From the rector: Finding summertime joy in an era of anxiety

When you think of summertime, where does your mind go? 

I have so many great summer memories as an adult, as a parent, but I think I go back to the way summer felt when I was still a child. I probably wander back to 1985 in Charleston, South Carolina. I had just moved from Newport, Rhode Island, and I was heading into fifth grade. I was young enough that worry and anxiety had hardly entered my lexicon, but I found enough independence to expand my world well beyond my parents’ eyes. I remember riding bikes to the pool, experiencing my first significant crush. Soaked in Skin So Soft to repel the low-country gnats, we’d stay out until we could no longer argue it was only dusk. The neighborhood kids would play any game we could conceive and organize.  And on nights we had clearance, we would play flashlight tag well into the night. Still, to this day, when those thoughts cascade across my mind, I can feel a lightness come over me as the corners of my mouth rise.

I pray that I have provided my children enough moments like that. I worry that their more scheduled summer days, travel sports and sports camps, electronics exposure, and the more protective supervision have limited some of these unadulterated experiences. I do feel they provided me with the foundation to trust that the world is safe, beautiful, and light. Goodness — I want that for our young people. 

In a recent opinion piece, a college senior was asked what it’s like to grow up in this era. He described his generation as the most rejected. It was startling but it made sense. They have been fighting to get into the top classes, the right travel team, padding their college resumes.  They have personal coaches, private tutors and instructors. Their social media accounts are a constant reminder of how they stack up against their peers. They have been competing as long as they can remember trying to eke out any advantage. And these are the young people that haven’t already been beaten down by early failures or frustrations. They are applying to so many more colleges than the generations before them, flooding the applicant pool in hopes of getting accepted into one. It continues with internships, the less-certain job market, and so on. 

Even student-run organizations like fraternities and sororities, which don’t have any built-in need for heightened rejection, have become far more selective. It appears that rejection is so enculturated in young people that exclusivity is tantamount with value. The more people rejected the more worthwhile the organization. The opinion piece asserted that all this rejection fosters a lack of self-confidence, an aggressiveness, a lack of kindness or grace, heightened anxiety, and a sense that the world is far from safe, beautiful and light.

Amidst this current culture, my encouragement to myself, to you, is to reflect on the most blissful, carefree summers of your lives. Feel the peace come over you. Seek to recreate it (we are never too old for summer). And allow it to reframe us as people, as parents, as leaders. Encourage others, take them outside with you. 

When I think of summer, I feel God’s abundant creation. I breathe it in deeply, present in the moment, free from anxiety or pressing concerns. And I think of the people. In that wide open space where the most cutthroat competition was “Marco Polo”, “Sharks and Minnows”, or flashlight tag, I formed some of my deepest connections. And in those summers, I fell in love with the world God entrusted to us and the beautiful people all around me. I trusted that there was enough and that life was and would be good. I pray that you and yours experience a summer that reminds you of that abundance. You are — and there is — far more than enough.

Peace,

Ben+

The Rev. Benjamin Wells Maas is the rector of Saint James’ Warrenton. He can be reached at rector@saintjameswarrenton.org.