c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) At last … August. Summer’s languid afternoon. The loveliest, laziest days of the year.

For most of my life, August has meant vacation. When I was a child, my parents would pack my brother and me into the station wagon, head to the ferry dock on the Connecticut side of the Long Island Sound, and we’d float across the water to the Hamptons, where my mother’s best friend lived.

August meant long days in the sun at the beach and long dinners around my Aunt Patti’s table with fresh zucchini, snap peas, tomatoes and corn from the farm stand down the road. Some days _ those very best days _ before dinner, Aunt Patti would hand me a little metal bucket and lead me across the gravel road to a bramble-laden field where we’d pick blueberries.

Thirty-odd years on, those memories of plucking indigo gems has not faded a bit. Even when I collect my blueberries these days from Whole Foods, I still pick through the berries like Patti taught me, looking for the few errant green stems left behind by the processing plant in Michigan.

There is a spiritual connection, for me at least, between the slow rhythm of August and opportunity to take a Sabbath, to slow down and realign myself with my family and my Creator.

What I didn’t know, until I did a little poking around this week, is that there is an actual spiritual connection between August and blueberries. Well, bilberries, to be more precise.

For the ancient Celts (and some of their modern-day kin in Ireland and the Diaspora today), the first day of August was sacred. They called it Lughnasa (“loo-nuh-sah”) _ the beginning of the harvest season and the festival of first fruits.

In Celtic mythology, Lughnasa is said to have been initiated by Lugh, the High King/hero/god known for his many skills (he’s the patron of blacksmiths, among other things). As the story goes, Lugh was the grandson of a nasty tyrant named Balor of the Evil Eye, about whom there had been a prophecy: He’d be killed by a grandson.

So Balor put his only daughter in a cave where, much to his dismay, she became pregnant by a man from Balo’s rival clan and gave birth to triplets. Balor drowned two of the newborns, but Lugh was spared and raised by a blacksmith and his wife, Tailtiu.

Tailtiu was a remarkably selfless goddess/queen who, according to lore, single-handedly cleared a forest in County Meath with an ax so that the local inhabitants could plant fields there after a bad harvest. She died of exhaustion, but, before she breathed her last, she asked Lugh to commemorate her death every year and ensured that “Ireland would never be without song.”

Lugh indeed fulfilled the prophesy, killing his grandfather with a well-aimed stone. But he also began a celebration every Aug. 1 in honor of his foster mother, and that became known as Lughnasa, a festival marked by family reunions, harvest festivals and other agriculturally themed events.

The first ripe fruits in Ireland in August are the bilberries, a cousin of the North American blueberry; it became a tradition to gather the wild berries on the last Sunday in July.

In County Donegal, in the rugged northwest of Ireland, it’s also a tradition for young people to head out to the hills for bilberry picking after church on the first Sunday in August and not return until nightfall. According to an interesting essay on Lughnasa traditions on the Web site of All Saints Parish in Brookline, Mass., (http://www.allsaintsbrookline.org), “bilberry picking” became something of a euphemism for summer flings. How cheeky. But I digress.

This year, I’m spending Lughnasa in the wilds of western Montana, where the huckleberries (a smaller, sweeter cousin of the blueberry and the bilberry) are in season. Every roadside stand I passed from Whitefish to Missoula advertised various huckleberry delights _ huckleberry ice cream, huckleberry fudge, huckleberry wine and, of course, just plain huckleberries.

The hucks grow mostly above 6,000 feet in these parts, so I won’t have a chance to stroll and pick a bucketful before dinner, like I did as a child. But I will savor a sacramental bowl or three of the blue lovelies with my family as the sun disappears beyond the Bitterroot River.

And we’ll give thanks for August and all its blessings.

(Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of “The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.”)

KRE/LF END FALSANI725 words

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