Summer

 

The summer solstice occured last night at 10:41 p.m. This means that the sun is now at its highest point in the sky in the northern hemisphere, and that these are the longest days of the year - a full 15 hours and 5 minutes of daylight here in New York. 

Of course, “the longest day of the year” makes much less difference to us de-natured people in our modern urban, electricity-determined lifestyle than it did to our ancestors, for whom this occasion was existentially meaningful and observed accordingly. Indeed, it is one of the many ironies of our crazy contemporary culture that summer and places with longer summers have become increasingly popular, precisely as a consequence of air-conditioning, the whole point of which is to make it not feel like summer! (That is at best bizarre, but more importantly is itself another contributor to our changing climate.)

Of summer's two most characteristic markers - heat and daylight - while the former is just beginning to set in and dominate our daily lives, the advent of the summer solstice also means that we will shortly begin to notice progressively less light as the days start to shorten and the nights start to lengthen once again according to their annual routine. That other dimension of the solstice - decreasing daylight following soon after the year's longest day - invites us to a whole other level of symbolism, a symbolism especially associated with the commemoration of the Birth of Saint John the Baptist on June 24, six months before Christmas (in keeping with the chronology established in Luke's gospel). Celebrating John the Baptist's birth at the time of the solstice inevitably invited a seasonal symbolism of its own, especially in light of John the Baptist's own famous words with regard to Jesus: He must increase, but I must decrease (John 3:30).

Meanwhile, however, it is now summer, with all that entails - unbearable heat, wildfires, droughts, melting glaciers, etc. - in this unfortunate era of climate change. Indeed, a dangerous heat advisory is set to go into effect tomorrow, and the temperature is set to reach 100 here in New York on Tuesday. 

Of course, summer also has its fun side. Growing up in a more innocent world before climate change, I remember playing long hours in the park, frequent trips to the beach, weekend picnics, holiday cookouts, occasional family vacations (the first in 1958 to Lake George, NY, after my father bought his first car). Those are good memories, and to the extent that people are still able to enjoy those seasonal pleasures, may they continue to experience summer as that special time. George Gershwin's wonderful song from Porgy and Bess still resonates: Summertime and the livin' is easy.

Sadly, however, global warming and climate change are everywhere making living much less easy!

Thanks to the widespread political polarization that has increasingly infected our entire society society, "caring for our common home" (so passionately advocated by the previous Pope in his encyclical Laudato Si') seems an increasingly unattainable aspiration. Many things have gone wrong in America in the last decade, but surely one of the most consequential has been the widespread loss of faith in expertise and objective knowledge, leading to an increasing denial of the climate realities we are actually experiencing. This has been accompanied by an uncitizen-like political passivity, a loss of confidence in our capacity for collective, concerted political action, in other words, shared action for the common good. On that latter point, I am reminded of something the late Tony Judt said in an exchange with his son, which appeared in The New York Times in June 2010: "I don't think the challenge is to convince Americans about pollution or even climate change. Nor is it just a matter of getting them to make sacrifices for the future. The challenge is to convince them once again of how much they could do if they came together."

(Photo: June from the famous Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, an early 15th-century prayer book, which is widely considered perhaps the best surviving example of medieval French Gothic manuscript illumination. The illustration depicts summer fieldwork against the background of  the Palais de la Cité and the Sainte Chapelle.)