When St. Barnabas smiles both night and day, / Poor ragged robin blooms in the hay

June 11: St. Barnabas' Day

When St. Barnabas smiles both night and day,
Poor ragged robin blooms in the hay.

Traditional proverb

Hi folks! My name is Kristin - I’m a Pacific Northwest artist, farmer, & mom sharing art and reflections inspired by the sacred & the seasonal, place & past. I explore the agrarian heritage of the liturgical calendar and how we can reflect it in our varied homes, landscapes, & lives.

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Every day for the past few weeks, our youngest has asked me the same question: “Is it summer yet?” There’s a lot of wisdom in that daily query…when does summer begin, after all?

Our modern seasonal reckonings look to astronomical time, but they define the solstice as the start of summer - earlier cultures, though, saw the solstice as Midsummer (which makes more sense to me, anyway!) Once we experience the summer solstice - when that great defining light in the sky appears to stand still - we slowly, steadily, edge our way toward decreasing days and increasing nights. Sunlight is waning after the solstice occurs.

This older way of looking at the seasons (defining the solstices and equinoxes as midpoints) would have placed the beginning of summer sometime around May Day, which blends more effortlessly into meteorological ways of measuring the seasons.

We live by other calendars, too, though - school calendars, civic & fiscal calendars, local calendars, and, of course, the Church year…and they all matter in our lives. So, although I tend to think we’re about to reach the middle of summertime, we simultaneously haven’t even begun summer - school hasn’t let out yet, and our Summer CSA session here on the farm only just started last week.

We make sense of our days through layers of calendars, woven in and out of each other - tools to help us glimpse the permanent amidst the transient.

“He has contrived to gratify both tastes together on the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual ear; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.”

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

We’re living in a paradoxical “both/and” state, and the liturgical year has been training me to be okay with that nuance. To let life exist in gradients instead of hardened boundaries. To see that the finitude of our days is lived in the context of eternity.

Dust to dust - leaves wither, but summer will return again.

Before earlier calendar reforms, the feast of St. Barnabas - June 11 - landed near the summer solstice. Even after timekeeping changes, Barnabytide still retained that Midsummer flavor…a bit like an opening song to the great Nativity of St. John the Baptist.

It’s helpful to recall that, for our forebears, this timing of St. Barnabas’ Day was considered both potent and illustrative - and that they saw his feast as landing not at the start of summer (as we tend to see it in our modern world), but rather at the very mid-point of summer…the tipping point, when summer days would begin waning.

The traditions of Barnabytide speak to this: Haysel (the haying season) begins, when farmers would cut the grass of their hay-fields for the coming winter months.

At Barnabytide, they found themselves celebrating the very apogee of the summer season by preparing for winter. Cutting summer grass to ensure warmth & a food source for any over-wintered animals.

For many of us in our modern context, with summer break just around the corner, it’s hard to imagine preparing for winter. Yet that’s what is required of us; not just in terms of tending to the needs of daily life, but also in our pilgrim souls. We live in paradox; we’re invited to celebrate the warmth and abundance of Midsummer, but also asked to keep an eye toward the leaner months. We live our lives knowing that all of our celebration & joy can, at any moment, be suddenly torn asunder, finding ourselves in seasons of loss & confusion.

The wisdom held by rural cultures in Barnabytide’s hay season embraced this paradox, and we could do well to learn from their promptings. To let the character of God, not the circumstances of our moments, define our lives. To not let joys be marred by the knowledge of their fleeting nature; celebrating Midsummer, but simultaneously laying the foundations that will support us throughout the winter months.

And what better saint to herald this message? Barnabas brought the newly-converted St. Paul to the Apostles, vouching for the changed heart of a former persecutor. St. Barnabas well understand paradox, and his boldness at a pivotal moment in early Church life continues to ripple in our theology and our lived faith experiences today.

Martyred in AD 71, St. Barnabas was a native of Cyprus and member of the tribe of Levi. Though not one of the Twelve, his role in our tradition was so important that he is still considered an Apostle.

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Art + Resources

» Originals & Prints

It’s been awhile since I’ve shared my wee original Vignette drawings - tiny glimpses into the seasonal stories of the calendar, meant to enliven the nooks and crannies of our homes…tucked in amidst dusty books or beneath draping fern fronds.

For the feast of St. Barnabas, I have two new original Vignettes - hand-drawn with colored pencil, ink, and gel pen. They tell the story of some Swifts returning for the summertime, celebrating Barnabytide with fragrant blooms.

Both of these originals are available in my Etsy shop!

I also have new holiday wreath prints available, as well as some Barnabytide prints that celebrate the start of hay season…beautifully reproduced from my original watercolor paintings.

(I keep a square frame in our kitchen and like to change out the wreath prints once a month…it always freshens things up and brings a helpful reminder of the season to my days!)

» Printables

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

For St. Barnabas’ Day, I’m offering up a few resources to help you craft your own liturgical year binder - a pretty cover page, info sheets with some details about St. Barnabas and the agrarian heritage of his feast, ideas for celebration, & some fill-in areas to help prompt your own gatherings.

