Rogationtide: Traditional prayers

 

Planting tip: Blackberries don't bloom till after your last frost

Last week I wrote about the season; today I want to share some traditional prayers for the Rogation days, which are today, tomorrow, and Wednesday—that is, the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday between the Sixth Sunday of Easter and Ascension Day (40 days after Easter).

The following collects are from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, but they can also be found in the 2017 ACNA prayer book. [When used as a noun, “collect” is pronounced /COL-lect/.]

In our daily morning prayers, after the Lord’s Prayer we pray the collect for the previous Sunday followed by other prayers according to the season or specific prayer needs of our loved ones. During the Rogation days, after the collect of the day, we pray a different Rogation collect each day.


Sixth Sunday of Easter

O God, who hast prepared for those who love thee such
good things as pass man’s understanding:  Pour into our
hearts such love toward thee, that we, loving thee in all
things and above all things, may obtain thy promises, which
exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one
God, for ever and ever.  Amen.



For Rogation Days
For use on the traditional days or at other times

I. For fruitful seasons

Almighty God, Lord of heaven and earth:  We humbly pray
that thy gracious providence may give and preserve to our
use the harvests of the land and of the seas, and may prosper
all who labor to gather them, that we, who constantly receive
good things from thy hand, may always give thee thanks;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with
thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

II. For commerce and industry

Almighty God, whose Son Jesus Christ in his earthly life
shared our toil and hallowed our labor: Be present with
thy people where they work; make those who carry on
the industries and commerce of this land responsive to thy
will; and give to us all a pride in what we do, and a just
return for our labor; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who
liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

III. For stewardship of creation

O merciful Creator, whose hand is open wide to satisfy the
needs of every living creature: Make us, we beseech thee,
ever thankful for thy loving providence; and grant that we,
remembering the account that we must one day give, may be
faithful stewards of thy bounty; through Jesus Christ our
Lord, who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth,
one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

Rogationtide: Praying for mercy and for fruitful seasons

 

Everything is burgeoning! The dogwoods, irises, and peonies have finished blooming, but the clematis and pinks are going wild and the lavender shooting out bloom stalks. I love this time of year.

My youngest daughter has started two bed in a sunny spot in our back yard that are modelled after the traditional “three sisters” way of planting. First she planted corn and sunflowers. Now that they’re coming up nicely she’s going to plant beans, which will twine up the stalks of the taller plants, then in a few weeks she’ll plant squashes, which will flourish on the ground below the other plants.

This coming Sunday will be the sixth Sunday of the Easter season. Up until fairly recently the Gospel reading for this Sunday was John 16:23-33, which begins, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it you.” The Latin word for ask is rogare, and so this Sunday is known in liturgical churches as “Rogation Sunday.”

One of the traditional prayers for this brief season is the prayer for fruitful seasons:

Almighty God, Lord of heaven and earth: We humbly pray that thy gracious providence may give and preserve to our use the harvests of the land and of the seas, and may prosper all who labor to gather them that we, who constantly receive good things from thy had, may always give thee thanks; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

I have written before about some of the festive ways Christians have kept the days between Rogation Sunday and Ascension Thursday, but this week something new struck me and I wanted to mention it here.

Over the last year I’ve been dipping into Eleanor Parker’s delightful book, Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year, and last night I read her section called “Holy and Healthy Days,” which is on the origins of Rogationtide and the ways the early medieval English Christians kept this season. She mentions one of Aelfric’s sermons for Rogationtide and describes how the season was a penitential season as well as a festive one. Aelfric says that during this season, “we should pray for abundance of our earthly fruits, and for health and peace for ourselves, and, what is still greater, for the forgiveness of our sins” (pp. 157-158).

So, on the Rogation Days (the three days between Rogation Sunday and Ascension Day), the priests and parishioners would walk around the parish boundaries not only praying for fruitful seasons, but also praying for the forgiveness of their own sins and for the Lord’s mercy on their city. In his History, Bede quotes a chant from the Gallican Rogation Litany:

We pray Thee, O Lord, in all Thy mercy, that Thy wrath and anger may be turned away from this city and from Thy holy house, for we are sinners. Amen.

