This school year is almost complete and the students in my household are yearning for summertime. I did, too, when I was a student in grammar school, in high school, and even in college. To me, summer was that wonderful, magical luxury of time free from academic lessons when I could read deeply and widely and joyfully, unhindered by the disciplines of formal education.
Growing up in the blazing heat and sultry humidity of the deep South, there were a few hours out of every midday that were simply too hot to play or work or even to swim outside. Oh, the blissful glee of those reading hours!
Every Monday my mother would load up my sisters and me and we would head to the little brick public library primly landscaped with an unusual mixture of blue hydrangeas and boxwoods, tucked neatly away on a side street behind the post office. I loved those crowded little rooms with the hardwood floor that creaked in the most strategic places, lined with shelves and shelves of stories and adventures, reverently hallowed in its hushed silence. Every Monday I would check out the limit of treasures allowed at one time and devour them one by one.
Neither of my parents were readers, so this summertime ritual was somewhat of an oddity to them and my pleasure in reading a marked mystery. It also meant that there was no guidance or direction provided for this particular passion so I read whatsoever I chose from the shelves of the Greenville Public Library. While this pasttime was welcomed in the summertime, it was often resisted at other times of the year.
All my life I have been chided for my love of reading, citing it as a "waste of productive time," usually by those without enough poetry, literature, history, theology and philosophy in their own souls to know the difference. As a child, I was sometimes sent to the principal's office for reading a book hidden inside my math text during class. I hadn't actually purposed to discount those dull, witless numbers and formulas, I just couldn't help thinking about the unfolding story in which I had been currently engrossed.
Even my younger sister, who has a gracious abundance of poetry, literature, and music in her soul, once confessed to having often hidden my library books after school because she wanted me to play outside with her. She knew that "just the next chapter" I pleaded for before playing could easily span the brief time between school and dinnertime.
These days I am finding it delightfully refreshing to have providentially fallen into a community that actually values reading after all these years! One that knows, recognizes, acknowledges, encourages, and promotes beauty, goodness, and truth as the standard of the gospel and thereby as the normative basis for all of living.
