In Between Time
Poet Jennifer Grotz wrote:
"Summer specializes in time, slows it down almost to dream.
…
Summer lingers, but it’s about ending. It’s about how things redden and ripen and burst and come down."
I feel the paradoxical quality of summer time she describes most acutely in August, which has always seemed to me a kind of peculiar time at church. I’m back from my summer break. Many of you have returned from summer travels as well, because students, teachers, and professors have returned to classrooms and lecture halls–or will very soon. But, though the church’s fiscal year started July 1, our new program year doesn’t start until the Sunday after Labor Day. Our staff here, at UUCS, and our board and our committees are preparing to “do church” in the new year–while doing church now. August isn’t last year and it isn’t this year. Yet, here we are in the space in-between one year and the next.
Even apart from church life, August is an in-between time. It’s still summer–with the autumnal equinox 7 weeks off from today. And in much of the Northern Hemisphere, certainly including Savannah, the weather feels like summer. But hours of daylight have begun to decrease, and noticeably so. With the coming and going of August 1st a few days ago, we are now closer to the end of summer than the beginning of it.
In both the Christian tradition and the ancient Celtic tradition, August first is a holy day marking the halfway point of summer and celebrating the first fruits and grains of the new year’s harvest–Lammas and Lughnasa, respectively. Early August is a time of abundance, ripening, gathering. As indeed we are gathering, a congregation that even if every single one of us was gone for some portion of the summer has never wavered in its being, its wholeness, its holiness. A congregation of abundance, and ripe with possibilities.
Most of our lives, the days and the hours, aren’t spent in church or church pursuits (well, a lot of mine are) and most of our lives, the months, aren’t lived in August. But in-between times? Oh, yeah. That’s where we dwell.
We have a name for it in childhood–the tweens, when kids are not yet teenagers but not exactly young children either. Child development experts have identified a set of physical, emotional and psychological characteristics that define this stage that roughly corresponds with middle school. But for those who are tweens–it’s just life. And often a life of not yet. Not yet old enough for all the freedoms they desire–freedoms that the explosion of media and social media in recent decades have made more visible and more enticing than ever. Perhaps that’s why, though the word itself has been around much longer, its usage has become almost ubiquitous since its appearance in a 1987 article in the magazine Marketing and Media Decisions. Regardless of contemporary origins as a designation to aid marketing, the tweens are a time when kids are often expected to step up to household responsibilities and levels of academic rigor beyond that of their younger years, while being denied those aforementioned freedoms–later curfew, less supervision, consumption of more media, etc. A time of acutely felt betweenness.
Once we pass through the tweens, and the teens, in-between times become a way of life. The time between beginning a teaching career and earning tenure; the time between completing adoption paperwork and home studies and being matched with a child; the time between the end of the winter holidays and the beginning of summer vacation; the time between beginning a job search and landing a job; the time between undergoing a medical test and receiving the results; between submitting a manuscript and receiving a publishing contract; between the heartbreaking end of a cherished relationship and the beginning of healing and trust; between making an offer on a house and moving in; between starting a new job and receiving the first paycheck; the time between elections and change; between communications from estranged children or friends or siblings; between putting the cupcakes in the oven and serving them for supper.
If this sermon were a bumper sticker slogan it would be a variation on the classic life is what happens while you’re making other plans: life is what happens while you’re waiting for the next thing to happen.
Our lives are a long, sometimes overlapping series of times in-between something that happened and another thing we hope will happen or at least expect to happen. Depending on our particular circumstances in any given instant, in-between times can be frustrating, even discouraging. Filled with nervous fidgeting, repetitive, swirling thoughts, cycles of despair, boredom, and hope, as we wait for something to happen, to change, to arrive. Tinged often by doubt or even fear–will what we’re awaiting arrive at all? and if it does will it be what we truly want or perhaps something so different from what we expected that in the end we’ll wish we were back where we started?
Other times the in-between times have a quality best summed up by W. H. Auden in these lines from his Christmas Oratorio For the Time Being:
"But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry
And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it."
Life in-between the big events of life. Often dull, unexciting and uninspiring, especially if compared to the larger, brighter, more productive, creative, prosperous or meaningful lives of others–lives we used to get carefully curated glimpses of only in annual Christmas letters but now see every day on social media.
We’ve all experienced life that way sometimes–dull in comparison to some perceived ideal, dull even sometimes in comparison to earlier stages of our own lives. And when we do, while we may wallow for a while in the self pity of not having somehow achieved a bigger, better life, or the self recrimination of not doing whatever would have given us less dull and uninspiring lives–sooner or later after the wallowing and the self pity and recrimination, we probably give ourselves a good talking to, reminding ourselves that this is what it means to be a grown-up. Life mostly is monotony between big much anticipated events–and that’s a good thing most of the time. It gives our brains and our nervous systems and usually our finances a break. As John Tagliabue wrote in this morning’s first reading:
the ordinary
blankness of little dramatic consciousness is good for the
health sometimes,
only Dostoevsky can be Dostoevskian at such long
long tumultuous stretches;
...we don't want
Sunday church bells
ringing constantly.
Sometimes, in fact, when we’ve had long eventful, tumultuous stretches or long stretches of constantly ringing celebratory bells–sometimes we don’t have enough in-between time, and we long the for monotony of a time that is neither the big thing that has happened and the big thing that will happen.
"How could I look at anything in this world
and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart?
What should I fear?
One morning
in the leafy green ocean
the honeycomb of the corn’s beautiful body
is sure to be there."
In our second reading this morning Mary Oliver offers a third perspective on times such as the month of August at church and other in-between times. Neither the enervating dullness of Auden’s kitchen table, nor the simply sanity-preserving break from drama of Tagliabue’s welcome monotony, but rather the promise that though we can neither see nor hear nor otherwise observe it, something ripens in the time slow season of summer. And thus we need not tremble and fear.
Could it be so in our lives too? In the long stretches between submitting the paperwork and learning our fate–tenure, a child, a house, a diagnosis–is something ripening in us, turning from green to gold, ready for the harvest in the fullness of time? When it feels like the months stretching into years between communication from our estranged loved one are destroying our spirit day by long day, could it be that some seed, rooted deep within our spirit is cracking open, growing plump and rich, readying itself to feed a reconciliation? Are the in-between times not characterized by stalling and inertia and inaction, but rather by an outer stillness beneath which abundance and possibility burgeon toward fruition? That rather times of monotony and dullness we must endure until the next big thing happens, they are times of miracle, unobserved but real, and that the next big thing comes not after the in-between time but out of the in-between time? Can we have faith enough to neither tremble nor fear nor wish away the in-between time?
May August be that for us here at church. A holy time during which miracles have their way in us and among us and around us. Miracles, the evidence of which will be revealed to us at the season’s next turning. Amen.