As Parker puts it so beautifully, “The Rogation Days seek physical and spiritual health for the individual, the community and the natural world; all are connected, one harmonious whole” (p. 162).

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

For more on Aelfric’s sermon and the medieval traditions, see Eleanor Parker’s blog post at The Clerk of Oxford.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Rogationtide, part two: Traditional prayers

Chaucer and Spenser

 

Studying for my upcoming conference talk and came across this gem:

"Spenser, almost alone among Elizabethans, drank deeply from Chaucer's poetry and shared his vision."
J.A.W. Bennett, The Parlement of Foules: An Interpretation

You know Spenser's Faerie Queene is going to come up in my talk, right? :-D 

This conference is going to be fantastic. Jason Baxter, author of The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, will be speaking in addition to Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks, and Jenn Rogers. Read more about it here.

Spoilers!

Canterbury Tales Prologue
ca. 1400-1410, mssEL 26 C 9, Huntington Digital Library

 Last spring I had planned to take a class on Chaucer at my local college but that didn't work out for a number of reasons. To soothe my disappointment I've been reading some of his poetry as well as various things about Chaucer and his poetry. Today I was listening to a lecture by Seth Lerer and he mentioned something I've never heard before about medieval reading habits. He said that people used to pick up a book they were about to read with the left hand, then open the back cover with the right hand and read the last few lines there. Then they'd flip to the front of the book and start reading from the beginning.

In an age when a large part of story-telling was retelling older stories, no one worried about spoilers. Homer and Virgil both begin their epics by telling the reader how the story is going to end. 

Knowing this habit, medieval authors were fairly deliberate about the final lines of their stories, which makes for some interesting features. The last lines of The Canterbury Tales are this inscription:

HERE IS ENDED THE BOOK OF THE TALES OF CAUNTERBURY
COMPILED BY GEFFREY CHAUCER,
OF WHOS SOULE JHESU CRIST HAVE MERCY,
AMEN.

The reader would then flip to the front and begin reading the Prologue.

Curious, I flipped through some of my older books to remind myself how they ended. Most of them let you know what kind of story you'll be reading, whether it has a happy or sad ending. A few allude to the beginning of the story.

One that caught my attention was the ending of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso:

And lifting his victorious hand on hie,
   In that Turks face he stabd his dagger twise
   Up to the hilts, and quickly made him die,
   And rid himselfe of trouble in a trice:
   Downe to the lake, where damned ghosts do lie,
   Sunke his disdainfull soule, now cold as Ise,
   Blaspheming as it went, and cursing lowd,
   That was on earth so loftie and so proud.
(tr. Sir John Harington)

This is almost exactly the way The Aeneid ends:

In the same breath, blazing with wrath he plants
his iron sword hilt-deep in his enemy's heart.
Turnus' limbs went limp in the chill of death.
His life breath fled with a groan of outrage
down to the shades below.
(tr. Robert Fagles)

Which brings me back to my earlier point about there being no spoilers in ancient and medieval literature. 

And even if a reader didn't look at the end before beginning, each book of Orlando Furioso opens with an "Argument," a few lines that tell the reader what will happen in that book.

From the archives: How to make a paper snowflake

[A version of this post was first published December 17, 2014]

These photographs were taken by a man named Wilson Bentley, who was born in 1865. He took his first photo of a snowflake in 1885 and went on to take over 5000 more before his death in 1931.

Images via Wikipedia

As you can see, real snowflakes have six points and so do the best paper snowflakes.  

 

Mostly made by Violin Daughter

 

Making snowflakes out of paper is a great activity, but it's pretty hard to manage six points.

This is a doily, not a snowflake.

This is pretty in its way, but it's not a snowflake.

To make a six-sided flake, you have to start with a six-sided piece of paper.  Getting there is kind of tricky, so I'm going to show you the way my daddy taught me do it.

This isn't a snowflake yet, but it will be.

