“I am the bread of life”
Images of paradise abound in the festivals of harvest thanksgiving. Here we are in a corn field, it seems, surrounded by the rich bounty of the harvest, the fruits of nature and human labour. And yet, we are in the Church. Somehow what belongs to our human engagement with the created order also belongs to our worship of God.
Harvest Thanksgiving is actually a movable feast. It can take place anytime during the season of the Fall harvest. After all, the patterns of seed-time and harvest vary from place to place, from north to south, as it were, depending on climate and landscape. Not every year is the same as the previous in terms of the richness of the harvest. This year we have been blessed in the Valley, it seems, with a bountiful harvest. It is a bumper year for apples.
The Prayer Book readings often signal thanksgiving themes in the early Fall of the year that reflect the movable nature of harvest thanksgiving. The older medieval tradition of “the labours of the months,” depicted in sculpture and painting and in the decorated Books of Hours, the prayer books of the rich, illustrate that the labours of each month of the year varied according to place throughout Europe.
Tomorrow in Canada is designated as National Thanksgiving Day. It marks our thankful commemoration for the rational and spiritual freedoms which we are privileged to enjoy in this nation of Canada. That is important to remember. We should no more take our rational and spiritual freedoms for granted any more than we should assume that the harvest will always be good and plentiful, let alone that we are entitled to the good things of the land.
There is an inescapable spiritual feature to Thanksgiving. It is captured in our liturgy and in this Church festooned with the fruits of the earth in their season, the fruits of human labours in working the land, the results, really, of an important kind of stewardship of nature and her bounty. The point of bringing these “creatures” into the Church is that we honour not so much ourselves and our labours but the God within whose created order we find ourselves and without whom our labour and our lives are truly in vain. There can be no harvest without honouring the Creator in the order of his creation.
Just think about it. There is an important kind of marvel that a pumpkin – I know, pumpkins take on a dimension larger than life in Windsor! – is not a zucchini, that an apple is an apple and not a cucumber. Each aspect of the created order is distinct and knowable as such. It is an important feature of the world as an intelligible whole. In the great creation story in Genesis, there is the idea of the distinctive nature of each aspect of the created order. Each species is according to its kind and carries its seed within it, the seeds of its own development and evolution, if you will.
But for all that this harvest wonder seems to recall us to paradise, it is not paradise. We are not in the paradisal garden of Eden, however much we might like to think of the Valley in such terms. Not only are there blackflies, destroying winds, floods and times of drought, there is the fact that we have to work the land, working knowingly with the good order of God’s creation. Our labours in the fields and orchards are really a form of prayer and praise.
Bread and wine are the classical symbols of civilized life. They speak to the deeper reality of human culture, to the interaction between our humanity and the land, to the remarkable capacity to take the natural world and transform it into something more fruitful and more bountiful. You, perhaps, know the old joke about the Yankee farmer whose farm a passer-by was admiring. “Look at what you and the Good Lord have done,” he exclaimed, to which the farmer replied, “Yup! You should have seen it when just he had it.”
We are apt to be proud of our labours, often forgetting the necessary humility of being open to the order of creation in order to work with it to our good and to the glory of God. We are, at best, secondary creators.
Bread and wine remind us of the fact of culture. We do not go out into the fields and find a loaf of bread, ready at hand. We do not go into the woods and find a bottle of wine, ready to drink. No. Bread and wine are important symbols of the human interaction with the created order.
Wheat from a thousand fields is planted, cultivated and gathered in by a thousand hands to become the bread of the world. Grapes from a thousand vineyards are planted, nurtured and harvested by a thousand hands to become the good wine of the land.
These are profoundly human activities. But their real meaning is captured, I think, in our liturgy. Jesus reminds us of God’s providential care for his wayfaring people, feeding them “manna” in the wilderness, here referred to as “bread from heaven.” How wonderful, it seems, and yet the people of Israel grumbled at the bread from heaven, what is also called, angel’s bread. That, of course, is another part of our story – we grumble and complain about what God gives us as if we had determined that we were entitled to something more and better, something more and better according to our expectations; as if God owes us whatever we think we want. Such is utter folly and not a little dishonest intellectually speaking. But Jesus here in the Gospel identifies himself as “the bread of life.” Somehow, the whole idea of bread, itself the fruit of creation and human labour, has become food for our soul, spiritual food.
That is, of course, the very meaning of the sacraments. Things that belong to the natural world and our human interaction with it now become the means of our participating in the spiritual life of God. Bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. There can be no greater affirmation of the created order and the dignity of our humanity than what belongs to the sacraments; no greater affirmation of the meaning of Christ’s Incarnation.
The strength of this thinking is very great. Voltaire, in his celebrated novel, Candide, explores the global world of the eighteenth century, mocking with rapier wit and delight the pretensions and folly of everyone and everything along the way, especially matters religious. Italo Calvino, an Italian critic and writer, rather wittingly describes Voltaire’s romp as “around the world in eighty pages”. In his travels, Candide, the hero, comes to the land of Eldorado; it is a Utopia, an ideal place. For Voltaire it serves, as all Utopias do, as a way of criticizing the political and social order of his world and day. Anti-religious in an almost fanatical way – Voltaire had no time for the Jesuits and he probably wouldn’t have cared overly much for Anglicans either- yet, Voltaire is nonetheless compelled to the following great insight. In Eldorado, they have a kind of natural religion but it is entirely about one thing and one thing only – thankfulness. In Utopia they have all that they need. It is a kind of paradise. They lack nothing and so the sole and primary religious act is that of thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving, of course, is the meaning of the central and defining act of worship for Christians. Eucharist means the good or great thanksgiving. It celebrates and gathers us into the celebration of Christ’s redemption of humanity and the whole of creation. Nowhere is the intersection between the natural, the human and the divine more explicit and more compelling. The bread and wine of civilization become the spiritual food of our souls. Jesus is “the bread of life.” It is his word to us; the word which has gone forth in creation goes forth in redemption. Like the harvest itself, we are gathered to God.
“I am the bread of life”
Fr. David Curry
Harvest Thanksgiving 2010