Minister’s Column
This time of year evokes many feelings and memories for me. As I write, it is 5:30 pm and the sunset is lighting up the sky with pink clouds. The air is cold…and it makes me think about football.
When I was in high school, I played on the football team and we had a special relationship with this time of year: the first weeks of November, after the changing of the clocks. Where I am from, eastern Massachusetts, there is no tradition of Homecoming. It is not a thing. But we had a comparable tradition at Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving Day, at 10 or 11 in the morning, high school football teams in eastern Massachusetts play their biggest game of the year, against their arch-rival high school. Because it’s Thanksgiving, many people from the town attend the game, including those who have moved away and are home for the holiday. Thus it is a homecoming.
In my town of Wayland, Thanksgiving meant playing Weston. It was not only the biggest game of the year, it was also the last. The Thanksgiving Day game was two or three weeks after the other games had all been completed. The other fall sports were done with their seasons by early November. This meant that in early November, the football practice field got lonely: the soccer, cross country, and field hockey teams who practiced on adjacent fields throughout the fall were now gone. The weather steadily got colder. Then one day the clocks changed and the regular football practice, going until 5:30, now ended in darkness.
Today is like that day in my memory: the empty field. The geese. The cold air. The sunset. My football memories include a sense of great purpose – nothing was more important to me at age 17 than beating Weston on Thanksgiving Day – and a sense of quiet spaciousness. I’m far away from that football practice field, both in miles and in decades of life experience. Yet the feeling today is familiar and connects me to that moment. As I did then, I pause now to take in the beauty of the early sunset. I feel my place in the world.
PRAYER
May the beauty of November be with us.
May we embrace the early morning sunlight and the 5:30 sunsets.
May each of us find peace in the stillness of these days and connect with our sense of belonging and of purpose.
Rev. Drew Frantz
November 15, 2023