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| These all look to thee, to give them their food in due season. When thou givest to them, they gather it up; when thou openest thy hand, they are filled with good things. Psalm 104: 27 - 28 |
It is the lean time of the year. Not for the produce of the land, no; we are in the fat of that sweet season. No, it is lean around the rectory. Our summer student, Father Philip Tran, has finished his compressed course load at Catholic University for this year and whooshed away in his electric-mobile to return after some exploration to Beaumont, or more precisely, Winnie, Texas.
Father Marcin Wiktor is also not here, though he did fool some people who spotted his car behind the rectory. He drove back from Mississippi a few weeks ago and then promptly flew to Poland to visit his family. He will be back shortly before his classes resume at CUA, later in August.
That means it’s down to just me and Father Swink. As you know, he is a man of action, whereas I tend more toward contemplation. Because most of the action has reached the end of its progress, such as his popular study of the First Letter of Saint Peter, he is fidgety. After the last session I had to chase his lingering devotees off the parking lot! Now he has no projects ready to hand; he is a bit at loose ends.
Thus stymied here, he will be away for some of the coming weeks, seeking enrichment and enhancement of the spiritual and theological sort, only to bring it home and spend it on you when the regularly scheduled frenzy resumes. It will be especially quiet around the holy House of Soubirous, at least until the Holy Day on the fifteenth. Shortly after that the teachers will slip into the school while I look the other way, pretending all of August is a summer month even as the drumbeat grows louder.
Because of this personnel situation, if you can call it that, we will reduce our weekday Masses to one per day until the fourteenth of August. The weekend Mass schedule will be the same as ever, though you might encounter some surprise visitors in the celebrant’s chair at those Masses. You may even recognize them from previous visits.
But I who do not share Father Swink’s desire (and capacity!) for constant activity will enjoy the sweet fruit of summer, not only the actual fruit of peaches and plums and such, but also that calm that settles around here when almost everyone is somewhere else. It will be too brief, but it is the most wonderful month of the year and I mean to enjoy it.
Both the sun overhead and the rich crop in the field feature this week in the lections for Sunday Mass. The challenge for us is not to lose sight of what is truly precious, not to be distracted by false goods or lesser goods from what is truly good and life-giving. That, I happily assert, is where contemplation comes in, and I invite you to join me in a reflective moment that requires nothing that will break a sweat. We do not even have to perform the evaluation all alone. It is never a bad time to ask the Lord, what is it that should delight me today?
And in the answer to that question, there is nothing lean about this time of year.
Monsignor Smith
