In the parishes of Tudor and Stuart England, the Monday of Rogationtide saw an ancient procession set out from the church door. The vicar, the churchwardens, the choristers, and as many of the faithful as could be mustered walked the boundaries of the parish, beating the boundary stones with willow wands. They paused at the bounds to pray, to chant the Litany, and (it must be confessed) to take refreshment at certain customary points. The custom was called beating the bounds, and it served three purposes at once: it taught the children where the parish ended; it sanctified the land enclosed; and it confessed before the Almighty that what was bounded was a gift, held in trust.
The Reformers, when they came to revise the ceremonies, kept this one. The Elizabethan Injunctions of 1559 ordered that the perambulation continue, for the retaining and conservation of the bounds and limits of the parishes. In some English villages it continues yet, three centuries and more after the willow wands first became sentimental rather than juridical. What the Reformers retained was not the medieval theology of corporate guilds, but the simpler, deeper conviction that the land must be walked, the bounds must be marked, and God must be acknowledged as the Owner.
For our fellowship, who meet by Zoom and have no parish bounds in the geographical sense, what then is the Rogation? It is, I think, the same act translated. We have a different shape of life — the shape of a household, a commute, a calendar of obligations, a screen full of windows — but it is a shape, with bounds. Today's invitation is to walk those bounds. Where does my work begin and where does it end? Where does my responsibility lie? Where does another's begin? What lies inside the limits of my stewardship that has not yet been blessed?
The willow wand strikes the stone,
and the stone bears witness.
S. James the Apostle, whose voice sounded for us in the Epistle of Sunday past, returns from another quarter of his Letter to set the key for these days: "Pray for one another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much." Rogation, in the Apostle's mouth, is not the prayer of a special class but of any baptized soul who has learned that the Christian life is fundamentally an act of asking. We are askers because we are not owners. We are petitioners because we are creatures. The wand strikes the stone not to claim the territory, but to remember that the territory was never ours.
And there is a small severity in this, which we ought not to soften. Rogation is the antidote to a kind of false gratitude that gives thanks for blessings without ever asking for them — a piety that pretends to be self-sufficient and then attributes its sufficiency to Providence. Asking is harder. Asking is the confession of need. Asking is the posture in which the Lord finds us willing to receive what He intends to give. Petite, et accipietis.
Today, then, walk the bounds. Name them. Pray over them. Beat them, if you must, with whatever willow wand the day affords — a hand laid on the desk where you work, a word spoken in the kitchen, a circuit of the garden. The land is the Lord's, and the work of these hands. May He bless what is enclosed within them, that it may serve Him.