Lammas Day and passing our time

It is Lammas Day, the first day of August.

Here in Jeremy Taylor country we can see the beginnings of harvest. Bales abound in the fields, farmers are working late into the evening, the crops of mid-Summer have been gathered in. Lammas falls almost mid-way between Rogationtide and Harvest Thanksgiving. Our prayers for a good harvest were offered in the earliest days of Summer. After Summer has ended and we enter into Autumn, we will give thanks for the harvest. Now, in these last days of High Summer, we see the crops that have grown being gathered, the fields change in colour and texture.

Lammas marks the passing of the agricultural year, preparing us for Harvest Thanksgiving.

And so Lammas Day also marks the passage of Summer. Soon I will again be reading the words of Wendell Berry:

It is mid August.

The year is changing. The summer's young

are grown and strong in flight. Soon now

it will be fall. The frost will come.

Before the month's end, berries will abound in the hedgerows. As the month closes, sunset will be before 8:30pm, more than an hour and a half earlier than on Midsummer's Day. It will begin to be cooler in the mornings and evenings. With Lammas comes the final weeks of Summer.

Lammas Day tells us that the glories of Summer will soon be giving way to the richness of Autumn.

Lammas Day falls this year in the week of the Eighth Sunday after Trinity. The last Sunday in August will be the Twelfth after Trinity. It will be almost half way through the long season of Trinitytide, which draws to a close with the 25th Sunday after Trinity on 26th November.

With Lammas, the passage of Trinitytide is also marked.

The words of the Second Collect at Evening Prayer can have an added resonance today:

may pass our time in rest and quietness.

May such be our prayer for the approach of harvest; for these final weeks of Summer; and as we prepare to enter into the latter half of Trinitytide.

(The painting is George Cole, 'Harvest Rest', 1865.)

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