Here Comes the Sun

by Rev. Terry Davis

Delivered to Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation on

June 16, 2013

While the official first day of summer in this part of the world is this Friday, when we will experience our longest period of daylight in the year, for many of us summer got underway weeks ago. For teachers and students, it likely started at the end of May when classes ended and final papers were graded. For others, perhaps it began when the temperatures started to rise and we found ourselves turning on our air conditioners for the first time.

For many of us, summer is perhaps a time that beckons us to be outdoors whenever we can and however we can. And while we may certainly want to follow through on plans to play and travel during this time of year, it seems that summer also presents us with an opportunity to be deeply reflective.

As Cynthia and Stan have pointed out, summer can be a rich time for the earth and for our spirituality. It’s a time to celebrate the warmth of the sun, the beauty of our planet and its abundance of life.

And so, this morning as we celebrate both the beginning of summer and the end of our congregation’s program year, I would like for each of us to consider a few questions.

First: What was important about your summers past? How did they shape who you are and what you hold sacred in your life?

Second: What might this summer be calling you to do now? What needs tending in your life? What unfinished business of the heart and soul do you have?

I believe reflecting on these questions may guide us to experience a summer that is both joyful and instructive, as we re-examine meaningful lessons from our past and open ourselves up to forming deeper connections with ourselves and others.

For me, to think about summers past is to think about my father. While my father and I have experienced a complicated relationship over the years, summer brought us together in the simplest and most profound way. And, the détente between us was brokered by the unlikeliest of peacemakers . . . the humble garden tomato.

You see, my father is an expert vegetable gardener. He comes from a long line of vegetable gardeners, going back two generations to Calabria, Italy. These southern Italians were known for being excellent farmers and gardeners. It is said that some of the best olives are grown and the highest quality olive oil is produced in Calabria’s sunny valleys.

Each summer when I was young, my father used to till and prep a large corner of the backyard to plant a wide assortment of vegetables. The garden included lettuce, cucumbers, yellow squash, peppers, zucchini and other vegetables. Most importantly, it included tomato plants – lots of tomato plants.

Growing tomatoes was one of my father’s passions. So, you can imagine my delight the summer he came home with tomato plants for my sister and me.

I was going to get to plant and grow my very own tomatoes in Dad’s garden. I was thrilled! It felt as if my father had signed us up for the Boy Scouts, but our troop was focused on tomatoes instead.  Yes, we had become members of the Tomato Scouts! It was a troop where fathers mentored daughters in the ways of raising Big Boys and Early Girls . . . where dads handed down secret tomato-growing knowledge that had been handed down to them by their fathers and their fathers’ fathers.

From the back of his black Volkswagen Beetle, my father produced several Burpee Big Boys, which were tall and slender tomato stalks with yellow blossoms planted in plastic containers. If you know about Big Boy tomatoes, you know that were among the first hybrid plants introduced to American home gardeners following World War II. Big Boy tomatoes were engineered to be, well, big, as well as bright red, smooth and sweet. And, they needed lots of sun – at least 6 hours a day.

My father took my sister and me to our plot in the back yard to show us how to plant our Big Boys. After putting our plants in the ground, we drove little wooden stakes into the soil next them. We then tied the stalks to the stakes with thin strips of white sheets my dad had ripped up so that they would remain upright once the heavy fruit began to emerge.

My father then showed us how to spread white lime in the soil and dust it on the plant leaves to minimize the chances that worms would get to our tomatoes before we did.

For the next several weeks, we would go out to the back yard daily with my father after he got home from work to check on the progress of our tomatoes. We’d hunt in search of new green ones hiding among the leaves. And, we’d check on the progress of the fruit that had already emerged, watching each tomato change in size and color until it was bigger than our fist and the skin was almost bright red.

As our Tomato Scout troop leader, my father was the final judge on when the tomatoes were ready to be harvested. If we picked them too soon, they might not get nice and juicy. If we waited too long, they would fall to the ground and rot.

