May: Blessing the Fields
May opens with soft light, longer days, and the sense that the world is finally awake. In the Church’s year, it is a time of Eastertide, still echoing with resurrection, but also of Rogation Days: ancient days of prayer for the land, the seeds, the animals and the hands that tend them. “Rogare” means to ask, and in May the Church has always asked God to bless the fields and all who live from them.
There is something deeply grounding about this: a reminder that faith does not float above the earth but is woven through soil, seasons, and sustenance. The early Church walked the boundaries of fields, praying blessings over hedgerows, streams, and crops. Perhaps we, too, are called to walk more slowly through our places: to bless what feeds us, to give thanks for what grows unseen.
This is a month for paying attention, for speaking quiet prayers over kitchen tables, gardens, and windowsills with seedlings stretching towards light.
From the Earth
May is the month of hawthorn blossom: white and frothy along the hedgerows, sometimes called the May tree. Bluebells flood ancient woodland floors, a mist of violet and green. Birds build nests in gutters, barns, and hedges; swallows return from Africa, stitching the sky with their flight.
The fields are full of movement: calves in meadow grass, bees waking to flowers, cowslips bright on verges. The earth is no longer resting: it is working, stretching, offering.
Those Who Went Before
St Julian of Norwich (Feast Day: 8th May)
St Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century English mystic, lived through plague, uncertainty, and fear, yet her writings are some of the most hopeful in all Christian tradition. She lived as an anchoress, enclosed in a small stone room attached to St Julian’s Church in Norwich, spending her life in prayer, listening, and quiet counsel.
In her Revelations of Divine Love, she writes that she saw the whole of creation as small “like a hazelnut” held in God’s hand and that it endured, simply because God loves it. Her most famous words still speak balm: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Julian teaches us that hope is not denial of suffering; it is the belief that love is deeper still.
A Prayer in Action
This month, take a short walk: through your garden, a park, or simply down your street. As you walk, pray a quiet blessing over what you see:
“Bless this ground, bless those who tend it. Bless the creatures, the hidden roots, the hands that work, the homes that rest here.”
If you grow food or herbs, touch the soil as you pray. Faith does not need to be lofty, it can be spoken with muddy hands.
“You care for the land and water it; you enrich it abundantly.
The streams of God are filled with water to provide the people with grain.”
