Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

Some mornings we found a bucket of blackberries on our porch. On other days, parishioners would drop off a jug of maple syrup, tapped from their trees, or a few blue gill, freshly caught.

In the first country parish we served, the people lived off the land. Many were farmers, but even those who had day jobs spent hours tending to their gardens.

They took a broad view of tithing – giving a portion to the church of all that God had given them, from income to ripe red tomatoes and succulent ears of corn.

But even for a people so connected to the land, the idea of blessings on Rogation Days seemed far-fetched. 

When my husband made the offer from the pulpit to bless their land, only a few signed up -- most likely to indulge the young pastor his penchant for old English customs. That year, he filled a sports bottle with holy water, said prayers and sprinkled the water over the newly planted crops. 

In the fall, the farms that had been prayed over experienced significant increases in their yields.

The next spring, requests for Rogation Day prayers filled four legal-size sheets. Single-spaced. My husband put more than 1,000 miles on his car in three days, crossing the county to bless farms, big and small, gardens and berry patches. 

Rogation Days start Sunday and continue until Ascension, on June 2. I wonder how many congregations still honor this tradition of blessing the spring plantings. (Share your stories with us!) It seems a wonderful opportunity to re-connect with the land, to see stewardship as more than sharing from our pocketbooks, to see God’s grace in the first buds of beans. 

In that small farming community, the people witnessed the power of prayer. They saw its tangible results, more potent than any store-bought Miracle Grow.