If I Were Pope

Summer is ending September 22, but only technically. I grew up in a house with a garden, so for me summer concludes when tomatoes wither to an end in mid-October. I don’t even like tomatoes, but if they’re still growing, it’s still summer, no matter what the refrigerator calendar says. It feels a bit these days as if we’re crossing a creek on unfamiliar stones, unsure if they’ll hold. Sometimes all it takes to be pitched into the water is the wobble of a rock. That’s why it’s important that the calendar not lie. If it says summer ends on September 22, then by golly that’s when summer should end, and when it doesn’t, what is left to depend upon?

In my mind, when summer ends, so should mowing the lawn, but these days I mow well into November. I cut two lawns, totaling four acres. They’re a hundred miles apart, so it’s no small thing to keep both yards neat and tidy. If the calendar were honest, I’d do the last mowing on September 22 and not have to worry about it again until mid-April. When Pope Gregory XIII instituted the modern calendar in 1582, it quickly became obvious he’d never mowed a lawn or grown tomatoes. I’ve worked in religion all my adult life, and the last thing I’d do is put religious people in charge of the calendar. Religious people can’t even agree on a common date for Easter. It changes every year, depending on the stages of the moon, somewhere between March 22 and April 25. Something as important as Easter shouldn’t be left up to a man who never mowed a lawn or grew tomatoes.

As long as we’re talking about Popes, I like the new one, and I’m not even Catholic. He plays Wordle every day with his two brothers. I play Wordle every day, which means I could have been the pope. Technically, any baptized Catholic male is eligible to become the pope, and since I was baptized Catholic in 1961 and neglected to tell the Catholics when I became a Quaker in 1977, I assume I was in the running.

If I were the pope, I’d still mow my two yards, no matter how busy I was. I do a lot of thinking when I mow, and God knows we religious folks could benefit from a little more thinking. If I were the pope’s PR man, I’d take a picture of him wearing blue jeans, a Dickie’s plaid shirt, and a seed corn cap, push mowing the Vatican yard. Something tells me this pope knows how to mow a lawn, that the rows would be straight and he wouldn’t blow grass into the flowerbeds.

My goals are clear: become the pope, change the calendar to accurately reflect the growing of tomatoes and grass, and celebrate Easter the same day each year, like we do Christmas. There’s no law that says Easter must be on a Sunday. In fact, it shouldn’t be since we already have Sundays off. If Easter were on Monday or Friday, we’d get a three-day weekend, and more people would like God. Good Friday could just as easily be called Good Tuesday or Good Thursday, whichever the case may be.

While I was at it, I’d design a new refrigerator calendar. Ours sticks to the refrigerator with magnets and starts each day near the top of the refrigerator door, sliding down incrementally throughout the day, ending at the bottom by suppertime. Something as important as a calendar should stay put, fixed in place, not waffling all over the place like Easter.

Philip Gulley is a Quaker pastor and author of 22 books, including the Harmony and Hope series, featuring Sam Gardner.

This article is featured in the September/October 2025 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.