c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In his last summer, Clay Miller watched the gift of nature’s beauty and a family’s love unfold before him.

In that summer of 2001, he had just found out he had a malignant brain tumor, and his family knew they could not go anywhere on vacation.

His two sons decided to build him a pond with a waterfall in the back yard of his home in Parma, Ohio. As their father watched from the deck, the young men dug a hole 18 feet long by up to 14 feet wide, and put in 41/2 tons of sandstone and 2 tons of river rock.

By the time they were finished, the pond was transformed into a water garden with 76 varieties of plants. Five goldfish swam in the placid water. Before he died that winter, he asked that his ashes be scattered on the pond.

This summer, his widow, CeCe, goes out to the pond each day with a feeling that her husband’s spirit is there with her. Feeling a gentle breeze on a warm summer day as the water lilies provide a peaceful tableau atop the water, the pond becomes a sacred place that, like the long, languid days of summer itself, seems to reach beyond time and touch the soul.

“The pond, to me, is like a symbol of all that summer is,” CeCe Miller said. “This is like heaven. This is like the Garden of Eden.”

She is not alone in celebrating the spiritual gifts of the warmest season.

Summer is the Sabbath of the seasons, a time of rest, meditation and rejoicing when people can realign their priorities and re-enter the daily grind renewed and invigorated, say the editors of a new book from Skylight Paths Publishing titled “Summer: A Spiritual Biography of the Season.”

The book is in some ways a call to turn off the cell phone, take that vacation you have been putting off and remember what it was like to just lie in the grass and stare at the sky.

The simple pleasures of summer _ fishing with a father and grandfather, the lighting up of a night sky, a mother and a son building sand castles in the world between childhood and independence _ are what last in our memories and have the power to touch our souls, the authors say.

“Summer provides the time for our play _ that portion of our human experience so vitally necessary to our sanity, which must allow us to step back for a moment from our self-importance and our drivenness to provide a larger perspective,” wrote Gary Schmidt and Susan Felch, the book’s editors. “It is a pause in the action, a moment to let this thought come: Maybe I am not so critical to the world after all, a humbling time when we might dare to believe that stopping and looking around us might be more important than driving toward the distant horizon.”

When you do step back, the joys of summer can be majestic.

Listen to fantasy writer Ray Bradbury describe in his book “Dandelion Wine” how 12-year-old Douglas Spaulding contemplates the first morning of summer in Greentown, Ill.: “He saw his hands jump everywhere, pluck sour apples, peaches and midnight plums. He would be clothed in trees and bushes and rivers. He would freeze, gladly, in the hoarfrosted ice-house door. He would bake, happily, with 10,000 chickens in Grandma’s kitchen.”

Not that summer is appreciated only by the young.

Walt Whitman, reflecting on summer in the countryside near Camden, N.J., described a night when the stars declared to him the glory of God.

“Creation noiselessly sank into and through me its placid and untellable lesson, beyond _ O, so infinitely beyond! _ anything from art, books, sermons or from science, old or new. The spirit’s hour _ religion’s hour _ the visible suggestion of God in space and time, now once definitely indicated, if never again.”

Hey, no one ever regretted on their deathbed not spending more time at work, so the saying goes. So, too, Sarah Orne Jewett said in an essay on the simple joys of summer in a Maine village that the “gifts of peace are not for those who live in the thick of battle.”

Cancer helped the Rev. Marvin McMickle of Antioch Baptist Church learn that lesson.

He no longer works as hard in June, July and August as he does the rest of the year since his successful battle with prostate cancer in 2003. He makes time for at least two vacations a year in Virginia Beach, where he and his wife like to just sit on the balcony and listen to the ocean. At home, he takes more time for leisurely dinners with his wife and caring for their garden or just staring at the stars until midnight.

Taking time out to relax “and remind myself how small I am, and how great God is” is more than just a sensible way to lead one’s life. “It’s actually a biblical mandate,” McMickle said, referring to the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus tells his disciples to come apart to a desert place and rest.

In North Olmsted, Ohio, St. Clarence Catholic Church has a Polynesian Nights social during the summer, not for a fund-raiser, but just for fun and fellowship.

Summer, said the Rev. Neil Kookoothe of St. Clarence, “is a very good time to stand back and refresh yourself for the rest of the year.”

The season is not a time of total retreat.

The Rev. Lynn R. Schlessman of Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church in Avon Lake, Ohio, grew up on a farm, where cultivating crops makes summer the busiest time of the year.

With weather so central to a farmer’s life, Schlessman said, “you especially get tuned into what God is up to.”

Which brings us back to another seasonal truth: Enjoy summer while it lasts. It can be short, CeCe Miller said.

“We have to, like, do it. Take advantage of it,” said Miller, co-founder of Sacred Space, a spiritual growth group for women.

Spiritual leaders and writers through the centuries have said that appreciating each of the seasons on their own helps humanity each year through the journey of life _ and death.

A year after her husband’s death, Miller was inspired to write a poem about her experience in each of the four seasons, from the enchantment of seeing the lotus bloom for the first time in summer to the hanging icicles in winter that represented the last tears “to end the year of missing you.”

Her poem, like summer, concludes with a sense of hope amid the mysteries of creation:

Holy was this year and the crocus will

again appear. And we will move to and fro

where the pond frees the fish to go

among the rocks, within the ledge.

As we sigh out loud, another season

will rouse us to grow.

I look through the west window,

a threshold of meditation

where a bonsai and stepping stones

will carry us to a new generation.

But still the question remains,

why am I here and

why did you go?

KRE/PH END BRIGGS

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