Lord of Summer Fires

A blog on Bealtaine / May Day to fire your faith 



Seems a strange season to be starting fires.  The beginning of May, or Bealtaine in Irish, is greeted with the ancient Celtic festival of the same name. The rites and rituals to greet the start of summer include burning fires, symbolic of the return of the sun in the brighter half of the year.  People joined their cattle in walking through such fires to protect them from evils and bad luck for the season ahead.  Ashes from the fire were sprinkled on the crops to keep them from harm.  

To me this feels somewhat strange on a number of levels.  Yes to the burning of fires in the darker end of the year, to brighten the darkening sense of doom and to protect from the evils and ills that would greet the winter ahead.  What need of these in summer’s brightness? More fitting the flowery displays that were crafted, with fiery yellow colours of primrose and gorse thought to be especially powerful, in protecting against any fairies with ill intent.  Greeting the summer with such flowers was then adapted by Catholics in the honour of Mary at this time of year.  Summer flowers make more sense to me than summer fires.  

Could it be that the spiritual sensitivity of those who have gone before us offers us a different perspective from our more rational modern minds?
They recognised even in the best and brightest days of the year all was not well.  
They knew there was an uncertain journey to travel between the promise of summer’s beginning and the harvest at summer’s end.  
They turned to fires in search of a cleansing from evil and renewing of life for the season ahead.  

These fires were for the Celtic god Bel to protect them.  Attempts to adapt the customs for Christianity sought protection in Mary.  Could she be so sought after in the Catholic faith, as protection is sought under the wings of a Mother figure?  Such tender love can show itself fierce and fiery when the children are under threat.  Such protective love is used of God directly (Psalm 91.4) and such passionate love of Jesus’ weeping over the vulnerable yet resistant people of Jerusalem (Luke 13.34)   

The protection we seek is found in the crucified and risen Jesus. He protects and keeps through fires that might meet us in the summer or whatever season we find ourselves in.  As one of Jesus’ disciples Peter wrote to communities of Christians suffering he encouraged them they were kept through these fires. (1 Peter 1.5-7) 

…who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed.

They were kept and they were also cleansed from evil through these fires, 
just as gold is refined in the heat of a furnace, 
or as war wounds were cauterised to prevent infection, 
or as scrublands of gorse were burned to cleanse it and allow fresh growth.  

Not only is Jesus with us in the fire, 
but through these fires He is working.  
We are kept and we are cleansed.  

Here is a faith that burns more deeply than a finding a way to avoid evils and ills, rather it is a faith that does not fear fire, because it knows whatever may lie in wait for us, even surprising us in our brightest and best days, we know we are kept and we are cleansed.  

A prayer 
You walk on the waters
You speak to the sea
You stand in the fire beside me
Your roar like a lion
You bled as the Lamb
You carry my healing in Your hands- 
Jesus 
(From song Jesus by Chris Tomlin) 

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