Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 31, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
My little grasshopper
My child, conduct your affairs with humility,
 and you will be loved more than a giver of gifts.
 Humble yourself the more, the greater you are,
 and you will find favor with God.
Thinking of Mary Oliver’s poem, written after her longtime partner’s death, considered in the midst of Mary’s grief, carried me home on this last day of August, home to the world made precious.
In 1993 (or 4) Andi’s adult friend gave her young soulmate, our daughter, a cat one day. She was a black kitten whose tail had been lopped off by a genetic mutation. Andi’s heart bent toward this kitten, and she named her Precious.
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life? – Mary Oliver
Elizabeth Meyer Boulton, creator of the Salt Project, repeats Mary’s question.
“Tell me, what else should I have done?” What else, that is, besides “falling down in the grass, being idle and blessed, strolling through the fields all day.” At its heart, this poem is a little revolution, a provocative question mark beside the conventional answers to the query, What makes for a day well lived? How should I spend this “summer day”? This summer day, I mean — the one we’re in right now. The one we’ll live in tomorrow.
Oliver’s potentially life-changing proposition is that we very well may need to rethink what a “productive day” looks like. It may look a lot less like a day tied to screens and email and housework and errands and getting things done, and a lot more like the simple, astonishing affair of getting to know a grasshopper. This grasshopper, I mean. And if we remember that not everyone today has the opportunity to take a day in the fields to be “idle and blessed,” then this poem may redouble our efforts to build a world in which everyone — everyone! — has the occasional time and space to stroll through the fields, “wild and precious,” holding out a little sugar in our hand.
We need not reconsider or regret moments, or hours, or days of leisure when they appear out of our cloudy sky like God’s rainbow, the Lord’s sunburst of peace. Whether those moments are frequent or extremely rare, they can be as Elizabeth suggests, times to be simple, present and alert to one specific “grasshopper, holding out a little sugar in our hand.”
Teach your children well
Their father’s hell did slowly go by
Feed them on your dreams
The one they pick’s the one you’ll know by
… Don’t you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would cry
So just look at them and sigh
 (Sirach 3, Psalm 68, Hebrews 12, Matthew 11, Luke 14)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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