Monthly Archives: August 2024

The truth of honey and grapes.

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It’s eleven years !! since I wrote this post at the Feast of Transfiguration, and focused on honey and bees. Since then I’ve posted several times about various aspects of the feast, and now I’m going to return to this one focusing on honey, that marvelous substance in great abundance all over the earth. Who can believe it? Only God could have thought of such a food. I’ve updated the following with some bee photos of my own, and kept my favorite honey pictures:

My parish is lucky enough to have our own vineyard right behind the church. This is very handy on the Feast of Transfiguration; at the end of the liturgy we can process out the doors and around the vineyard, to bless the grapes. It’s traditional to bless grapes or apples or any fruit, really, on this day.

Earlier on the feast day morning people brought into the church baskets of fruit and herbs and flowers. I carried a wooden bowl of blueberries and peaches. While we sang and communed and focused on the main event being commemorated, the fruit waited. The incense was particularly sweet that day, and I didn’t notice the smell of the beeswax candles as much as I usually do. Though I could see basil in a couple of the baskets, I didn’t catch its aroma either.

At the end of the service, with the prescribed prayers for the event, our priest (and all of us) thanked God for all His bounty, and then he sprinkled holy water over the representative sampling.

He explained to us that this is not a superstitious rite we perform, using holy water to do magic on the fruit. When we bless anything in this way we do not make it into something other than what it is, but ask God to reveal it to be what it has always been.

Whatever created things we are talking about, they have always been meant by God to bring us into communion with Him. The service of blessing of fruit brings our thoughts back to Paradise, and the right and good use of the fruits of the earth that God has given us. We are reminded of how in the beginning God made Adam and Eve to be stewards over the Garden of Eden; human beings were called to exercise a loving and thankful dominion over the earth.

Russia

But we by our sin have instead caused destruction on the earth. Mankind more often than not has overused, abused and consumed in perverse ways the gifts of the Creator. Personally, I often gobble my food and eat without attentiveness to Him.

We have prayers for the blessing of bees and beehives and honey, too, usually in a separate service. Around here it’s August 1st, but I found pictures of honey blessings in Bulgaria where they do it dramatically on February 10 (see the bright cross picture down the page).

People like to take pictures of little girls and honey, I was happy to discover, and I am posting some of them here. The Russian ones are from Optina Monastery, and the Oregon photos from the Facebook page of New Martyrs of Russia Orthodox Church.

Father Ted Bobosh has posted a large photo collection of bees and other pollinators, along with quotes about bees and Orthodox prayers for them. Just looking at the pictures will likely make you burst into prayer, too. Here is one of the prayers he posted:

O God, who knows how to work benefits through human labor and irrational living things, You instructed us in your loving-kindness to employ the fruits and works of the bees for our needs. Now humbly we beseech Your majesty: Be pleased to bless the bees and increase them for the profit of the human race, preserving them and making them abundant. Let everyone hoping in Your majesty and Your boundless compassions, and laboring in the care of these living things, be counted worthy to receive abundant fruits of their labors and to be filled with heavenly blessings in Christ Jesus our Lord, to whom is due glory, honor and worship unto ages of ages. Amen.

The photo above is from my church on Transfiguration, baskets of all kinds of fruits of the earth waiting for the prayers of blessing. Some of them were inspiring in the variety and arrangement of items, but one of my favorite baskets is the big one in front, full of apples picked just that morning.I don’t eat much honey these days, but I get a whiff of it in the candles every Sunday in church, and I can imagine the heady scent emanating from these tables laden with jars and bowls and plates of honey.

Doesn’t it just tell you something about our God, how sweet He is, and how extravagantly generous, that He would give us something as intense and rich as honey? The bees, of course, are also in the business of pollinating the fruit. The whole Creation and its interconnectedness is reflected in the Church and in our salvation history, all of a piece and orchestrated in love by our dear Father God.

Blessing of beehives
Blessing honey in Bulgaria
Honey blessing in Oregon
Oregon honeycomb

African Blue Basil

bees, my garden, nature, , , , , , , ,

This morning I switched my walking route to the less-frequented, unpaved path by the creek, and I was alone down there. But for a minute I could hear above me on the paved path, behind the trees, a woman talking on her mobile phone. She had it set on speaker, and I could hear both sides of the conversation. The woman near me said, “How is your diet? Are you eating the right things?” and I caught the Woman-on-Speaker saying, “I just can’t eat salad,” after which Woman No. 1 said, “I know people think Special K tastes like cardboard, but I eat a bowl of it every night before bed. It helps me sleep good!” And then they were out of range….

Bristly Oxtongue

That conversation is slightly connected, by being about things we do or do not eat, to the title I almost gave to this post, something about “Bristly Oxtongue” — but it was a little too rough. Now that I think about it, I do see why the plant was given that name, though when I have cooked beef (ox) tongue, I never thought of the bumps as bristly. And the botanical one I saw on the path was in its glory, such as that is, with prolific flowers on a 4-ft high plant. I have identified it in the past, but lately don’t tend to pay attention to the various thistly and bristly plants out there.

Another plant that is not my favorite, and which I wish I could keep far away from my garden, is Bermuda Grass. When I was growing up, the birds brought its seeds to the lawn my father had planted around our new house, and from then on it was a Bermuda Grass lawn, which has a lot to say for it in the dry and hot Central Valley of California. It needed watering less than weekly. It was a scratchy and coarse kind of grass to play on, and in the winter it goes dormant and brown, but it’s very hardy in every way. This plant has been encroaching from my neighbor’s back yard to mine for as long as I’ve lived here, and I am forever fighting its advance.

Today I realized that one reason this stretch of path is surprisingly green, is that it has a healthy crop of Bermuda Grass growing on the sides.

I saw quite a few other plants along the way. Curly dock reminds me of the rural bus stop of my childhood, where that plant was always growing.

Back in the home garden, my cultivated species are filling my cup of contentment. I have strawflowers for the first time, which the skippers love. If I didn’t have the ability to put a big digital photo here, I wouldn’t be able to see the long but miniature tongue the skipper is dipping down into that flower. Drink up, little skipper! Be my guest!

African Blue Basil

The plant you have been waiting for is the African Blue Basil — at least, that’s what the tag on the little pot said, that I brought home from the nursery. I just read about it online, and it says that the leaves are purple when they first sprout, and mine aren’t… It also is supposedly a perennial, which would be nice. It’s magnificent, and I saw two species of honeybees among the dozen or more were working it. It’s the latest dish that the pollinators are tasting on the smorgasbord in the Glad Garden.

Cherries and new galaxies.

beauty, poetry, , , ,

EVERYTHING IS PLUNDERED, BETRAYED, SOLD

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death’s great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?
By day, from the surrounding woods,
Cherries blow summer into town;
At night the deep transparent skies
Glitter with new galaxies.
And the miraculous comes so close
To the ruined, dirty houses—
Something not known to anyone at all,
But wild in our breast for centuries.

-Anna Akhmatova

Vlasina Stars, by Goran Vojinovic