Things start in September. That doesn’t make much sense at first glance, since the name of the month reveals it was seventh in the Roman calendar until two Roman Caesars, Julius and Augustus, inserted their namesake months just ahead of it. Why start in the seventh month? Seven is regarded as lucky in many cultures, but whether that contributed any impetus, I do not know. Things surely start in September.
Of course, because modern Americans can’t wait for anything anymore (see: Christmas etc.), September starts in August. Eating a chunk out of The Most Wonderful Month of the Year, the campus lit up like Cape Canaveral around an Apollo moon rocket this past week as parents brought their kids for the beginning of school, our enrollment up and expectations even more so. There had been anticipatory activity the week before as teachers and staff prepared. But breaking our stride for the long Labor Day weekend, we know things really start in September.
Summer has many activities associated with it, but starting is not one of them. “Indolence” may be only a summertime ideal, rarely if ever achieved or indulged in our always-on culture, but until the season passes, we still abstain from starting, along with other burdensome or too-serious things.
The first week of September back in 1986, I moved to Washington to seek my career and my “fortune”. I had finished crisscrossing the country to vacation and visit friends in what I called my “summer of dissolute living.” Freshly granted B.A. and frightfully brief C.V. in hand, I had a car, an interview suit, and a place to live; a frequent collaborator of my father, who lived just down the street from Blessed Sacrament Church in Chevy Chase, offered her basement. Thirty-seven years and several vocational twists and turns ago, it all started in September.
Looking back even further, sixty years in fact, the whole undertaking, vocations and all, began in September. Steve Smith, my dad, and Bernie Eichenlaub, my mom, were married in Sacred Heart Church in the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh on September 7, 1963. To try to grasp the change and happening that has unfolded in the intervening time simply boggles the mind – well, it boggles MY mind, anyway. And to look for a moment at that one thing that has stayed the same – that Steve and Bernie Smith are married – is to find that words of measure or description fail.
As human beings fashioned in the image and likeness of God, you and I and every person on earth now and ever are capable of amazing things. We are capable of and engage in innumerable things; projects, activities, and undertakings, many of them mundane, some of them selfish, none of them irrelevant. Every time we do, we can and in fact should echo and incarnate the creating and life-giving love of God, faithful and self-sacrificing. Alas, we do not achieve that every time. But we can, and occasionally do; and none of us should fear to try.
Be not afraid, our Lord says, in words among His most often quoted. Anybody who seeks to instill fear in you or me or our young people desires the opposite of our good. It is in this context -- of living, of giving, of starting – that the deep meaning of Christ’s exhortation to us is revealed in fulness and in truth.
If it is good, you can do it. If it is hard, you should do it. If it is long, you must begin. Who knows what manner of things will start this September?
Monsignor Smith
