Blessed Lammas!

Being Inter-Spiritual has the benefit of many celebrations. This weekend is one of them. Smile, the Wheel is turning! The River of God is flowing!

Blessed Lammas! Lammas is a festival celebrating the first fruits of harvest, the fruits of our labours, and seeing the desires that we had at the start of the year unfold.  It's a time for bread-making and corn-dollies.  This time brings memories of making corn-dollies with my children and friends during our Wiccan days, wrapping corn husks for bodies, tying knots, and smoothing soft corn-silk hair.  Thinking of the things we hoped for at the last Samhain, the beginning of the cycle, and reinforced at the calendar New Year, we fashioned corn-people made of our dreams.

Lammas is an early Christian festival, "lammas" means loaf mass and represented the first loaves baked from that years crop. These were taken to church and laid on the altar.  For Pagans, this day might also be called Lughnasadh, and be commemorated as a feast day for the God Lugh, sacrificed when the grain ripened.

Goddesses celebrated around this time include Demeter and Ceres. Trees associated with Lammas are Hazel and Gorse and herbs are Sage and Meadowsweet. Colors associated with lammas are golds, yellows and orange for the God and red for the Goddess as mother. (From website The White Goddess)

There are a few saints who have feast days around this time as well.  In the Antiochian Orthodox tradition, August 5th is the feast day of St. Nonna, the mother of Gregory the Theologian.  She is remembered as a model wife and mother, yet also as a strong woman who lived a life for God and for others without neglecting her other obligations.

Due to schedules and the like, we are not having a gathering this weekend; however, there may be bread-making shenanigans before the end of the weekend. Anyone connected to St. Brigid in the Desert is encouraged to bake away, and share your offerings here!

St. Brigid is an Inter-Spiritual House Church without walls! Anyone who feels a connection to what we are doing here is a part of the virtual St. Brigid in the Desert. Baking bread? Celebrating the gathering of the grains? Brewing beer? Share photos! Blessed Be, my friends!

Photo from:  Book of Mirrors