lammas...

Ah, the bounty and beauty of summer comes full blown as August arrives in the Berkshires: the lilies and hostas are magnificent, the native corn is delicious, our tomatoes and pumpkins are ripening on the vine, and the berries are abundant. Parker Palmer has written that:

Summer is the season when all the promissory notes of autumn and winter and spring come due, and each year the debts are repaid with compound interest. In summer it is hard to remember that we had ever doubted the natural process, had ever ceded death the last word, had ever lost faith in the powers of new life. Summer is a reminder that our faith is not nearly as strong as the things we profess to have faith in--a reminder that, for this single season at least, we might cease our anxious machinations and give ourselves to the abiding and abundant grace of our common life.

And yet at this very moment, within the heart of these riches, at the very same time our hills and fields are bursting with the promise of plenty, there comes a hint of autumn. Christopher Hill puts it like this:

August is summer that has heard a rumor of fall. It doesn't sparkle with the liveliness, motion, and lightness of May or June or the high festive brightness of July. It shimmers away toward the horizon in a hot blue haze. I know a painter who says she sees a distinct kind of light in August, different from both summer and fall. The name of the month comes from the emperor Caesar Augustus, and the purple robes of those august caesars color the last of summer. Blue shadows hide in the corners, like the patches of cobalt light after a flashbulb goes off. A stillness falls, like one of those lapses in conversation around a dinner table. We're aware only in the vaguest way, but summer is already looking ahead to its end.  (Holidays and Holy Nights: Celebrating Twelve Seasonal Festivities of the Christian Year, p. 185)


What a fascinating paradox: while the harvest is still literally waiting on the vine, a hint of the next cycle of life emerges, too. We have only just celebrated the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene in all of her fecund, midsummer presence when we notice a glimps of color in the trees and the scent of of autumn on the wind. In Celtic lands, these first few days of August are called Lughnasadh (sometimes called 'the earth's sorrowing in summer".) As the early grain harvest takes place "the Anglo-Saxons refashioned this festival to become"Lammas" - the loaf mass - with bread baked from the first fruits of the fields of summer. 

The wider church holds the Feast of the Transfiguration during these early days of August, too. At the summit of Mt. Tabor Jesus mystically communes with both Moses and Elijah - the law and the prophets - after which he announces his march towards the Cross in Jerusalem. "Jesus takes his friends up Mt. Tabor to see everything... we are aware only in the vaguest way, but summer is already looking ahead to its end. Here at the end of summer - like Mt. Tabor - the world shows us everything caught in the still center of August." (Hill, p. 185) There is abundance as well as the end of the harvest, there is warmth plus the cool winds of evening, there is life, death and life beyond death.

Often, Dianne and I spend the close of August in Montréal: the northern light is exquisite, the crowds of summer have dispersed, and a cool breeze often fills the vibrant nights in that grand city. We also wander a bit through the Eastern Townships where vineyards abound and the autumn color peeks through the summer green. There is a mix of joy and sorrow in the air and our hearts on these trips. Melancholia? A bodily prayer of endings and the patience to wait before new life returns? All of this and so much more? In three weeks, we will go again mostly to just wander. No agenda. No plans. Just a time to walk and watch together. A time to talk and listen to one another and be silent together, too. To be sure, we'll spend some evenings taking in the best jazz club ever - Dieze Onze (http://www.dieseonze.com) - but mostly we will be les flâneurs, strollers open to the mystery of each day.

The late Jane Kenyon captures this brilliantly in her poem, "Evening Sun."

Why does this light force me back
to my childhood? I wore a yellow
summer dress and the skirt
made a perfect circle.

                          Turning and turning
until it flared to the limit
was irresistible . . . . The grass and trees,
my outstretched arms, and the skirt
whirled in the ochre light
of an early June evening.
                           And I knew then
that I would have to live,
and go on living: what sorrow it was;
and still what sorrow ignites
but does not consume
my heart.

(pictures from our garden earlier today...)