Today we had our agriculture blessed by Father Greg Lozinskyy, the pastor of St John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Church (Trumbull, CT). Father Greg is a priest of the Ruthenian Eparchy of Passiac (NJ). He happily walked the land to bless us!
Typically I have the various parts of our agriculture project blessed earlier in the season but for many reasons that was impossible to plan. The great summer liturgical feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord is a fitting time in the Slavic Byzantine tradition to bless honey, so we blessed the newly made honey plus we invoked the Lord’s blessing upon the honey bees, pigs, cows, dogs, laying hens, and the land. Also, we asked the Lord to repel the pests.
The Byzantine Catholic Church (the same as the Orthodox and traditional Latin Churches) has a rich set of prayers for imploring God’s blessings on agriculture especially noting fruitfulness (i.e., generativity). We have successively “restored” the use of blessing of agriculture these last several years.