Rogation

In the UK at this time of year, spring we relive the experience of our rural ancestors. Rogation, a time when the Farming community traditionally walked the boundaries of their land and prayed for the crops that they had planted. During this annual ritual they would often set up or renew the boundary stones that marked off their land.

But Rogation also marks a bridge in the seasons. As we move into Summer and the fields and hedgerows turn green, the flowers bloom, and the weather, we hope, begins to get warmer we feel the urge to get out and explore our world.

These markers reminded our ancient forebears of the thin veil between the natural world and the spiritual world. The turning seasons brought them close to the mystery of life and they set up great monuments like Stonehenge to welcome the coming of new life into the world. Though most of us no longer live as close to nature as they did, we still wonder at the miracle of nature, and we can echo the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’

The natural world is, perhaps, the place where most of us encounter for the first time the mystery of life. It is the place we meet with God. In the beauty of a sunset or the delicacy of a flower, the joy of new birth, or the grief of death we wonder at the mystery of the universe. Such moments of ‘Encounter’ can become ‘Sacred spaces’ when the veil between heaven and earth becomes thin.

Sacred Space

Chagall captures this mystery in a painting called ‘Sacred Space’. in it he depicts a place where heaven meets earth and where we connect with the past and future.

The painting, in a series telling the story of the Jewish people, Jacob, the father of the 12 tribes of Israel, falls asleep at a place called Bethel, (later Bethlehem), his head lying on a pillow of stone. He is fleeing from Esau, his brother from whom he has stolen the family inheritance. During the night he has a dream of angels ascending and descending a ladder. In the morning, as he awakes, he knows that this place is Holy, and so he takes his stone pillow and builds an altar. A place where he can recall his encounter with the Divine.

Like the boundary stones, and monuments set up by our ancestors, the stone marks a place that links Jacob across the generations and reminds him of the encounter with God through the thin veil that separates us from the angels. The stone pillow becomes for Jacob not only a boundary stone marking the place that will one day be his inheritance, but as Chagall portrays it, a bridge back to his ancestors from whom he has inherited this place, and forwards to his descendents who will be the inheritors of this place.

Notice how he places, once again, the crucified Christ, who is to be born in Bethlehem in the far right hand top corner of the painting. The story of Jacob’s ladder is one of the moments in the history of the Jewish people that Chagall wanted to capture because it speaks of God’s faithfulness through the generations, through suffering and death to deliverance and freedom.

The Christian cross describes a ‘Sacred Space’,

Chagall's painting also follows a cruciform pattern. He shows us in the vertical plane our relationship with God and in the horizontal plane our relationship with the world around us which we have inherited from our ancestors, and will pass on to our descendents. In both encounters there are both boundaries that tell us about our inheritance and remind us of our sacred duty to pass on that inheritance unviolated, and bridges that invite us to explore. Let us first explore some of the bridges that Jesus talks about.

The Horizontal plane

“Remain in my love”: John 15: 9-17. As Jesus describes the relationship between himself and his disciples he talks in terms of a ‘Love’ that is a bridge to God and to others. He calls us to leave behind fear and doubt. He invites us to explore and enter into the new world of God’s Kingdom, On the altar of love we are also to stop and examine ourselves and our relationships with others before God.

The Vertical

“I no longer call you servants” Jesus also describes a ‘Love’ that breaks down barriers. Servants serve their masters out of fear, but Jesus invites us to step out in faith and enjoy a new relationship with The God of love who calls us friends. Here we are free to explore a new world of possibilities. “The Father will give you whatever you ask in my name.” God’s love, then, makes prayer possible as we are invited to break through that ‘thin veil’ that separates us from God’s Kingdom and claim His promises.

The Sacred

“If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away” Some markers are there to speak of Holy places, they mark exclusion zones that we must respect.

These holy places could in modern Safeguarding parlance be called ‘Safe Spaces’ are there to protect us and others from potential dangers. It is significant that the ‘marker’ that Jesus sets up here is not a series of rules but our treatment of the ‘other’.

“My command is this: love each other”.John 15:12 Here is a clear marker, it sets a limit to the way we are to treat each other and indeed the world around us. We are to respect and cherish God’s creation as we respect and cherish ourselves. If we cross this boundary, Jesus warns, we are cut off from the life of God and will wither and die.

Love is then, like Jacob’s pillow, both a boundary and a bridge, inviting us to leave behind fear and doubt and explore God’s kingdom. But we also called to remember the boundaries of love that God has established, boundaries that protect the ‘sacred space’ we all inhabit.

A prayer for peace in the Holy land.

O God of all justice and peace we cry out to you in the midst of the pain and trauma
of violence and fear which prevails in the Holy Land.
Be with those who need you in these days of suffering; we pray for people of all faiths – Jews, Muslims and Christians and for all people of the land.
While we pray to you, O Lord, for an end to violence and the establishment of peace,
we also call for you to bring justice and equity to the peoples.
Guide us into your kingdom where all people are treated with dignity and honour as your children for, to all of us, you are our Heavenly Father.
In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen. 

Rev. Simon Brignall.