To keep our tomatoes from over-ripening, my father usually picked them a few days before he deemed them ready for eating. He’d line them up on the kitchen window sill like a row of Italian bocce balls and we waited some more until he or my mother would take a few down, declare them done and wash them off.

And then, finally, we would have our home-grown tomatoes for dinner that night! They were, of course, the best tomatoes I had ever eaten.

As the summer went on and our garden went into overdrive, we soon began having tomatoes for dinner every night. We ate them sliced and sprinkled with salt, with sugar or nothing at all. We bit into them whole like apples with juice running down our chins. We put them between slices of white bread, on burgers, in salads, and in our spaghetti sauce.

It wasn’t long before our tomato-eating ability was overtaken by our garden’s tomato-producing capacity. Those dang tomatoes just kept coming and coming! And, as much as we loved them, it eventually became impossible for our family of five to eat all of them. And, so my father would begin giving our tomatoes away – to my grandmother, to my aunt and uncle, to our neighbors, and to his friends at work.

When it finally seemed that we and anyone we knew within a 10-mile radius of our home couldn’t possibly eat any more of our garden tomatoes, it would all be over. Those prolific plants that gave us food in such abundance would eventually exhaust their supply.

Summer was ending and so was my magical Tomato Scouts experience, where my father’s love of gardening and my love for him were all mixed together like the white lime and black soil around the base of those plants. Autumn was approaching and those powerful moments of connection with my father in the garden might have to wait until the summer sun and the growing season came around again.

Robert T. Weston wrote that summer is “a time for soul searching . . . [when] we might turn to examine our own lives . . . to sift the true from false in the things of doubt.”[1] This experience of growing tomatoes with my father reminds me that love and compassion can grow in abundance this time of year just like a summer garden if we take the time to tend to our relationships.

We might, for example, contemplate taking some personal risks that involve letting go of our fears and opening the way for greater intimacy. We might call that friend or relative with whom we haven’t spoken in some time to see how she or he is doing. We might set aside more time to do things with our partner or family, and risk letting some of our work and civic commitments fall further down on our list of priorities.

We might increase our intimacy with ourselves by stepping up our self-care. We might eat better, get a little more active, or go to bed a little earlier to get more rest. We might commit to finding that 15 minutes in the morning to sit quietly – before the kids are up or before we rush into our day – so that we can listen to the birds outside and to our hearts inside.

Summer can ultimately be a transformative time when we explore our souls and find what rich soil lies there. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whose book Gift From the Sea was written during her summers on Captiva Island in Florida during the early 1950s, expresses how she came in contact with her need for solitude and simplicity. She writes:

[Life] today in America is based on the premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communication.

It involves not only family demands, but community

demands, national demands, international demands on the

good citizen, through social and cultural pressures, through newspapers, magazines, radio programs, political drives,

charitable appeals, and so on. My mind reels in it.

What a circus act we perform every day of our lives. It puts

the trapeze artist to shame.[2]

Influenced by the calming presence of the ocean, the diverse beauty of the sea shells, and the warmth of the summer sun, Lindbergh found that her life was inviting her to slow down and to find extraordinary beauty in simple things.

“This is what one thirsts for,” she writes, “after the smallness of the day, of work, of details, of intimacy – even of communication, one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of stars, pouring into one like a fresh tide.”[3]

Is it possible that summer might bring forth in us, too, this longing for simplicity and connection to mystery? What would happen if it did? What might we do if we responded to these urgings? What changes might we make? What of our hearts and ourselves might we find?

As we go from here, my hope for you and for me is that we bring a sense of curiosity and wonder to our summer activities. My hope is that our memories of summers past will provide us with insights on what we may need to be doing now with our lives . . . insights that will help us live in deeper relationship with ourselves and those around us.

May your summer bring you joy and fulfillment. I’m wishing you these in great abundance. May it be so. Amen.