The many faces of summer

When graduation songs resound in school campuses, when students grow excited as they plan their treks to beach resorts, and when teachers begin to feel lighthearted as the easy days of April and May near, we know summer is once again in our midst.

The heat of course is summer's unfailing prelude even as smiling sky and sparkling seas presage also its coming. Kalachuchis too as they explode in milky splendor send the same prophecy. All nature in fact connive with the first tender steps of the season - the chirping of birds, the rustling of breeze, the sloshing of waterfalls.

To all these the heart surrenders. Young or old gets a slice of summer in the mind and heart stirring a thought, a feeling more often undefined. Is it the beach alive with the thrill of youth or the hillside with a vanishing trail? Is it a song unsung, a poem uncomposed? Is it a thought unwritten, a feeling unconfessed? We don't know. What we know is the vague restlessness, the longing for something unnamed, the striving for a state uncertain.

St. Augustine once wrote: My heart is restless, O Lord, until it rests on you! Is summer restlessness akin to what the saint felt during his days? When age catches up with a person he begins to be introspective. He tends to impart meanings on what he sees. But since meaning begets meaning begets still other meanings he ends up without a clear idea of the impressions buffeting his senses.

If the impressions however are seen through the window of the soul clarity dawns like a new day which drives the dark away. The fog clears, the shore appears and the self rediscovers its destiny. Confronted with a spiritual darkness Cardinal Newman once prayed: "Lead kindly light, / Lead thou me on, / The night is dark, / And I am far from home"

The light of course is Jesus. The evangelist John quotes Jesus as saying that He is the light of the world. As such the Lord promises that a man who follows Him "will not walk in darkness, but will have light and life".

The soul's restlessness, like summer's restlessness, is a spin-off of one's waywardness. Exposed to the world with its glow and glitter the carefree soul stumbles. The world is too much with us, laments a poet. And truly it is. Like wine one's immersion in the world makes the mind fuzzy, the soul empty. It is only when one holds tightly to the Light that lostness and restlessness are appeased.

For the young, however, summer is a definitive sense experience. Summer is a frolic on the beach, a sojourn to strange and enchanted places, an encounter with friends freshly found or long lost. It is a reawakening of forgotten feeling or the dawning of another inspired by a new discovery.

Freed from the rigors of lectures and term reports, the young savor the freedom of their days. Time becomes irrelevant. They sleep throughout the day and do their thing at night, watching the idiot box or just monkeying with friends.

For most young people summer is indeed wine and roses. Forget the morrow, they say, let's eat and drink and be merry! Beautiful but when cautions are thrown away one's future too is cast away. It's good to savor the thrills of youth, but it pays to remember these lines from Ecclesiastes: "Be mindful of your Creator when you are young, before the time of sorrow comes and before the sun, moon and stars withdraw their light, before the clouds gather again after the rain"