A message from the Dean - 2 October 2020
Dear Friends,
Since Victorian times, the Church of England along with many other churches, has kept the first Sunday of October as Harvest Thanksgiving. We can trace its origins to the work of an imaginative Cornish parish priest, the Revered R S Hawker. He adapted the old celebration of Lammas, that takes place in early August, with its thanksgiving for the crops of the field and sharing of a “Lammas loaf”, and combined it with the secular “harvest home” celebrations of his time. (There’s a rollicking account of a very bucolic Wessex harvest supper in Thomas Hardy’s novel, “Far from the Madding Crowd” – if you don’t want to read the book see the splendid and sumptuous John Schlesinger 1967 film version of it). Hawker’s work gave rise to the tradition of bringing to church fresh produce – fruit, vegetables, eggs, and other foodstuffs together with fresh flowers and symbols of the earth’s bounty. These days much of this is then given to local foodbanks or shared with people in need. In many places Harvest is still kept with a shared meal and, in rural parishes, this is kept as a supper with a verve and gusto that wouldn’t be any less intense than those taking place in Victorian times. In my last parish, Brancepeth, Co Durham, we feasted on ham, pease pudding, baked spuds, heavy-duty puddings and some home-made wines of astonishing strength. We sang ourselves hoarse with all the old North East folk songs – “Blaydon races”, “Cushy Butterfield”, “The Lambton worm”, “Keep yer feet still Geordie hinny”. All monies raised went to Christian Aid; it was, without doubt, one of the best community events of the year. Some of our oldest harvest hymns capture that exuberance with a sense of human dependency, something that our ancestors were more sensitive to than we are in our sophisticated, convenient, western consumerist culture.
“Come ye thankful people , come,
raise the song of harvest-home:
all is safely gathered in,
ere the winter storms begin” (H Alford, 1810-71)
It’s wholy good that once a year we remember our manners and thank God for our daily food and drink, for earth’s bounty and the cycles of production and distribution that bring it to us. But we cannot stop with a cursory “once a year” reminder to be thankful. This year Harvest falls on St Francis’ Day, 4 October. He has been adopted as the patron saint of the environmental movement by the World Wildlife Fund. The gatherings of the world’s religious leaders on the environmental crisis have taken place in Assisi, Francis’s birthplace and burial place. Francis had a clear attitude of humble wonder and profound praise for all God has made. His teaching makes a good summation of Christian ecological spirituality:
1. Everything created is a gift of God and God wills its good.
2. We share with all living beings in the giftedness of creation and we share in the divine care and compassion for all beings on the earth.
3. With all living beings we are called to express gratitude and love constantly for creation in a natural symphony of praise.
Some reflections of these propositions:
1. Everything created is a gift of God and God wills its good. We are among the first generations of humanity to live our lives by another account of our origins. Large numbers of our contemporaries do not see the earth as a gift of God but a chance occurrence in a galaxy billions of years old. The idea of creation – that everything is ordered according to the purposes of a good and loving creator – is eclipsed by this powerful modern ideology of chance, randomness, of creation as a measurable event rather than a providential act. Take notions of God out of creation then it is not good in itself, it is simply ours for the re-making. We may believe that as conscious, talking beings it is our right to remake the world in our image, to engineer and use the resources of the earth simply to service our needs. As a result, we are not good at wonder, at the sheer surprise and joy of being alive and being part of nature, as opposed to dominating it and exploiting it. We slap ourselves on the back for our achievements and our inventiveness, but the greatest wonders are gifts: the human eye and brain, the amazing communication skills of whales and dolphins, the sonar navigation skills of bats. Here’s a simple spiritual exercise to refresh our capacity for thanksgiving – sit down or lie down (preferably outside) remember a beautiful natural place that you know or have visited, a hill, mountain, beach, a lake, stream or river. Imagine it with every sense, taste the air as you breathe. Let the peace slow you down. Imagine you can touch the grass, the bark of a tree, the water, the grains of sand, hear the insects that buzz, or the birds sing, breathe in the smells, touch the earth beneath you and imagine the species within it. As you drink all this in imagine this as holy ground, the place of divine presence, this place of abundance and diversity.
2. Francis taught that we share with every living thing in a blessed ordering. Our culture tries to make us forget that by abstracting us from the environment. Instead of realising we are our environment we distance ourselves from nature itself: creation is something we use not share. Therefore in this next spiritual exercise take up an image in your mind of a being or natural process that has suffered from ecological destruction – it might be a person, a mammal or a bird, a tree or reptile, or a river boxed in a concrete culvert. Express sorrow for what has become extinct, the logged and devastated forest, the polluted river, the mined valley, infertile farmland. Confess the sin that has given rise to this destruction and pray for the healing of the earth. Jesus’s dying and rising is the cost and fruit of reordering the world away from selfishness and greed into a new patterning of loving and compassionate existence.
Remember too the fact that creation has recently called 999. We have a climate emergency on our hands with only a short time to respond before we are engulfed in unimaginable catastrophe. Pledge to respond, be informed and join force with people of goodwill to try and rescue our planet with blessings of right action.
3. Francis lived his life as if he was intoxicated by the love of God and he expressed it by an absolute abundance of praise, noticing how all things are related to one another and mediated God’s goodness. So you could say that to care for this world means being other-worldly, not so much concerned about having and consuming but of being, not of possessing but in being possessed, by God. And so, the third spiritual exercise is this: in Jesus Christ, crucified, resurrected he has become Lord of all. That is the new life God has provided for us. This is the meaning of the cross-shaped icon that hangs from the roof of our Cathedral. Take a long look at both sides of it. There are pictures on the website, or better still come and spend some time in front of it. Pray, with your eyes open, the Jesus prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner”. Think how this face, this life, this story replaces all our icons of human power and how this face, the face of Jesus, reveals God’s truth to us. There is indeed a hurting, suffering world all around us but it will not heal or change unless we change, and we cannot really become agents of change and blessing unless we are more deeply converted, as Francis was to the profound joy of getting caught up in God’s loving purpose and enabling the world to speak of its original blessing in God’s delight for all that he had made.
“God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Genesis 1:13)
Finally, you might like to pray the Lord’s prayer with a particular intention for the healing of our world and a conversion of human behaviour. Here is a suggestion from Eco-Congregation, England and Wales.
Our Father, in heaven …
You are also at home in the air, the soil, the forests and the oceans,
Hallowed be your name …
By the care we take of your creation,
Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven …
Your will to till and care,
Give us this day our daily bread …
That all may have sufficient to live life in fullness,
Forgive us our trespasses …
Our greed, our exploitation, our lack of concern for other species and for future generations,
As we forgive those who trespass again us …
By reconciliation with justice and peace,
Lead us not into temptation …
The temptation to equate dominion with exploitation,
And deliver us from evil …
The evil of destroying your gift of creation,
For yours in the kingdom …
Yours Lord, not ours,
The power and the glory …
In the cross and resurrection,
For ever and ever …
You were the beginning and you are the end,
Amen …
And so be it.
With my love, prayers and blessing.
Adrian