The Blessed Cruelty of Summer

A reflection and invitation for a season often craved.

This past week, the solstice rang in and summer kicked off with a heat wave that bore down like a hand heavy and thick with intent to harm. I sometimes forget that summer teaches us, in the same way winter does, that there is no escaping the extremes. Where the danger of winter arrives in life laid bare and then frozen into a numbing, mindless sleep, the danger of summer comes in a roiling heat that melts away the excess and bares its teeth to devour what remains. It is easy to see brutality in winter, but we often forget that summer carries the same, an opposite yet equal extreme.

I want to get lost in the joys of this season, to praise it as I do all seasons, but I also want to stand before the blessed cruelty of it and not look away. When the hot depths of July and August arrive to press my head down into dry, dusty ground, I want to be ready. I do not want to be smothered there nor do I want to emerge from that holding with rage radiating throughout, for I know that to struggle is to make loss all the more certain, but to do nothing feels akin to giving up. How, then, will I bear summer, this season of all or nothing, this season that so few of us could tolerate, much less love, it without our modern comforts?

All I know is this: I don’t want to absorb only summer’s sweetness and refuse its medicine. Instead, I want to let that yearly baptism drip down over my crown and onto my shoulders. I want to look honestly and closely at that which the sun is already scorching away. What will die beneath that gaze? What will reach toward the warmth and flourish? Of that which is lost, what deserves my grief? What doesn’t? There is, after all, a wide gap between the losses we should bemoan and those we should usher in.

Perhaps this can be a summer for both/and. A summer for screaming and a summer for singing. A summer for gorging on the garden and fasting in resistance. Perhaps it can be for both hard labor and deep rest, for community and solitude. A season for all that is easy and all that is tearing us apart with hardship.

Much needs our attention right now—both the horrors and the joys. One grows while the other dwindles, and it is an act of sure defeat to deny that the balance is off. If nothing else, let this season be a call to pay attention. May we heed the invitation to tune in, to participate in the act of summer where both death and life race alongside us, begging us to put our hands and our talents, our time and our money to the never-done work of pulling humanity from the horror toward the joy.