Read the instructions below:

Grammar speaks

 "I have four parts: letters, literature, the man of letters, and literary style. Letters are what I teach, literature is I who teach, the man of letters is the person whom I have taught, and literary style is the skill of a person whom I form. I claim to speak also about the nature and practice of poetry. Nature is that from which speech is formed. Practice occurs when we put that material into use. To these we add the matter, so as to know what we must talk about. Speech itself is taught in three steps; that is, from letters [i.e. phonemes, the basic units of sound in a particular language], syllables, and words."
~Grammar, explaining her profession and field of study in The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, by Martianus Capella (fl. A.D. 410-420)

"... angry passion yields to wisdom and Ares stands in awe of the Muses"

 "Not only during peacetime but also in war, the Gauls obey with great care these Druids and singing poets, both friend and enemy alike. Often when the two armies have come together with swords drawn these men have stepped between the battle-lines and stopped the conflict, as if they held wild animals spell-bound. Thus even among the most brutal barbarians angry passion yields to wisdom and Ares stands in awe of the Muses."

~ Diodorus Siculus (fl. c. 60-c. 30 BC)
Bibliotheca Historica, Book V.31

Formative influences: Books

Some Lewis-inspired reading

 

Last week a group of my internet friends and I were talking about books that had a formative influence on us so I thought I’d rework it into a blog post. These books are a few of the earliest influences that are still with me, in roughly chronological order of reading.

1. The big, gorgeously illustrated book of fairy tales from around the world, which was part of my steady reading diet for most of the first decade of my life. There are a couple I first met in that book that I still enjoy reading – they’re both in Andrew Lang’s books. “The Bones of Djulung” is a Polynesian tale that’s in the Lilac Fairy Book, and “The Song of the Yara” is a Brazilian tale found in the Brown Fairy Book (Lang calls it “The Story of the Yara,” but I’m pretty sure my book called it a song). I’ve long since lost this book, but boy I wish I could find another copy of it! It was big and orange and had a paisley pattern on it, and it’s probably why orange was my favorite color as a child and I still love paisley.

2. An illustrated edition of King Arthur stories. I didn’t read it as much as the fairy tale book, but it was one of my early favorites and led me to read lots more of the same kind of thing. This book and the big fairy tale book were on the bookshelf in my room in my earliest memories. I have a feeling that these two books and the others were put there at the same time as the crib, changing table, and rocking chair. The fairy tales and King Arthur stories really shaped my taste in story, and to this day the stories I love best are the Romances, the stories that have a fairy tale shape.

3. Mere Christianity, which I first read when I was 15 or 16 years old. I grew up Baptist, and that meant that I was very familiar with the Bible, but I’d never had anything remotely resembling a systematic theology taught to me. Not that MC is exactly that, but it was the first clear, logical explanation of key elements of the Faith that I’d ever come across and it was like drinking water from a clear mountain spring. After reading that I searched out more of Lewis’s non-fiction and I feel like he’s been my spiritual father ever since then. I like to call him Saint Jack. :-D

4. Surprised by Joy, which I first read about a year after Mere Christianity. This is when I discovered that Lewis was a kindred spirit, and I’ve spent most of the rest of my intellectual life alternating between wanting to read everything he wrote and wanting to read everything he read. The former might be possible, but the latter never will. My interest in the last few years has been reading things he talks about in The Discarded Image, which is why I’m now reading Martianus Capella, as I mentioned in my last post. It was Lewis’s love of The Faerie Queene that first led me to read it, and you can see how the foundation for my own love of it was laid in my childhood. I’ve written so much about FQ here that it has its own tag.

5. Our Marvelous Native Tongue: The Life and Times of the English Language, by Robert Claiborne. My mom bought this for me when I was 17 or 18 because I was already a word-nerd but I had no idea that there could be a biography of a language. It expanded my word-nerdery into love of languages and how they work. Even though I haven’t had many opportunities to study that kind of thing it’s always on my radar, even to this day (hence this post last week on the life of the word galaxy). Mike has memories from early in our acquaintance (I was 19 when we met) of me talking about this book a lot and he says that one time brought it with me to some singles group activity. I don’t remember any of that specifically, but I’ve been taking books to social evens since I was a child. Being a grown up I try not to do that anymore. :-D
 

Word-nerd fun: Galaxy

Photo of the Milky Way
taken by my son John
10 November 2023

Yesterday I was reading Chaucer’s delightful Parliament of Fouls. Early on, the narrator says he fell asleep reading Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio,” and he retells the story for the reader. In the dream, Scipio meets his grandfather who “showed him the Galaxy.”

