The Moon Come to Earth

Speaking of similar things, and I'm pretty sure Chad will be okay with me telling the story.

I'll check with him before I publish it on the podcast.

But in his conversion to Catholicism, at some point he was talking to his priest and he was sort of explaining what Chad and I do, you know.

saying, is this okay? Is there a problem with this? And the priest said, no, I don't see a problem with it, but gave Chad a blessing of the land to say.

He said, here, here's this, which I thought was just a lovely way of handling it.

Absolutely.

I mean, these days actually coming up to Feast of the Ascension were traditionally the Rogation days.

They were known as the Rogation days from Rogare, which means to ask or to seek.

And these were days when Catholic communities and Catholic parishes were... would usually take processions around the edges of the parish or around the edges of the fields.

And it was to bless the land for a good harvest and for, you know, to keep away sickness and harm or danger and also to cast out anything that may be negative that had come in in the previous year.

And it was this beautiful experience of kind of liturgy life and land all together.

And the idea that, again, We're recognizing the original blessing of the land because it comes from God and also our role in kind of working with the land, you know, in terms of producing and feeding and looking after the people and trying to recognize that there is a balance to be kept, you know, an ecology, in fact, to be kept in the fullest sense of the word oikos, you know, that we recognize this is the home that we've been given.

And sadly, a lot of those customs disappeared or because people were living in communities maybe that weren't, you know, overtly Catholic or whatever.

But they're coming back.

And we often would encourage people, you know, even with regard to their gardens, you know, to bless your garden, to bless the plants, to invoke prayer and blessing over your own land and house and place, you know, in whatever way that works with you, that suits you.

And just recently we had a big, beautiful farm and retreat center in Donegal, and we're slowly bringing the farm back to life after a long time.

We have a massive old walled garden there that has fruit trees that are nearly 300 years old, some of them still bearing beautiful apples and cherries and all that.

So on the 1st of May, we had The blessing of the blossom, which is, again, the blessing of the apple trees and the blessing of the blossom so that there will be good fruit and good harvest and all of that, you know.

So, yeah, we're much closer to the land than we think we are.

And the more awareness we have of that, the better.

Again, I think this modern separation of Christian, pagan, this, that, that, that, there's this idea that doing that would somehow prevent the other from manifesting in some

way,

you know?

It's quite the opposite.

You are in dialogue.