It was Augustine, in the first book of De Doctrina Christiana, who drew the distinction that has shaped Christian thought on creation ever since: between uti and frui — between use and enjoyment. Some things, he said, are to be used; some things are to be enjoyed; and the well-ordered soul is the soul that does not confuse the two. God alone is to be enjoyed for His own sake. Created things are to be used in the service of that enjoyment. Disorder enters when we begin to enjoy what is meant to be used, and to use what is meant to be enjoyed.
The Rogation Days, as they have been kept in the Church, are a kind of annual rehearsal of this distinction. We ask for fruitful seasons. We ask for blessing on the labours of those who till and tend. We ask, in the words of the 1928 Book, that we may learn to use the good things of this life in such sort as not to abuse them, and the rather look forward to the world to come. The petition is not that we may have more, but that we may rightly receive what we have. Rightly receive: the grammar of Rogation is creaturely.
This is timely. We live, you and I, in an age that has lost the distinction between use and enjoyment so thoroughly that the very vocabulary has gone strange. The earth is treated as a thing to be enjoyed, exhausted, consumed for its own sake; meanwhile, persons — made in the image of God, the only creatures meant to be loved with the love proper to God's own — are increasingly treated as resources, used for the satisfaction of ends not their own. We have inverted the categories. The Rogation comes as a small annual correction, a Tuesday in the long week of the world's confusion, in which we are taught again to handle creation with reverence and persons with delight.
The grammar of Rogation
is creaturely.
The patristic tradition recognised that this rightly-ordered use is itself a form of worship. Quidquid agis, ad gloriam Dei facite — whatever ye do, do all to the glory of God. The kitchen, the workbench, the keyboard, the fields of every kind: these are not domains outside the sanctuary. They are the sanctuary's antechamber. To eat with thanksgiving, to work without anxiety, to give without grudging, to receive without grasping — these are the small daily liturgies that the Rogation week makes plain.
And there is a particular relevance for those of us who labour in fields the medieval parish never imagined. The information the historian collects, the lines of code the engineer tests, the spreadsheet the accountant balances, the patient the nurse tends, the document the priest drafts — all of it is given. None of it was ours to begin with. The mind that thinks the thought, the hand that types the line, the breath that carries the word — these are gifts of a moment, lent for the labour, returned at the close of the day. Tuesday's Rogation simply asks: did you remember, this day, to whom these things belong?
So today's prayer is not for more. It is for clarity of vision in the midst of what we have. Use, do not abuse: the formula is so simple it is easy to overlook. Yet it contains, in seed, the whole of Christian ethics; and the soul that learns it on a Tuesday in May learns it well enough to be carried, in the strength of it, all the way to the world to come.