Summer's here, and (on top of the visitations and services and sessions, class lectures, conferences and meetings -- of which I am a peevish fan), it's brought the verdant offerings of herbs and roses and the annual sojourn to the Shore.
Today I will throw a little library into a raffish bag (usually prohibited, by my wife, from public appearance). Into it will go my poetry anthology and prayer book, and my moleskine cahier. Joining these will be John Brown's Body (couldn't resist the intentional ambiguity), Edwards' The Book of Ebenezer Le Page (since it's been commended so highly), Eusebius, Maximus and Patrick Leigh Fermor. I am considering either Douglas' South Wind or Waugh's Scoop.
As you might have guessed, I do not like meetings (whether they are called conferences, consultations, plenary sessions, or conventions). In fact, I prefer church banquets over any meeting. Retreats with prayer and presentations, and conversation, are perfectly defensible. I wonder how much the church suffered when it coopted (or got coopted by) the corporate system of committees, commissions, conventions, and the animal-farm-frisson of sophomoric parliamentarism.
As I languish in reeking hotel halls (which, the night before, hosted connubial mass rituals, and whose carpets are permeated by watered-down drinks and various smears from instant mashed potatos and regrettable stuffed mushrooms), and as I attempt to understand financial reports (which, I suspect, are intended to mystify, or at least filter out the notice of skeptics) and attend to the interminable sonorities of summaries of goals chosen and how they've been reached and how the recession has wrecked damage on accounts and billfolds ...
... as I sit uncomfortably under the cold refrigerator flourescence in a hall that's either stuffy or clammy, I think of a high summer's day going on, happily, somewhere outside. I think of my prism nexus diving and rocketing on Jockey's Ridge, my church school kids running relays at the parish picnic and my friends pitching horseshoes, my girls dancing in the surf, my marjoram spreading green and luxurious in the bed, my wife reading under the fair pavilion on the strand, and my brother and I looking out at the horseshoe bend of the Youghiogheny, with backpacks made lighter by a week's travail.
That is what summer's for: pilgrimages, earth and sea, sun and affection, friendship and prayer, gardens and voyage to mountain and shore.
Not conferences.
See you.
Comments