Summer is just too short. When August comes around, I can’t help but think of Shakespeare’s line, “Rough winds to shake the darling buds of May, and summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”

Whatever happened to the summers of our childhoods, that seemed to last forever? Author Frederick Buechner wrote a memorable passage about this in “The Sacred Journey”:

“What child, while summer is happening, bothers to think much that summer will end? What child, when snow is on the ground, stops to remember that not long ago the ground was snowless? It is by its content rather than its duration that a child knows time, by its quality rather than its quantity — happy times and sad times, the time the rabbit bit your finger, the time you had your first taste of bananas and cream, the time you were crying yourself to sleep when somebody came and lay down beside you in the dark for comfort.

Childhood’s time is Adam and Eve’s time before they left the garden for good, and from that time on divided everything into before and after.”
For a child, again in the words of Buechner, this wonderful time is “running forever through the firefly dusk of summer”.

In the liturgical churches, summer is a part of what is known as “ordinary time”. That’s appropriate, because it’s not Easter or Christmas; summer is made up of days to be counted, to be lived. A wonderful preacher and author, Barbara Brown Taylor, has written a new book titled “An Altar In the World”, in which she embarks on a search for the sacred in the midst of ordinary life. She begins with the biblical character, Jacob. Jacob was no saint in the usual sense of the word. He was born into one of those many dysfunctional families, and had to leave that family after cheating his brother out of his father’s blessing. He spent a good portion of his life “on the lam”, running from the ghost of that memory.

One ordinary night, Jacob has a dream, and the dream changes his life. Who knows where the dream came from, but his vision of a ladder that spanned from heaven to earth was an unforgettable glimpse into a reality that remains hidden, unless one night we gain the eyes to see such things.

After he wakes in the morning, Joseph sets up a stone for an altar and exclaims, “Surely this is the house of God, and I didn’t know it.” 

Taylor writes, “What if God can drop a ladder absolutely anywhere, with no regard for the religious standards developed by those who have made it their business to know the way of God?”

What the author is driving at, I think, is that our unpredictable God is holy but not domesticated. Experiences of God cannot be limited to churches and temples, and “ladders” can appear in unlikely places — even in the ordinary, extraordinary days of summer’s late lease.
   
Blair Monie is senior pastor of the Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church (phpc.org). The Worship section is a regular feature underwritten by Advocate Publishing and the churches listed on these pages. For information about helping support the Worship section, call 214.560.4202.