From the May 2024 Magazine
Fr Stan writes:
Because of an early Easter this year, Rogation Sunday is also early on May 5th. There are four celebrations each year when the church calendar gives an opportunity to remember our reliance on the creation which is God’s gift to us, one in each of the seasons.
The first is Plough Sunday, the Sunday after the Feast of Epiphany, January 6th. Here the farms and their equipment were blessed at the start of the year. In two of my former parishes it was the tradition to bring a plough into church and for the local farmers to stand round it as it was blessed. In one parish it was a real plough such as a horse would have pulled, in the other it was a model placed on the Altar.
The spring celebration was Rogation.
On Rogation Sunday the “Beating of the Bounds” took place. After the Sunday service the congregation would process around the parish and mark the parish boundary stopping for prayers at the boundary stones. This was easier in pre-industrial times before roads, railways and factories were built across boundary lines. (In one of my former parishes, if we had Beaten the Bounds we would have had to cross a motorway six times and not always at a point where there was a bridge!). On the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday following Rogation Sunday (called the Rogation Days), the parish priest would visit the farms, fields and water courses of the parish to bless them.
The summer celebration is Lammas.
This falls on August 1st. By tradition the bread used at Holy Communion on that day was made with the new wheat grown that year. I have only once presided at a Lammas day service in all my ministry and that was by invitation to a parish that was then in vacancy.
The autumn celebration is of course the Harvest Festival. There is no fixed date for this and churches fix their own time in September and October. Of the four creation celebrations Harvest Festival is the most widely observed although it the one introduced most recently, in Victorian times.
Hardly a day goes by now without some mention of Green Issues. We are dependent on the Creation and climate change is something that must concern us all. This year in our garden we have had the earliest flowering of plants I have known: our first daffodil bloomed on February 3rd and our first rose was out on April 14th.
Change is not coming, it has arrived.
God grant us all a desire to care for His creation and may we be good stewards of what he has given us.
