August: Quiet Mornings and the Gift of Rest
August feels like a deep breath: not the start or end of anything, but the steady fullness in between. The fields are heavy with grain, gardens with courgettes and beans, and time moves more slowly under the weight of warm afternoons. In the Church we are still in Ordinary Time, yet this is far from an empty stretch. It is the season that asks us to live faith in its simplest form: daily, quietly, and without hurry.
This is also a month of quiet transfiguration. Not like the thunder of Mount Tabor, but the kind that happens in long evenings, in the hush after rain, in the way light falls on a kitchen table. The kind that doesn’t change everything at once, only the way we see it.
August invites us to rest without guilt, to serve without fuss, to slow down enough to notice the holy hidden in ordinary things: the click of a kettle, the hum of bees, the warmth of sun on a stone wall.
From the Earth
The land is rich and ripening. Blackberries darken on thorny arches, their first sweetness arriving. Heather glows purple across moorland, and wheat fields sway like gold water in the breeze. The air hums with crickets; evenings are warm, smelling of cut grass and woodsmoke.
Birds begin to gather on telephone wires. Rowan berries blush red, apples swell, and sloes begin to form like dark marbles on blackthorn branches. The sky is wide, open; the light stretches long.
Those Who Went Before
St Clare of Assisi (Feast Day: 11th August)
While St Francis is often remembered, St Clare of Assisi, his friend and fellow pilgrim, offers a quieter form of courage. Born into nobility in 1194, she left everything in the night of Palm Sunday to follow Christ in radical simplicity. She founded the Poor Clares, a community devoted to prayer, poverty, and gentleness.
Clare’s faith was steady, hidden, and strong. When soldiers attacked her convent, she walked out carrying the Blessed Sacrament. The armies withdrew. But most of her life was not filled with miracles, it was spent in stillness, prayer, sisterhood, and tending the sick.
Clare is a saint for August because she teaches us that rest is not laziness: it is trust. Work can be holy, but so can quietness, stillness, smallness.
A Prayer in Action
Choose one evening each week in August to eat simply and slowly: bread, cheese, fruit, or whatever you have, ideally outside, or by an open window. No screens. No hurry. Just food, light, and presence.
Before eating, pray:
“For what we are about to receive, may we be truly thankful.”
Not as a routine, but as a genuine pause. Let the meal itself become prayer: humble, unpolished, real.
“He makes me lie down in green pastures,
He leads me beside quiet waters,
He restores my soul.”
