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Just Another Essay



A Midsummer Night's Reverie

Weekly Essay for June 22, 2004 by James E. Nelson

It never occurred to me just when midsummer was. In fact, it never occurred to me that midsummer was a specific day. I guess I always thought of it as a period of time, an approximation, something more mythical than scientific, as in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. It wasn't until just a few years ago, listening to A Prairie Home Companion, I realized that midsummer is actually the same thing as the summer solstice; it's simply a different way of perceiving the flow of the seasons. Over the last few years I have found this discovery deeply satisfying.

You probably think that's a gross overstatement, but I'm serious about the phrase "deeply satisfying." There's a couple of different ways we can look at the world. On the one hand, we can be clinical; we can figure it out; we can understand it. On the other hand, we can approach it with wonder and awe. These two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but at the extremes are tragic. The one extreme sees the world as a cadaver to be sliced up, categorized, and controlled. The other extreme treats the world as a mystical other or primal life force. The one approach is the temptation of scientific rationalism, the other is the temptation of animistic religious sensibilities. And much like the ancient rocks Scylla and Charybdis, safe passage lies, not with either pole, but in the safe navigation between the two.

Defining the summer solstice as the first day of summer may have the benefit of being scientifically accurate (because we can define the actual solstice down to the minute and second) but it is factually wrong. Anyone who will take the time to get their nose out of a science text book, play hooky from school for a day, and actually see for themselves what's happening outside the hermetically sealed glass of the science building will recognize that summer is already well underway at the time of the solstice.

The rationalistic culture that confused solstice with the first day of summer is a culture that tries to define, describe, and through those tools, control the world around them. Their penchant for figuring out what's behind what's there has blinded them to what is obviously there in the first place.

By equating this penchant with scientific culture, I've been inaccurate. Michael Polanyi, the brilliant philosopher of science, rightly distinguishes between scientific culture and technological culture. He also rightly labels what I have described above, not as science gone astray, but as technology run rampant. True science is wonder-filled and awe inspiring. Technology tends to be crowded by gadgets that eventually are known for their dull sameness rather than their creativity.

It is the captives of the technological culture who populate our local news rooms and coffee shops, commenting on how it seems like summer has been around for weeks and, in turn, questioning whether the weatherman and mother nature herself maybe got this "first day of summer" thing wrong. There is an underlying arrogance in this silly annual banter on the airwaves and in the coffee shops, that is often missed simply because of the banality of the conversation. We know precisely when summer starts. We don't have to go outside and watch the buds turn to flowers and leaves. We don't have to look into the trees and see the eggs hatch to become a new generation of birds. We don't have to watch the horizon as huge thunder clouds slowly but surely roil into circling tornadic activity. Those are simply miscues of silly old mother nature. We technological sorts understand that summer begins at the solstice.

A technological society with a penchant for defining things, and thus controlling things, is enamored with beginnings and endings. Searching for the holy grail of beginnings and endings tends to lead to an arrogance that is both tiring and depressing. One of the early rationalists, in a prescient comment foretelling the attitudes of technological culture, said that if he could find out the exact location and velocity of every atom of matter in the universe, he could tell us when the universe began and when and how it will end.

Let's imagine for just a moment it was possible, and he was right. Sadly, he would miss the beauty and glory of a simple sunrise because he would be so wrapped up in his endlessly long equations defining the process.

Rather than the endless search for touchstones at the beginning and end of things, a much more liberating and realistic way to see the world is through the touchstones of middles. Middles are notoriously less precise, but infinitely more interesting than beginnings and ending. The closer you get to actually nailing down a beginning (or ending for that matter), the more focuses you become on that moment in time and the less able you are to see anything else at all. But from the vantage point of the middle, it is possible to see the grandeur of not only the middle, but also the beginnings and the endings. The beginnings may be rather imprecise and the endings rather murky from the vantage point of the middle, but they are clearly visible all the same.

And that's precisely what Midsummer is, a touchstone in the middle. It doesn't try to do the impossible and give us that precise moment when Spring became Summer. The passage from Spring to Summer is, after all, slightly different for the tree in the front yard, the rabbit in the hedge, and the hawk high above, trying to find the rabbit amongst the trees and the hedges. The passage from Spring to Summer is far too mystical and surprising to be defined precisely; it is best celebrated by looking back on it seated firmly in the middle.

Evangelical Christianity has this same tragic bent toward defining beginnings and ends. (And upon reflection this should not be too surprising because the Evangelical form of Christianity came about at the same time as technological society.) It too tries to control through definition rather than celebration of realities in all their fluid, changing, and dynamic surprise. Take the Evangelical bent on defining when a person becomes a Christian. This seems a noble enough enterprise on the surface because we all need touchstones in history on which to ground our personal faith. But defining a precise beginning implies that we are in control of that beginning. The moment when we become a Christian, when we "invite Christ into our hearts" is up to us. Like the science of the seasons discussed above, this notion is technically correct while at the same time terribly out of touch with the surprising reality of God's work in the world.

But what if we were to approach our faith from a midsummer sort of perspective? What if we were to acknowledge the important touchstones of our faith life, but refrain from trying to place those touchstones precisely at the end or the beginning? What if instead of carefully defining those beginnings, I looked back from the middle and acknowledged God's presence and activities in different times in my life? I could then acknowledge God's faithful shepherding of a wayward lamb in a way much more faithful to the reality of God's ever-insistent and surprising love.

It's deeply satisfying to see my life from the perspective of God's surprising and glorious love rather than from the perspective of my fickle decisions. My decisions, by themselves, are rather discouraging. But my decisions, when seen as part of that intricate tapestry of the life of God as it flows into and through the world, are fascinating, sometimes beautiful, and when one can discern how the divine weave directs and shapes those decisions, that process is positively awe-inspiring.

When I look back at my life in this way it's a sort of midsummer reverie that's much more gratifying than carefully setting out the parameters of precisely when I accepted Jesus as my Savior.