The Harvest Within

This weekend, churches will be awash with tinned food, packets of cereals and various displays of local produce.  Here at Cuddesdon we have the usual Harvest Supper on Saturday night (tickets still available...and ably cooked by our very own Honorary Curate, the Revd. Prof. Mark Chapman)...and then the Harvest Service on Sunday.  Across the country, improbably large marrows will jostle for position with baskets of fruit; loaves of bread will vie with sheaves of wheat.  Brownies, Scouts, Guides and Guides will parade, and the clergy will try to say something sensible about Harvest Festival, a curiously popular service, despite the fact that people’s connection with food today is mostly with supermarkets and fast food restaurants, and hardly ever directly with the land that provides the food. (A pity, this; and perhaps especially this year we needs to pray for and support our farmers who are having the toughest of times, truly). 

Although there is a sense in which harvest has always been celebrated (Lammas and Rogationtide come to mind) the modern fondness for harvest is traceable to the Revd Robert Hawker, a Cornish priest, who began the new services we now recognise as ‘harvest festival’ in 1843, at his parish in Morwenstow.  It was Hawker who, building on earlier Saxon and Celtic Christian customs, began to decorate his church with home grown produce, a practice that has now become widespread for a hundred and fifty years.  Throughout the Victorian era, the festival was steadily embellished and romanticised, probably to act as a counterweight to the growing influence of the industrial revolution and secularisation.

However, although the twentieth century has seen the observation of Harvest Festival continue to flourish, the churches’ understanding of what and for whom the festival is for has altered considerably.  The sixteenth century Book of Common Prayer Collect seems to assume that God is wholly responsible for the weather, and for the abundance of produce.  The prayer petitions God accordingly. 

But in more recent times, the festival has shifted in its cultural and theological moorings.  Modern collects place very little emphasis on God as the fickle conjurer of weather, together with his shy husbandry of crops, fruit and livestock.  Instead, contemporary prayers for harvest stress the political and social mandates that issue from a focus on food and provision in a world that is wracked by inequality and injustice.  A recent Christian Aid prayer captures the sentiments well enough:

‘We stand before you, Lord, with hands wide open, ready to receive you.  We bring before you, Lord, our modest gifts, like tiny seeds, not knowing what fruits you may bring out of them.  We wait before you, Lord, asking that our hands and gifts, offered in your service, will make a difference to the world beyond all our imaginings.  In the name of Jesus, who once was weak, but now is exalted.  Amen.’

In the post-war era, the emphasis in contemporary harvest festivals has moved progressively away from thankfulness for ‘our’ abundance, to one of concern for those whose experience of provision is one of scarcity, or even outright starvation.  The festival has, in other words, become slowly but radically politicised.  Personally, I consider this to be an important and welcome development.  This subtle evolution relocates the festival more securely in the kinds of cadences expressed in the Old Testament, and perhaps especially the Torah.  Harvest is a time to consider those on the margins and beyond.  Those for whom the leftovers, waste and the scraps are enough, or at least necessary.

But there is another sense in which harvest is beginning to see its’ meaning evolve, even if its symbolic forms and liturgies remain apparently unchanged.  In thinking about fruits and seeds, and taking a rather more post-modern turn, it is possible to understand the festival as being something rather more personal.  In sum, the celebration of the festival is increasingly concerned with the harvest within.  The Collect quoted earlier shows that modern writers are now very much alive to the inner spiritual aspects of Harvest Festival.  In talking about fruit and seeds, offering and growth, life and potential, one can see a simple ‘snapshot’ that captures the full range of theological shifts in human consciousness.  The God who provides weather and produce (pre-modern); the God who is concerned with the distribution of these resources (political and modern); the God who is concerned with the individual, and our inner state or response (post-modern).

Increasingly, the cadence of harvest reflects the spirit of the age.  It looks in three distinct directions: to God the paternal provider; to God as an agent of social and political transformation; and to God as the therapeutic healer, who begins his work deep inside the self, not just deep inside the soil.  But perhaps this is no bad thing?  Ultimately, Harvest Festival calls us to be thankful for what we have been given, acknowledge the giver, and above all, give to others in return.  The quality of the harvest within is always judged by what is given out.  Jesus once said, in a waspish swipe at his opponents, that true religion is not about the seeds or roots we can claim in our lineage.  Faith is, in the end, a matter of the fruit we cultivated and shared, not the seedlings we were given.