My paid subscribers can find these (as well as lots of other printables!) in the Scriptorium - if you’d rather make a single purchase, you can also find them on Etsy:

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Fragrance of Barnabytide

“Woodroofe Asperula hath many square stalkes full of joynts, and at every knot or joynt seven or eight long narrow leaves, set round about like a star or the rowell of a spurre. The flowres grow at the top of the stems, of a white colour and of a very sweet smell, as is the rest of the herbe, which, being made up into garlands or bundles, and hanging up in houses in the heat of summer, doth very well attemper the aire, coole and make fresh the place, to the delight and comfort of such as are therein.”

John Gerard, as quoted by Thomas Forster in The Catholic Yearbook

The heritage of the liturgical calendar is infused with the natural world and agricultural tradition. We still see vestiges of this sometimes in modern life - we bring evergreens indoors at Christmastide and are familiar with the smells of that season.

The Church of generations past, though, embraced this intersection of nature & theology year-round. For the feast of St. Barnabas, we see aromatic Midsummer herbs & flowers being brought into churches, worn by priests, and adorning houses. Can you imagine the delightful fragrance of sweet woodruff wafting above you as you step into an ancient stone church?

These botanical adornments were not merely off-the-cuff additions…they were valued elements of the liturgical experience.

We see them in the painstaking Medieval records of St Mary At Hill church in London, where the churchwarden’s account itemizes roses & sweet woodruff in the 15th century:

Item, payd…
for Rose-garlondis and wodrove-garlondis on Saynt Barnebes day

And Robert Chambers elaborates on our imaginings:

“It appears to have been customary on St. Barnaby's day for the priests and clerks in English churches to wear garlands of the rose and the woodroff. A miraculous walnut-tree in the abbey churchyard of Glastonbury was supposed to bud invariably on St. Barnaby's day.”

Worship in the Church context was not a sterile experience…it was filled with offerings gleaned from the natural world and from agricultural rhythms. Our forebears didn’t just bring long-lasting evergreens inside; they brought delicate, transient blooms that would be at their fullest for mere days before withering.

There’s something remarkably beautiful about a church fostering that intersection of the temporary and the eternal, isn’t there?

The Feast of St. Barnabas ushered in everything from roses to lavender to sweet woodruff, all hung in bunches, garlanded, or even being worn.

Ragged Robin, popping up in hay fields at Midsummer, was also a Barnabytide bloom - as well as cheerful Midsummer Daisies.

What can you bring indoors from the outside to recall Barnabas today?

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Haysel

On St. Barnabas
Put a scythe to the grass

Traditional proverb

Hay season (Haysel) traditionally began with the feast of St. Barnabas, weaving winter’s preparations into Midsummer’s celebrations.

This Midsummer start of hay season beautifully amplifies Barnabas’ devotional life: St. Paul himself was a paradox, one of the most violent persecutors of the Church becoming her greatest theologian. St. Barnabas witnessed the converted heart of Paul; he saw the new and the beautiful existing in the context of a complicated soul. And he trusted & celebrated that movement, going so far as to usher Paul into the active life of the Church.

Here on our farm in the Pacific Northwest, hay season isn’t quite in full swing yet; but, soon enough, it will be…even though we’ve only just started to share our Summer CSA with folks.

Just a quick primer on this farmlife staple: hay is cut, dried grass that is longlasting and stable (though it loses a bit of nutritional quality over a long time). It’s used for bedding and for feed. Cutting summer hay means that we can capture a bit of the nutrition in the grass and then provide it to our animals in the winter, but for dry bedding and for eating.

If Barnabytide paradoxically celebrated Midsummer abundance and made preparations for winter’s scarcity, how can we foster that mindset in our own modern lives?

What does it look like for me to be in the midst of busy summertime activity, yet still be “making hay” in my own heart?

St. Barnabas’ Day is an invitation to ponder these questions, and to prompt our spirits out of complacent repose and into vigilance. For my own part, I’ve gotten lax with my habits: for prayer, technology use, disciplines of reading and meditating and creating. And it’s easy to let our foundations get shaky when the days are full and busy.

Barnabas, though, reminds me to attend to the foundations: to anchor myself in the character of God, not in my circumstantial ebbs and flows…to “make hay” by resetting my habits and priorities, so that when the hard times return (and oh, they will), I’ll have a firm foundation to support my days.

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Benediction

Ring ye the bels, ye yong men of the towne,
And leave your wonted labors for this day:
This day is holy; doe ye write it downe,
That ye for ever it remember may.
This day the sunne is in his chiefest hight,
With Barnaby the bright,
From whence declining daily by degrees,
He somewhat loseth of his heat and light,
When once the Crab behind his back he sees.

Edmund Spenser, excerpt from Epithalamion

Friends, the second iteration of Ordinary Time is upon us…and it’s my favorite season. Though at first blush it doesn’t seem to have the bells & whistles of other liturgical seasons, I promise you…they’re here. From St. John’s Tide to the celebratory July feasts, to the turn toward Fall that we see in Lammas and the Assumption…and onward till Advent…there’s so much to ponder.

How are you celebrating summer? How can you “make hay” in your life while the busy, outward pace of summer is upon us?

Pax vobis,
Kristin

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