Raise the song of harvest home

By
Patricia O'Neill

Harvest Festival is a tricky one. It’s very tempting to relapse into a childlike version of jolly haymakers, rosy apple-pickers and kindly farmers providing us with the fruits of the earth. Give me a little of the fruit of the vine and I would happily engage in a harvest dance right down the aisle. We all know the reality is agri-business, globally one in four people moderately or severely food insecure, while others expect perfect produce plastic-wrapped in supermarkets and we see a curious collection of offerings at church, where enormous inedible marrows jostle with canned baked beans.  So naturally at the first notes of ‘We Plough the fields’ or ‘Come ye thankful people come’ we gratefully relapse into the comfort of God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world. Who wouldn’t want to indulge in the fairytale when the bitter reality is that it is very much not all right with the world? 

This may always have been true. There have always been the lords of the manor and the peasants, the have and the have-nots, the overfed and the hungry.   It may be just that the extraordinary expansion of knowledge and ways of communication have confronted us reluctantly with the devastation we have wrought on creation whilst embedding inequality in every outpost of human existence.  However, when the celebration at harvest suppers was for those whose hard work had ensured the gathering in and storing of produce against the barren days of winter, it had a  meaning that is almost impossible for us to find today.  We find some meaning in gratitude for what we have and an intention that the world should be more equal, but no more so than we should every waking day of our lives.

So I search for meaning at this season and find that what I can do is celebrate the beauty of God revealed in autumn:  glowing colours, gentle light and a bounty of fruits and vegetables, cultivated or freely available in the hedgerows.  A glorious burst of fruitfulness before the slowing into late autumn and the darkening of the days.  It’s such a powerful metaphor for life. We emerge into the world, learn and grow, develop and change, then our lives turn and we experience a time to reap what we have sown, to show forth our fruitfulness, to reflect and calm ourselves before the greatest adventure of all when our life’s pilgrimage finds its end in the love of God.