A Harvest of the Spirit

Over the next few weekends, churches will be awash with tinned food, packets of cereals and displays of local produce. Improbably large marrows will jostle with baskets of fruit, loaves of bread and sheaves of wheat; brownies, scouts and guides will parade, and 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 rather than the land that provides it.

Although there is a sense in which harvest has always been celebrated (Lammas and Rogationtide come to mind), the modern fondness for the festival is traceable to the Rev Robert Hawker, who, in 1843, building on Saxon and Celtic Christian customs, began to decorate his church at Morwenstow, Cornwall, with homegrown produce. Through the Victorian era, the festival was embellished and romanticised, probably in an effort to counterbalance the influence of the industrial revolution and secularisation.

However, although the 20th century has seen its observation continue to flourish, the churches' understanding of what, and for whom, the festival is has altered considerably. The 16th-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.

In recent times, the festival has shifted in its cultural and theological moorings. Modern collects place little emphasis on God as the fickle conjurer of weather, stressing instead the political and social mandates that issue from a focus on food and provision in a world wracked by inequality and injustice.

A recent Christian Aid prayer captures the sentiments well: "We stand before you, Lord, with hands wide open, ready to receive you . . . our modest gifts, like tiny seeds, not knowing what fruits you may bring out of them . . . asking that our hands and gifts, offered in your service, will make a difference to the world beyond all our imaginings."

The emphasis has moved from thankfulness for our abundance to one of concern for those whose experience of provision is one of scarcity, or even outright starvation. Harvest festival has, in other words, become slowly, but radically, politicised.

This is an important and welcome development, relocating the festival more securely in the cadences of the Old Testament and 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.

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 more postmodern turn, it is possible to understand the festival as being something more personal. In sum, the celebration is concerned with the harvest within.

The collect quoted shows that modern writers are very much alive to the 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 their inner state or response (postmodern).

Increasingly, the cadence reflects the spirit of the age, looking 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.

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 in return. The quality of the harvest within is judged by what is given out.

By Rev Canon Martyn Percy

The Rev Canon Martyn Percy is principal of Ripon College, Cuddesdon, Oxford

[Source: Guardian.co.uk]


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