Then today I was reading The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, a 5th century Latin work by Martianus Capella. In Book II, Philology is ascending through the heavenly spheres on her way to the wedding. When she reaches the upper limits of the cosmos, the narrator says, “The incandescence of a milk-white river gradually flowed down from the burning stars. Full of joy and thanksgiving she turned toward the Galaxy where she knew that Jove had assembled the divine senate.”

I wondered whether the word “galaxy” was used in the original Latin so I looked it up and sure enough it says, “iter in Galaxeum flectit.” Galaxias is itself a borrowing from Greek.

The story behind the word galaxy is a fun one, so I thought I’d share it.

Prior to modern astronomy, Galaxy simply meant the Milky Way, γάλα [gala] being the Greek word for milk. The story is that after Zeus’s son Heracles was born to the mortal woman Alcmene, Zeus waited till his wife, Hera, was asleep and put the newborn to nurse from her so he could partake of the divine quality of her milk and become divine himself. When Hera woke up and found she was nursing a strange infant, she thrust him away causing milk to spurt from her out into the heavens, and that’s the origin of the Milky Way.

If you study the word “galactic,” you’ll see “lac” in the middle of it. This is because the Latin root lac, milk, seems to have come from an earlier word which has been reconstructed as either *g(a)lag- or *g(a)lakt-. In English, we get from this root lactate, latte, and even lettuce.

Our word milk comes from the Indo-European root melg- which is a verb and means “to rub off,” and also “to milk.” It’s related to the word emulsion which comes from the Latin emulgeo, “to milk out.” In English, the verb milk seems to predate the noun milk. It’s been used from the beginning to refer specifically to human or animal milk. Incidentally, mammals and the mammary glands are named after mamma, which means mother in English, but it means breast in Latin. They both come from the same root, ma-, which means mother, and gives us the Greek Maia (good mother) and also maieutic, which means to act as a midwife, and is the word 17th century philosophers used to describe the Socratic method.

The Old English language also used the word milk to refer to the milky juice you can get from a plant. The 2nd century text Herbarium by Pseudo-Apuleius describes getting milk from wyrte/wort, meaning from a plant (think of the “wort” in St. John’s Wort). “Almond milk” has been used since at least the 1300s, so keep this in mind next time one of your friends scoffs at people talking about almond milk, and insists that milk can only properly refer to that which is produced by the mammary glands. :-D

 

* In linguistics, the asterisk before a word means that the word can’t be found written anywhere, so scholars have made an educated guess about what it probably was.

Of knights and snails

One the funnest parts of looking at medieval art is running across an illustration of a knight fighting a snail. 

There are many theories as to what these snails are doing in the art, but not a one of them matches my own, which I came up with this year while reading through the Psalms with my family. Take a look at this:

Psalm 58

1 Do ye indeed speak righteousness, O congregation? do ye judge uprightly, O ye sons of men?
2 Yea, in heart ye work wickedness; ye weigh the violence of your hands in the earth.
3 The wicked are estranged from the womb: they go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies.
4 Their poison is like the poison of a serpent: they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear;
5 Which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming never so wisely.
6 Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth: break out the great teeth of the young lions, O Lord.
7 Let them melt away as waters which run continually: when he bendeth his bow to shoot his arrows, let them be as cut in pieces.
8 As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass away: like the untimely birth of a woman, that they may not see the sun.
9 Before your pots can feel the thorns, he shall take them away as with a whirlwind, both living, and in his wrath.
10 The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.
11 So that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous: verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth.

 

The psalmist is describing how ferocious and dangerous the enemies of God appear, but then in verse 8 he says, "As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass away."

In other words, they appear unconquerable, but they really aren't. 

The popular idea about this image is that the knight has given up and is begging mercy of the victorious snail, but I believe he has recognized that this is spiritual warfare, so he has laid down his sword and is praying to God for deliverance.

What's your favorite theory?