The Loaf-Mass
This year August 1st, Lammas Day, falls on a Friday. In previous years we have held a special vespers service for Lammas Day; this time around we will bless the bread on the following Sunday. Nevertheless, I wanted to share a little Lammas homily from the Year of Our Lord 2012. Happy Lammas Day!
Lammas Day: First Fruits
Homily:
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from
our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. AMEN.
To put things in the simplest of
terms, Lammas Day is a festival of first fruits.
July, they say, is the “hungry
month,” as communities wait patiently for fields to grow and for crops to
ripen. Around the beginning of August we
are rewarded with the first harvest of grain and the earth begins to yield up
her bounty. Our Israelite forebears were
instructed by the Law of Moses to make a basket of such first fruits and to
offer them upon the altar of God as a sign of thanksgiving, of faith, and of
fealty to the covenant that God forged with our ancestor Abraham. Following the Incarnation, Resurrection, and
Ascension of Jesus Christ, adoption into the family of God was thrown wide not
simply for those who shared the blood of Abraham but for every culture, family,
and individual who shared the faith
of Abraham.
Most of these cultures, too,
celebrated the first fruits of the harvest season. The Egyptians believed that after their god
Osiris was murdered he became lord of the underworld, whence he sent back plant
life; Osiris literally pushed up daisies.
They would bury little Osiris-shaped dolls or cakes covered in seeds,
and await the sprouting and ripening of those dolls to mark the return of the
harvest. When Jesus came, dying and
rising as the Bread of Life, they found their myths fulfilled.
Certain European cultures believed
that as the corn was harvested—“corn” here being a general term for any sort of
grain—the spirit of the corn, that life-force that caused food to spring forth
from the ground, would retreat from the harvesters’ scythes until only one
sheaf of grain remained. They called
this the “neck” or the “mare” or the “corn queen,” and in olden times to cut
down such a sacred spirit-stalk invoked the death penalty. Farmers would line up and throw sickles at
it, keeping their distance from the dirty deed.
This last bit of corn, haunted as they believed, they then wove into a
figure called a “corn dolly” or “corn bride.”
Here the life-giving spirit of the crop would remain safe through fall
and winter, to be planted again in the spring.
In time, the Light of Christ would reveal the true life-giving Spirit
hidden in Nature to be not a vulnerable ghost of grain, but the very Creative
Spirit of God Most High.
The Scots of northernmost Britain,
meanwhile, would grind up the first oats of the season to make sacrificial
cakes, which they then offered to mollify the “hooded crow”—or any other wicked
spirits or beasties—that might otherwise ravage their fields. When Christianity came to the Celtic peoples
of the Isles, this pagan tradition was adopted, reinterpreted, and sanctified
to Christ. No longer were their little
loaves offered sacrificially to devil-crows, but instead were brought to the
altar of the Church as signs of thanksgiving and gratitude for first
fruits. A priest would bless the loaves
and set some aside to be shared in the Holy Eucharist; the rest would be sent
to homes throughout the community as a blessing.
This celebration became known as the
“Loaf Mass,” when people would bring the bread of their labors to the God Who
provides our fields with fruit and our lives with love. Over time “Loaf Mass” became Lammas, one of the eight Quarter and
Cross-Quarter Days that mark the turning Wheel of the Year. A certain timid breed of Christianity might
quail at the seemingly pagan origins of this festival, but historically the
Church has never shied from taking beloved pre-Christian traditions and
adopting them into the life of God’s people.
Jesus, after all, converts not simply
individuals but entire nations, cultures, and traditions. Given that the vast majority of humanity
throughout the vast majority of history has lived an agrarian life, it comes as
no surprise that the Church year reflects these very human rhythms of planting
and harvest that bind us to
Nature. As the Law of Moses prepared the
Jews for Christ and philosophy prepared the Greeks, so did the rhythms of
Nature and the myths of our pagan ancestors prepare the rest of the world to
know the love of our Creator Incarnate of the Virgin Mary.
Alas, for good or for ill, our
society has undergone a great Industrial Revolution, and the agrarian patterns
of living—patterns that bind us to the land we were built to steward, patterns
that draw us closer through Nature to Nature’s God—grow obscure. We remain the lucky rural few, out here
amongst the fields. Tonight we celebrate
Lammas, the festival of the first wheat harvest, and this very week my son delighted
to watch the harvesting of the wheat fields just across our road. Cities divorce us from agrarian life, and
this makes it more difficult to conform to the liturgical life of the
Church—not impossible, mind you, just harder.
