The First Harvest has begun. The table that was bare is beginning to be filled with all the things that will carry you through the dark times of Winter. Normally when I write these up I stay pretty close to traditional writings, but Lughnasa is very special to me because in this lifetime my path has been tied to Lughnasa. This year has been no different, and my personal First Harvest has been nothing less than amazing, so I am going to get a bit personal about this Lughnasa.
A major theme in my life this past year has been Faith. Through the years I’ve been told that I was guilty of “blind faith.” However, this year someone who once said that said something else. He turned to me and said that I was Faith based, and it was a compliment. It has been a sincerely tough year, and more than one long, dark night only my Faith kept me going. And boy has it paid off. Last week I got some incredible news that made everything worth while. After receiving that news I spent some delightful time with a long time dear friend, and the subject of Faith came up. She, too, is Faith based. She made the comment that it was definitely not easy to keep that Faith, that it was a lot of hard work. She was absolutely right. Those of us who are Faith based work at it every single day.
What’s all this got to do with Lughnasa? This is the celebration of the First Harvest, but in order to get that harvest, you have to cut down the fields, and that takes Faith. Often it is celebrated by a symbolic sacrificing of the God. In days past that sacrifice wasn’t always “symbolic.” Now that takes a lot of Faith, on both the part of the God and those who are performing the sacrifice. Will He come back? Does He love us that much? Does He trust us that much? Do these people deserve my sacrifice? Will they make room in their souls for what I have to give them? Is that First Harvest just the beginning of a much bigger harvest in September? Faith lays at the foundation of that First Harvest because so much has been sacrificed in order to secure the future.
However you choose to celebrate Lughnasa, be sure to take a moment to examine your Faith. This is the perfect Sabbat to start cutting out anything that stands between you and your Faith, and to celebrate the courage you have developed inside yourself to keep going forward no matter how hard the path. That’s a First Harvest of the spiritual kind. As for me, I’m going to go out into my sacred space, pour some wine to the land in the deepest of gratitude, and dance around that HUGE Elder tree that was not there a month ago. I swear it was not.
