Templar Edification

Each year on the sixth Sunday of Easter, following the Divine Liturgy, I gather together at the main door of our church with a modest group of congregants bearing both hymnals and brooms. With the Crucifer before us, we perambulate about the borders of the parish property, “beating the bounds” with the brooms and reciting the Litany of the Saints in call-and-response. In recent years I’ve included a child with a smartphone so as to livestream the procession, thus answering the call to “keep Church weird.” The term Rogation derives from the Latin rogare, meaning “to ask.” Rogation Days are traditional times of fasting and prayer for God’s blessing in agriculture, and for divine protection against natural disasters. We want an amicable environment, not an angry one, as a happy harvest is our goal. The Western Church observes several Rogation Days. Major Rogation falls on 25 April, a time when the old pagan Romans used to sacrifice a dog to Rogibus, their deity of agricultural disease. Th...

As 2 February marks the Candlemas, so 3 February brings us to the commemoration of St Blaise, a figure of some import in the Middle Ages who has fallen into relative obscurity today. Indeed, I wouldn’t bring him up in these pages save for the fact that some parishes (such as ours) continue a wonderfully quirky tradition in his honor: the annual blessing of the throats. Blaise was famous, among other things, for saving someone from choking on a fishbone. It became de rigueur to take a pair of tapers blessed at Candlemas the night before, to cross them under a person’s throat, and to pray that they would be delivered “from every ailment of the throat and from every other disease.” I confess that I continue this tradition in part to “keep Church weird,” an operative dictum of mine. Yet even I don’t light the tapers, as had been the elder custom, lest I touch off someone’s hairspray. This is but one example of blessings held throughout the Church year—bread blessing at Lammas, beer blessin...