by CCW | 13 October 2019 15:00
The custom in our maritime communities has been to keep Harvest Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving Day weekend. It is a gathering together of different thanksgivings. The idea of thanksgiving for the harvest is ancient and universal, especially in rural and agricultural communities. The idea of national thanksgiving is more recent and focuses on the political and the social. We would do well to recall the inner spirit of both so I want to try to say something about the spiritual significance of Harvest Thanksgiving in the face of our current anxieties and concerns.
I have always been moved by Harvest Thanksgiving as it has traditionally been celebrated in our maritime communities, especially in our rural farmlands. There is something quite wonderful about gathering the fruits of field and orchard into the churches, something at once aesthetically pleasing and spiritually symbolic. At Christ Church for years sheaves of corn-stalks marked the pews. I always had the sense of preaching in a corn-field! Not a bad biblical image and precedent!
Harvest Thanksgiving has always a sensual and aesthetic quality to it; things seen, and touched, smelled and tasted. But therein lies the danger, the danger of reducing Harvest Thanksgiving to self-indulgence and conspicuous consumption, to a sensual feast of the belly at the expense of the mind and the soul More stuffed than the turkey. Who are we thanking and for what if it is simply about the sensual pleasures of appetite? In our rural and agricultural communities, there is always the danger of losing sight of the more profound meaning of Harvest Thanksgiving. It is not about thanking ourselves for what we have been able to achieve and accomplish. It is not about what we think we deserve, or worse, about what we think we are entitled.
This year the annual Pumpkin Regatta in Windsor will be a much diminished affair because the number of giant pumpkins is much so greatly reduced, owing to the cold spring, the dry summer, and the effects of Hurricane Dorian, which also blasted the cornfields. The world knows but ignores the humanitarian disaster of the continuing famine in Yemen. The current discourse on global climate change is increasingly paralyzing and dispiriting but contributes to the way in which events on the global stage, in which we are all implicated, play out locally, what some have called ‘glocalization.’ All these things challenge us to think more deeply about the radical meaning of thanksgiving. At the very least they remind us that the harvest cannot be taken for granted.
There are the sensual qualities of seeing, touching, smelling and tasting that are abundantly present at Harvest Thanksgiving in our churches. But what about hearing? This is where the lesson from Isaiah comes into significance in relation to the Gospel. The emphasis is on the Word of God which goes forth with purpose, the Word of God which also identifies himself as “the bread of life,” something seen, touched, smelled and tasted. In other words, through the Word we learn about the spiritual truth of all creation and about how we participate in God’s Word, especially the Word made flesh in Jesus Christ. Through the Word spoken and heard all the senses are redeemed and become part of the sacramental ways in which we live to God, with God and in God. Thanksgiving, too, I might add, is a feast of prepositions!
Harvest Thanksgiving recalls us to the land and to the nature of our lives as embodied beings but only to root us and to ground us in the goodness of God and his creation. It is not simply about our use of the created order as if everything comes down to use. What, after all, is the practical use of gourds? To say that they are a delight to the eyes is to say that there is something more to the wonderful diversity of the things of the natural world than mere utility. And as the Book of Job reminds us, God takes sheer delight in his creation. Perhaps gourds are like what the psalmist says about the great sea creatures: God made Leviathan for the fun of it! This is to suggest that Harvest Thanksgiving only connects us to the land and to creation so as to gather us to God and to a delight in God.
We have too small a view of our world, of ourselves (despite our swelling egos), and of God. Harvest Thanksgiving offers an opportunity to reclaim what we have forgotten, a sense of the grandeur of God in his creation. It offers us a way to think poetically and philosophically about how the whole world lives for the praise of God. This is one of the gifts of the Jews highlighted here in Isaiah’s words about “the mountains and the hills break[ing] forth into singing.” Here are pumpkins, apples, gourds, the things of creation, all singing the praises of God by virtue of their being what they are. We give voice to their praises for that is our human vocation as “the high priests of nature” and “the secretaries of God’s praises,” as George Herbert reminds us. That signals something spiritual and intellectual about us and about the created order that counters all and every form of material determinism. Spirit is the parent of matter and not the other way around (despite Feuerbach’s claims to the contrary).
We can only say what is – that a cucumber is a cucumber and not a zucchini, for instance – by virtue of the Word of God in creation. The harvest is not simply about human labour and ingenuity; it is about working with the order of things in creation, first and foremost. Forget that and you forget everything. It is like the old joke about a visitor remarking on the beauty of a farmer’s field: ‘look at what you and the good Lord have done!’ to which the farmer replies, “yup, you should have seen it when he just had it.’ The deeper message of Harvest Thanksgiving is about our working with God and his creation of which we, too, are an integral part.
The deeper theological point is not that we find God in nature but that we find the world in God. Creation is continuous and providential. In the Gospel, Jesus reminds us of God’s providential care for the people of Israel in their wilderness wanderings, recalling the gift of manna, “bread from heaven,” only to advance the greater spiritual teaching about how he is “the true bread from heaven” which “giveth life unto the world.” Harvest Thanksgiving, if it is to be truly Harvest Thanksgiving, recalls us to the origins of life, to God in his will and purpose for his creation. At the very least, it teaches us to take delight, as God himself takes delight, in the goodness of creation.
The bread on the altar in the shape of a wheat-sheaf is part of that idea of taking delight imaginatively and symbolically in working with the good things of creation. Human ingenuity and labour takes the wheat from a thousand fields and makes bread, the symbol of what sustains human life, “our daily bread.” Jen Appleby has shaped the bread into the form of a sheaf of wheat. Wheat, bread, wheat. In the Eucharist, Christ takes the wheat made bread to give his life for us. We live from him, from the Word of Life who becomes sacramentally “the bread of life,” the body of Christ given for us that we may live in him and he in us. Such is the wonderful power and truth of God’s Word which goes forth with purpose and returns not empty. Thanksgiving is about God’s Word moving in us to God and with God and with one another in delight and in prayer and praise.
Austin Farrer once succinctly summed up the Gospel of Mark in three phrases. ‘God gives you everything. Give everything back to God. You can’t.’ Harvest Thanksgiving, in its radical meaning, is creation’s participation in the will of the Creator, a going forth and a return of God’s Word in us, our going forth and our returning to God, a kind of metanoia, a thinking after the things of God. We participate fundamentally in the Son’s thanksgiving to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. Such is the abundance and the fulness of life. It is the life of God, the life of eternal thanksgiving and delight.
Fr. David Curry
Harvest Thanksgiving/Trinity XVII 2019
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