In the first Eucharistic Prayer of the Roman liturgy, the priest beseeches the Lord to grant the deceased a place of “refreshment, light, and peace.” The Latin origin of the word “refreshment” — refrigerium — is as mystifying as it is curious, as it’s also the root of our modern English word for refrigeration. Cicero once used a cognate of the same word to describe his delight for “the cool” (refrigeratio). Contemporary readers can easily sympathize with the Roman statesman. Anyone languid from the heat of an August afternoon knows what it means to delight in “the cool” that arrives as a welcome reprieve. A soft breeze during summer’s twilight hours, sifting through cotton-candied skies, evokes an incarnational assent to the meaning behind the Roman liturgy’s use of the word refrigerium: no mere change of temperature, but real refreshment and rest from an erstwhile blistering heat. Our summer exodus from work’s doldrums, when time slows and busybodies hibernate, teaches us something in those refreshing moments. We’re meant to long for an eternal “coolness,” a breeze which never ceases to refresh the body and the soul, finally freed from the postlapsarian burden of sweat and toil that make up so much of the human condition. Summer frees man from worldly weights with a kind of “cool” leisure—a refreshing good to be enjoyed by itself. In that refreshment, summer gives man more time to remember God, his goodness, truth, and beauty, and thus delight in worshiping him.
As August nears its completion and big box store advertisements portend the beginning of a new school year, we do well to savor the remaining days of summer. Pope Leo, himself choosing to vacation at Castel Gandolfo atop a breezy mountain miles away from the heat of Rome, told the faithful to use the summer to set aside time for silence, prayer, and rest. He reflected that “summer can be a providential time to experience the beauty and importance of our relationship with God.” Whether sitting by crashing waves on the shore, perched on a lofty mountain with breathtaking vistas, or spending time in the quiet of one’s backyard, summer makes it connatural for the human mind to envision God’s hand in nature’s design. Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ intuited nature’s capacity for wonder when he wrote his poem, “God’s Grandeur.” In that delightful script, Hopkins tells of nature’s capacity to instruct us in divine things, invoking wonder in the soul that has eyes to see. He, too, understood the power of “the cool,” or refreshment, writing, “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Those deep and fresh things teach us “being” before “doing”—a needed conversion for a world consumed by tasks. For the soul inspired by these moments of being, rather than doing, admiration of God’s hand in his creation invites us to something deeper and fresher this side of Heaven, which is the celebration of the Sacred Liturgy: the true leisure for which man is made, to worship God and commune with his goodness. Summer thus invites us to spend more time at church in worship, which, of course, is not time “spent” at all, but a moment outside of time, to be enjoyed for its own sake. The sacred liturgy escapes time and touches eternity—that place for which every soul longs with an insatiable thirst, satisfied by refreshment in God alone. When the priest prays for the faithful departed to enjoy that refreshment, the faithful worshippers of the gathered assembly can take hope that such a promise is meant for them, too.
