What’s your favourite local walk or cycle ride?
My guess is that many of us have been exploring our local landscape a lot in the past couple of months. If we’ve been able to get out and about at all, we’ve been limited to walking or cycling from home, and though those restrictions have been eased a bit, I suspect most of us still aren’t going too far afield. For many, to judge from Facebook pictures I’ve seen, it’s been a pleasant surprise to discover the beauty and interest on our own doorsteps.
The few days before Ascension Day (this Thursday- May 21) are known as Rogation Days, and have traditionally been associated with the custom of “beating the bounds”, walking round the parish boundaries, armed with sticks, hitting the boundary markers, supposedly to reinforce the knowledge of where they were.
 To enhance the lesson, choir boys sometimes found themselves “bumped” at the boundary stones. As the procession wound its way around the parish, the fields would be blessed by the priest, and a good harvest prayed for. The Church of England, (while not sanctioning the bumping of children!) has reinvigorated this festival in its modern resources for worship with prayers that we can use in services and walks. One of them features as the prayer of the week, below.
 But Rogationtide wasn’t originally an agricultural festival at all, and had nothing to do with establishing parish boundaries. It started in cities, way back in the fifth century, when churches took the relics of their saints out from their churches around the parish, visiting chapels and shrines and holy wells which were significant landmarks, like this procession (right) with the relics of St Gregory, pictured in the "Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Barry" from the fifteenth century. Rogation comes from the Latin word “rogare”,which means “to pray”. These were penitential processions, in which people prayed for forgiveness and blessing publicly. They were supposed to be solemn affairs, though priests often complained that people were using them as an excuse for a day out and picnic… I spent quite a bit of my sabbatical last year investigating this tradition, and can bore for England on the subject. I will try not to here, but if you want to know more about Rogationtide, head over to the blog I wrote recording some of my thoughts (and travels). Philip and I discovered that in Catholic countries, the tradition of “taking your saint for a walk” as I came to call it, was very much alive and well around this time of year. We shared in the procession of Sant’Efisio in Cagliari, Sardinia, and saw lots of evidence of other processions which had just happened or were about to.
Rogation processions, whether ancient or modern, formal or just a ramble, have the wonderful potential to remind us that God cares about the place where we are and that he is at work in the place where we are. Perhaps our local walks and cycle rides this week could be moments when we pray for our own locality, and those who live and work in it. |
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The Rogation Days (Monday to Wednesday of this week) lead up to Ascension Day, the day when the Church remembers Jesus’ Ascension into heaven. It’s a day which reminds us that our faith is both heavenly and earthly. It’s very much about the here and now, but we're also promised that there's more to life than meets the eye, that what we see is not necessarily all we get! Jesus ascends into heaven, with a body that bears the scars of his earthly suffering, taking with him all our earthly, physical joys and sorrows. God made the material world, and delights in it; earthly existence isn't a second best, something to be shed gratefully at death, but something to be enjoyed, honoured and treasured.
temporarily and drastically reduced during the coronavirus crisis and lockdown, and are struggling to pay for their weekly food shop.
I put a couple of baskets of spare plants – tomatoes, courgettes, snapdragons etc. - outside the lychgate on Saturday for people to help themselves to, with a suggestion that they might like to donate to the church, though they didn’t have to. Within 24 hours they were all gone. I am about to replenish the stock, but if anyone else has seedlings or bits of plants to share (label them, please, or no one will know what they are!) please just leave them in the baskets. I will keep them watered.
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