'They are in him, he likewise actually is in them': nurturing an Anglican love for Rogationtide
This is partly because Rogationtide reflects a significant strain in Prayer Book piety. The exhortation at the opening of Morning and Evening Prayer calls us to "to ask those things which are requisite and necessary, as well for the body as the soul". In the Litany we petition, week by week, "That it may please thee to give and preserve to our use the kindly fruits of the earth, so as in due time we may enjoy them". In the General Thanksgiving "We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life". The Prayer Book, in other words, consistently sets before us that which is our particular focus in Rogationtide: the created order as the gracious gift of God; sustained, blessed, and nourished by God, for our well-being and flourishing.
Hooker robustly defended 'worldly' prayers in the BCP from Puritan critics. Noting such Puritan complaints about "the number of our prayers for earthly things" (LEP V.35), he pointed to how many encounters in the Gospels came about because of 'earthly things' - "they whose bodilie necessities gave them the first occasion to seeke reliefe" (V.35.2). Hooker, in other words, recognised that, as embodied beings, "bodily necessities" will draw us to God. Such "bodily necessities", therefore, must be embraced by the Church's prayer:
Touchinge prayers for thinges earthlie, we ought not to thinke that the Church hath sett down so manie of them without cause.
Rogationtide, therefore, provides a yearly focus for such prayers, needs, and petitions, drawing us through "things earthlie" to behold, in the words in the collect for Rogation Sunday, the One "from whom all good things come".
Underpinning this is wider account of a participatory vision, highlighted by John Hughes. He saw it as given classical expression by Hooker - "All other thinges that are of God have God in them and he them in him selfe likewise ... So that all thinges which God hath made are in that respect the ofspringe of God, they are in him ... he likewise actuallie is in them, thassistence and influence of his deitie is theire life" (V.56.5) - and then found in many exemplars of the Anglican tradition: Traherne, John Wesley, Coleridge, Keble, F.D. Maurice, Westcott, Ramsey, Lewis, Eliot, Farrer, Rowan Williams. We might add other names to that list, including - as Fergus Butler-Gallie urged in a recent excellent article - Parson Woodforde, who "has much to teach us about rootedness". Hughes' description captures the significance of this vision for Anglicanism:
a particular piety and sensibility which could be seen as characteristically Anglican: a sense of all creation being in God and God being in all creation, through Christ.
Rogationtide, falling as it does in this time after Easter and these days before Ascension, can powerfully proclaim the Christological centre of this joyful vision of the created order: to again quote Hughes, "as flowing from and to him, who is the Alpha and Omega of all things".
It was the Elizabethan Injunctions of 1559 which maintained the Rogationtide procession, as a means to both "give thanks to God, in the beholding of God's benefits, for the increase and abundance of His fruits upon the face of the earth" and to nurture the mutual obligations which sustained communal peace: "the same minister shall inculcate these or such sentences: 'Cursed be he, which translateth the bounds and doles of his neighbour'". This is suggestive of a communal vision inherent to Rogationtide, a communal vision set forth elsewhere in the Injunctions:
because in all alterations, and specially in rites and ceremonies, there happen discords amongst the people, and thereupon slanderous words and railings, whereby charity, the knot of all Christian society, is loosed; the queen's majesty being most desirous of all other earthly things, that her people should live in charity both towards God and man, and therein abound in good works, wills and straitly commands all manner her subjects to forbear all vain and contentious disputations in matters of religion, and not to use in despite or rebuke of any person these convicious words, papist or papistical heretic, schismatic or sacramentary, or any suchlike words of reproach.
Here is another reason for Anglicans to cherish Rogationtide. Communal peace has been especially valued by Anglicanism, a painfully realistic reflection on the bitterness of civil divisions and conflict. It is a concern echoing throughout the Prayer Book:
who art the author of peace and lover of concord ... may pass our time in rest and quietness ... From all sedition, privy conspiracy, and rebellion, Good Lord, deliver us ... that peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and piety, may be established among us for all generations ... may be godly and quietly governed.
To observe Rogationtide is to indwell this prayerful Anglican desire for peaceable, just, rightly-ordered communities.
Finally, there is the parish. Even in those parts of the Anglican Communion where the parish system has no legal existence, the ethos of the parish church is to be found: the sense of the parish church embedded in the local community, seeking blessing upon the community, its well-being and flourishing. While sectarian 'against the parish' understandings of the local church are promoted by some, they are a rejection of a significant aspect of the Anglican experience (and the experience of other Christian traditions). As Andrew Rumsey has put it:
Parish is a bond-word: a covenant with place ... it expresses our need for a footing in the world, for local attachment ... binding secular to sacred, human community to natural landscape.
Parish is an expression of the participatory vision celebrated by Hooker and across the Anglican tradition; it is the embodiment of the recognition of "things earthlie" in the Book of Common Prayer, as Alison Milbank has recently emphasised:
A true ecological pariochialism is ... embedded in its community and sees itself as part of the wider habitat, constituted by those relationship, which are all open to God.
Rogationtide, then, gives expression to a fundamental part of the Anglican experience: what it is to be a parish, to seek the good - always coming from and fulfilled in the Triune God - of the community in which we are placed, in whose environment, landscape, commerce, allegiances, and recreations we share.
That other Christian traditions can meaningfully observe Rogationtide is not at all in doubt. Indeed, as stated at the outset, it is a joy to behold this. Those of use who are Anglicans, however, should have a particular love for Rogationtide, for these Rogation Days reflect much of the gentle and gracious goodness of our tradition, of the petitions and thanksgivings we offer in Common Prayer, of the joyous Hookerian participatory vision of all that is, of the peaceable vision of human flourishing carried by the Anglican tradition.
(The painting is 'Low Evening Light at Lawrenny Church' by contemporary British landscape artist Jon Houser.)
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