Why celebrate the seasons when all fruits and grains remain available
year-round in the store? Everything’s
grown so dreadfully homogenized; plenty becomes excess.
But Lammas, and its sister festivals
throughout the year, ground us, teach
us, remind us that God operates not divorced from the mud and blood of everyday
life but rather God meets us in the simple things, the everyday things, the
common things. God comes to us in bread
and wine. God purifies us with water and
flame. God heals us through the hands of
our neighbor, the love of our family, the gifts of the sinner next door.
In celebrating so humble a thing as
bread—in rejoicing at so common a thing as the season—we affirm that in Jesus
Christ Heaven has come down to earth, the Spirit now dwells within Man, and God
Himself has taken on human flesh and blood.
Ours is the highest of Gods manifest in the lowest of sinners and
simplest of things. And the Church will
rejoice in this wondrous promise even unto the end of the age, when all things
finally shall be revealed as they truly are.
Thanks be to Christ, our Bread of
Life forever. In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.
If you really want to get traditional, mark your Lammas loaves with a circle to represent God's good gift of the sun.
ReplyDeleteGabe, I need a place to ask you questions that go on for longer than 140 characters, and this seems as good as any.
ReplyDeleteI need to know if Bertrand Russell is all wet when he credits Porphyry with influencing Christian theology through the Neoplatonists. I'd discount it out of hand if not for Augustine's singling out neoplatonism for lighter abuse than other pagan schools in City of God.
I think it's safe to say that Neoplatonism influenced both Judaism and Christianity. While a minority wanted nothing to do with Greek philosophy (e.g. Tertullian's retort, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?") the majority found that Greek thought had a lot to offer. Clement of Alexandria provided the counterpoint to Tertullian: "As God prepared the Jews for Christ through the Law, so He prepared the Greeks by philosophy." Or something like that. Jewish thought had been heavily Hellenized for centuries before Christ, and the Church largely ran with it. Besides, a lot of Church Fathers started out as philosophers. Justin Martyr springs to mind.
ReplyDeletePorphyry came at it from the other way. He was a Christian who left the faith in favor of Neoplatonism. His greatest influence upon the Church must surely be his criticism of the Scriptures, which are often accepted by historical-critical scholars today. Several Church Fathers, notably Jerome, took up pen to refute him. Christian thought both adopted useful Neoplatonic ideas and responded to Neoplatonic criticisms.
I'm not familiar with Russell's specific accusations regarding Porphyry, but I'm sure he had influence on theology -- in the refutation if nothing else.
I had no idea how influential Russell was until I read him. His prejudices beat for beat are the same as the modern academy's.
DeleteIn his History of Western Philosophy he has a chapter on Plotinus. In that chapter he suggests that Porphyry's conception of a tripartite Godhead influenced the Fathers. The best evidence for this I know of is circumstantial: several Neoplatonists (e.g. Synesius) became bishops and may have brought his ideas with them.
In general, I'm suspicious of any attempt to assign a specific history to an idea. Ideas well up within us organically, and you might just as usefully try to discover the origin of the attached ear lobe or the epicanthic fold. But I wanted an expert's opinion before dismissing Russell on this point.
Ah, the Trinity. Neoplatonism's "emanations" of the One, the Logos, and the Nous have been compared and contrasted to the Trinity. Really the Trinity's roots lie in Jewish Wisdom literature, especially as developed in the Deuterocanonicals. Wisdom starts out as a concept, then a personification, and soon you have Wisdom as a divine Person who is both "God and from God" at the same time. When the Incarnation comes about, Paul explicitly identifies biblical Wisdom with the pre-Incarnate Christ. There is a real "binity" in much Jewish thought right before Jesus. John describes this same idea with the Word or the Logos, which is the same terminology used by the Neoplatonists and pre-Christian Jewish thinkers. (A modern writer who tackles some of this is Daniel Boyarin in "The Jewish Gospels.")
DeleteThe Trinity definitely arises out of a certain thread of Jewish thought -- a thread, one could argue, that also generated the 10 sephirot of Kabbalah. Now the question is, would Jewish thought have taken that route without Plato? Where does the Hebraic end and the Hellenistic begin? I for one have no idea, save to muse that they may have been looking at the same notion from different angles.