Outlasting February

They say that if a person looks hard enough and waits long enough, he can, sooner or later, find something good to say about anything. Well, I suppose that is true. But it is equally true that there are in life any number of things that sorely test that principle. One of them is filling out tax forms. Another is television commercials. And a third is February.

Try as I may, with all the good will in the world, about the only positive thing I can find to say about February is that it is short. You have to hand it to Pope Gregory. He knew what he was doing when he revised the Roman calendar. It used to be that all the months of the year were of equal length. That was Julius Caesar's idea. Now Julius doubtless had any number of good ideas in his time. That, however, was not one of them. It looked good on paper, and it made for very orderly calendars, but it just didn't reflect very accurately what was actually happening out there in space, where the comings and goings of planets about the sun follow pretty much their own schedule.

The upshot of it all was that early one morning, Pope Gregory more than likely must have popped out of bed, opened the window, breathed deeply of the fresh spring air, and delighted in the sound of birds chirping away and the sight of flowers blooming. All well and good, except for the fact that the calendar probably read something like December 3rd.

Now, you don't get to be Pope by missing things like that. Gregory must have picked up on it right away. Something, he more than likely concluded, is wrong here. This calendar needs a bit of touching up. Something lopped off here, something stuck on there. Not as neat, perhaps, but certainly more accurate. And of all the months of the year, it must have been the work of a moment to decide that the first to get the axe should be February. Why, it's even spelled funny. Nobody uses that first "r" at all. Let's chop the thing down to the bare bones. Four weeks, and not a day more. (Well, maybe once every four years we'll have to flesh it out some.)

Let's take a few of those extra days and scatter them around in May and July and August where they'll do some good. After all, nothing really happens in February. It's just a chunk of time you have to put in, in order to get from the holidays into Spring. Oh, sure, there's Valentine's Day, and Washington and Lincoln's Birthday. Earlier on there's Candlemas Day, and the feast of St. Blaise. And those are all fine, worth observing, certainly. But somehow it's just not enough. Somehow it's still just February, and as long as it is, about the only thing we can say about Spring that rings at all true is, "Wait."

Well, perhaps that's really not so terrible after all. Perhaps February is really another kind of Advent, a time for reminding ourselves that so often, in so many situations, the most creative virtue we can bring to bear on our surroundings is simply patience. It may take a bit of effort to bring ourselves to the point of seeing patience as a "creative" virtue. So often we think of it as rather more of a last resort sort of thing, more the mark of the defeatist, than of the one who actively, aggressively pursues his values.

But that's not so, really. Patience is a creative thing indeed. It may not change our surroundings, but it certainly changes, recreates, us. And it allows our surroundings to change themselves, in their own time, in their own way. Patience creates in us a sense of time, a sense of change. Patience encourages in us growth in the ability to observe and reflect before we act. And perhaps above all else, it encourages humility. It brings us to see ourselves as creatures who hold a place in the world of things and people, but not by any means the only place, nor even, often enough, the most important one.

That means that our real challenge is to harmonize with our surroundings, not dominate them. After all, how many things are there that really do follow exactly the calendars and blueprints and schedules that we write for our world?

February is a humbling month. I suppose that is something in its favor. Still, I'm glad it's short.

From 1980 through 1982, Father Sandell served as Chaplain to the Bishop O'Reilly Council No. 3918,Grafton, North Dakota Chapter of the Knights of Columbus. "Scattered Thoughts" is a collection of essays based on columns originally written for the Chaplain's Corner, section of the Council's monthly newsletter.