Spare meadow at Gregory

March 12: Feast of St. Gregory the Great

Spare meadow at Gregory, marshes at Pasque,
For fear of dry summer no longer time ask.
Then hedge them and ditch them, bestow thereon pence, -
Corn, meadow, and pasture ask alway good fence.

Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1573)

Welcome! Whether you’re a longtime friend or a new kindred spirit here (I recommend visiting the Village Green to get your bearings), I’m delighted to be a companion to you through the liturgical year.

Please enjoy this month’s focus: a practice of attention that encourages us to deeply explore one holiday within the context of the season.

For more to supplement your March days, peruse the March Almanac!
Pax+bonum, Kristin.

» Printable Resources

Keeping a liturgical Book of Hours binder helps me to distill all of the inspiration I find, so I can easily look to the elements that have been most nurturing for our family & community.

This month, please enjoy these binder resources to help you reflect on the feast of St. Gregory the Great:

• Cover page featuring a crow (sometimes used in place of the dove in Medieval English depictions of the Holy Spirit, as it migrates further inland in the spring) & the spring bulb Ixia bulbocodium

• Seven pages of prompts, information, & poetry (dotted with illustrations and photos) to help you learn about this feast and reflect on how it intersects with your own life and landscape.

Paid members can find this (as well as a whole library of printables) in the Scriptorium:

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FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS

In 540 AD, the Mediterranean basin was being decimated by famine & plague - and, into this chaotic time, St. Gregory the Great was born in Rome. His father held public office (perhaps in the Roman senate), and his mother - a passionate educator of her children, and a woman of incredible piety - consecrated herself to the Lord when her husband passed, living a solitary life & sending produce from her garden to the monastic community her son had established (in their family villa!)

For his own part, St. Gregory found himself wrestling with two ways of being: devotion to a contemplative monastic life, and his commitment to public engagement…a path & purpose for which his fortunate upbringing & education had uniquely prepared him.

Though drawn to a more cloistered life of contemplation, Gregory felt the persistent call toward public service, toward the correction of corruption, the holy refining of the Church’s interaction in the world.

And, balanced between these two poles, St. Gregory enlivened the Church…at the cusp of great change, nourishing believers through the transition from Antiquity to Medieval. (Retrospective distinctions we only identify later, but that were lived and felt by the people of that time, if not categorized).

Miniature of St. Gregory the Great writing, from Gregory the Great's Dialogi. From London, British Library, Harley MS 3011, fol. 69v.

An extraordinary writer & theologian, St. Gregory also practiced his devotion in tangible action - caring for the poor & the ill, ensuring they had provisions during these years of upheaval…reforming the Church & the liturgy…overseeing (maybe?)¹ the flourishing and development of what we know as Gregorian chant.

“Receive, O earth, the body that you gave, Till God’s lifegiving power destroy the grave. His heaven-bound soul no deadly power, no strife Can harm, whose death is but the gate of life. The tomb of this high Pontiff, now at rest, Recalls his life and deeds for ever blest. He fed the hungry, and he clothed the chill, And by his message saved their souls from ill. Whate’er he taught, he first fulfilled in deed, And proved a pattern in his people’s need. To Christ he led the Angles, and by grace To Faith and Church he added a new race. O holy pastor, all your work and prayer To God you offered with a shepherd’s care. High place in heaven is your just reward, In triumph and in joy before the Lord.”

Epitaph on the tomb of St. Gregory the Great
as recorded by Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731 AD)

He had a palpable connection with the people - a bias toward relationship evident long before his Papacy. He was beloved by parishioners and citizens, and such was his humility that he didn’t feel up to the calling.

The legend surrounding his election as Pope shows us this reluctant St. Gregory, fleeing to the woods to hide:

“When the procession was done [Gregory] would have gone privily out of Rome, for to eschew the office of the papalty, but against that the gates were kept so that he might not issue. At the last he did do change his habit, and so much did with the merchants that they brought him out of Rome in a tun upon a cart. And when he was far out of the town, he issued out of the tun and hid him in a ditch.

“And when he had been therein three days the people of Rome sought him all about. Anon they saw a pillar shining descend from heaven straight upon the ditch in which St. Gregory was; and a recluse, a holy man, saw that by that pillar angels descended from heaven to St. Gregory and after went up again. Anon then St. Gregory was taken of the people and after the ordinance of holy church he was ordained and sacred pope against his will, for he was much debonair, humble and merciful to rich and poor, and to great and small.”

Jacobus de Voragine, excerpt from The Golden Legend

The Church was ready for St. Gregory, but he wasn’t yet ready for the purpose to which he was called.

Still, this holy reluctance was not a setback, not evidence of misalignment: it was St. Gregory’s process of spiritual incubation. Fleeing the call to the Papacy, the legend tells us that he hid for three days in a ditch before God miraculously revealed his location…and the Scriptural canon holds potent precedence for this tradition of womb-like transformation:

• Abraham, commanded to sacrifice his son Isaac, willingly journeyed for three days with the weight of that unimaginable trial.²

• Jonah, fleeing from God’s presence, spent three days in the belly of a fish,³ before being vomited back out into the momentum of his calling.

• The Lord Jesus, crucified, lay in the tomb for three days before his resurrection.⁴

• St. Paul’s blindness upon his conversion experience lasted for three days.⁵

Time & again, we see a three-day period of stillness & separation (whether inclined toward the physical, mental, or spiritual) as being the symbolic language of God’s movement & intervention in a faith journey.

