Day: August 1, 2021

“These things were our examples”

The Calendar in the Canadian Prayer Book designates August 1st as Lammas Day and as the commemoration of The Maccabean Martyrs. In doing so, it looks back to the calendars of festivals and commemorations of the European medieval developments particularly in their Anglo-Saxon form and the way they have been recalled at different times. St. Peter in the Chains was a third commemoration on August 1st as well,  looking back to the story of Peter in Acts being freed from his chains by an angel while in prison and to the subsequent building of a Cathedral in Rome dedicated to the breaking of his chains in the fifth century. The concept contributes to the centrality of Peter, the Petrine primacy, as it came to be asserted in Rome. It is, perhaps, no surprise that such a commemoration did not continue on in England post-reformation. But what about Lammas Day and The Maccabean Martyrs?

Lammas Day is associated with the harvest. It is one of the four ‘cross-quarter’ days which have to do with a profound sensibility about our connection to creation understood in terms of the celestial and the terrestrial, the heavenly and the earthly, captured artistically and arrestingly, for instance, in the many windows and sculpted stone work of the medieval churches and cathedrals of Europe that depict the labours of the months along with the signs of the zodiac. Such images place human labour in the world as ordered to God and as a form of participation in the life of God; something which we have largely lost in our technocratic world which presumes the mastery of human and non-human nature at the expense of both. August 1st is more or less halfway between the summer solstice and the fall equinox; likewise, November 1st stands half-way between the fall equinox and the winter solstice; February 2nd or Candlemas roughly half-way between that and the spring equinox; May 1st, May Day, between that and the summer solstice. Such things are reminders of the patterns of nature’s year and what that means for human life seen in terms of the created order.

In one of the wonderful stained glass windows at Chartres Cathedral in north central France, August is associated with the labour of the threshing of the grain or wheat. July’s labour was the harvesting of the wheat; August marks the threshing of the wheat leading to its being transformed into bread; September marks the harvesting of grapes. Lammas derives from Old English, hlaf, loaf, and, maesse, mass, hence loaf-mass; it marks the first harvest and its fruit, as it were. The term, mass, in loaf-mass ties it to the Christian theme of our sacramental participation in the fruits of Christ’s redemptive work as suggested in today’s Epistle.

(more…)

Print this entry