct them when they need correction? Will we teach them to pray? And will we correct ourselves and each other to determine who we truly are? This is what Jesus is asking us to do: to help each other find out who we are. Let us lie down in the cool grass of our backyards, or sit on our porches in peace, comforted to know, that, like our children, we, too, will flourish with correction and guidance from God, and each other. Because, who are we? – We are all Children of God! Rev Fr Christopher Tracey, Saint Joseph Parish Saugeen Shores, Ontario
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Father's Blog
Rev. Fr. Christopher Tracey
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