The process is the “product,” as the more modern saying goes; what often seems, at first blush, to be a flag of refusal or inability is in fact a crucial type of gestation. In a phase of darkness, God unites the calling with the called. And, for that process of metamorphosis to occur, some sort of departure must happen: whether through the death of Jesus, the swallowing-up of Jonah, the journey of Abraham to Mt. Moriah, or St. Gregory’s flight out of Rome into a ditch.

Another legend tells us that as St. Gregory - elected Pope by this time - was en route to the British Isles to bear Christian teaching further west, a locust alighted on the book he was reading during a break in the journey. He read this as a sign: that he was to stay in his place (locus), and entrust the mission to others.

And in all of this is the Lenten wisdom that we receive in the feast of St. Gregory: growth & stillness intertwine, and it’s in privation or pause that we find the seeds of flourishing.

St. Gregory the Great wasn’t yet ready: but the Church’s readiness propelled him into an incubation. He was, indeed, born for “such a time as this.”⁶

How often have I lamented periods of seemingly backwards movement, doubt, or fear? I wonder if, hidden in all these moments that feel like stagnation, I’m in my “three days” of God’s movement…if the task ahead is ready for me, and, even in my stuck-ness, I’m unknowingly being prepared for it.

Rarely is the intersection of the destination and the sojourner perfectly aligned: In God, though, we see a pattern of completion and alignment made manifest again and again.

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SPARE THE MEADOW

This Lenten, Gregorian wisdom of holy reluctance - of an incubating preparation - winds its way into the land, too.

An old farming adage⁷ tells us to “spare the meadow at Gregory”: in other words, let the early spring meadows continue to rest.

By the time March 12th rolls around here in the Pacific Northwest, though, the animals are ready for the meadow…the meadow, though, isn’t yet ready for them.

Our wintered ground is uniquely saturated, since we’re in a flood plain - but, even then, the meadows are tender & delicate at Gregorytide, hungry for lengthier daylight hours. And, even if they appear superficially dry (a rare event), the water table is high enough this time of year that scratching below the surface reveals sponge-like mud.

In the greenhouse and ready to head out to a new field

We over-winter our pigs in greenhouses, once filled with ripe tomatoes and now dormant. This helps to provide the hogs with shelter during the cold, wet winter months, and it’s also a symbiotic boon: there’s no better rooter than a pig. They immediately set to work, nosing up clods of greenhouse soil, digging for all sorts of underground goodies. One of our most intimidating scourges is bindweed - which often likes to creep into greenhouses - and the pigs work there way through, digging it up, eating everything they find, and essentially tilling the soil as they go.

This time of year, though, they’re anxious to get back outside the greenhouse…and we’re impatient for that moment, too. Though we supplement their feed, they still hanker for all the delicacies of the rest of the landscape - old roots, chickweed, slugs, fallen nuts. Their springtime cravings grow day by day.

So, we let them out of the greenhouse and move them to fresh ground at Gregorytide - but, rather than moving them to pasture…the grass and ground still fragile from winter…we “spare the meadow” and move them to old cropland.

This gives the pasture more time to ready itself for the pigs (and the cattle, who also go out onto the crops first). The animals are ready for that tender green grass…but oh, how those digging snouts and stomping hooves would tear this wet early spring ground up in a moment!

Just en route to their new field, the pigs managed to nose-up lots of impressive holes. They work quickly.

So, this Gregorytide, the hogs are digging into last summer’s flowers…eating up all the chickweed & dead nettle, trampling the detritus of last year’s blooms, turning over the dirt with their shovel-noses.

And the pasture - not ready yet - is waiting…being silently nourished by sunlight and prepared to tend to life again.

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READ ON

March Almanac

Save the date!

gather: Lent

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BENEDICTION

Again we keep this solemn fast,
A gift of faith from ages past,
This Lent which binds us, lovingly
To faith and hope and charity.

The law and prophets from of old
In figured ways this Lent foretold,
Which Christ, all ages’ Lord and Guide,
In these last days has sanctified.

St. Gregory the Great, excerpt from Ex more docti mystico (trans. by J. M. Neale, 19th c).

Lent is itself a time of incubation: a season of pause, realignment, slow ripening. We don’t always go into this feeling “ready” for the challenge, often depleted and discouraged before we even begin its hallmark practices.

Jesus, though, is ready for us - and, ever-patient, he meets us in these times of metamorphosis. This uncomfortable process of stillness & introspection, of fasting & privation, equips us whether we feel ready yet or not.

Blessings to you, friends, as we all enter the desert together! Feeling very un-ready and ill-equipped myself, I’ll be leaning on St. Gregory’s example as I remember the true source of provision.

Pax et bonum,
Kristin

P.S. Please join us in digging deeper into St. Gregory the Great & his feast! Dr. Eleanor Parker - Medievalist, Oxford lecturer, author, & expert in Anglo-Saxon culture - will be joining us on Saturday for a live Zoom discussion!!

1. The hard evidence is lacking for this…but, whatever role Pope Gregory I played (or didn’t play) in the development of this Chant, the attribution to him - to the point even of adopting his name! - speaks volumes about his impact on Christian worship.

2. “So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac. And he cut the wood for the burnt offering and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar.” (Genesis 22:3-4 ESV) Though Abraham was faithfully willing, not reluctant in taking Isaac to the mountain for sacrifice, his three day journey is a separation, signifying God’s work of intervention and salvation.

3. “And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” (Jonah 1:17 ESV)

4. “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” (Matthew 12:40 ESV)

5. “Saul rose from the ground, and although his eyes were opened, he saw nothing. So they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. And for three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank.” (Acts 9:8-9 ESV)

6. “And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:14 ESV)

7. Recorded by Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1573)