Harvest Festival - 5^th October 2008

Bright robes of gold the fields adorn,
The hills with joy are ringing,
The valleys stand so rich with corn
That even they are singing.

Well, so they may. But when I trundle my trolley round the shops, I can’t say that I have too much sense of a harvest. When I open my bag of flour, or dunk my tea bag, I have little thought for the fields where they were grown.

And this is our loss – the dissociation from the land that has arrived since our lovely harvest hymns were written. "Harvest" itself is a poetic word that you don’t hear used that often. We can’t do with nostalgia these days. We need something more powerful than that, to describe the fruits of our lives. Something more like "productivity", or more simply, the "product" – which can be anything from a business plan to a can of beans.

And with that in-word, "product", comes a profound change in our thinking - from a sense of dependence on the natural world, to a belief in our power to make it serve our purposes.

As you and I, in the west, feed on the world’s produce in and out of season, we have begun to believe that, given the wits and the cash, we can be totally in charge of our well-being.

So productivity becomes way of life, an end in itself. It links up neatly to our tiresome work-ethic. What have I achieved today? We ask ourselves. Or this year? Or ever? What is the product of my life? I’ve washed a million dishes, raised a family, built bridges, delivered letters, designed textiles, driven buses – you name it.

And in our desperate need to know the product we look for ways to measure it, even when it cannot be quantified. How can you really measure, for example, the product of the teacher, the nurse, the social worker? Certainly not in any league tables.

So what is my harvest, today, or yours? Is it whatever we have produced? Or is it what we have been given – today, this year, this lifetime? Is it, perhaps, not what we have made or done but the self that we are, or that God is creating in us, in this "vale of soul-making?"

Is it not our harvest at all, but God’s harvest – in hearts that are bursting with gratitude to him, "for our creation, preservation and all the blessings of this life"?

Jill Hawes

continued ...