Day: October 10, 2021

“Blessed shall you be when you come in, and blessed shall you be when you go out”

The Prayer Book provides a rich collection of scriptural readings and prayers for services of “Thanksgiving for the Blessings of Harvest” at Morning and Evening Prayer and for the Holy Eucharist. It is well worth taking a look at them in ‘A Form of Thanksgiving for the Blessings of Harvest’ (BCP, pp. 617-621). The suggested lessons from Deuteronomy in particular open us out to a theology of the land, of the places in which we find ourselves whether it is in the city or in the country. “Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field.”

The Canadian Thanksgiving weekend mostly focuses on the theme of Harvest Thanksgiving, though it is tied to the idea of a national thanksgiving day for Canada. The former is more ancient and universal and at once reminds us of the original rural aspects of the nation though not at the expense of the urban. In our current distresses and anxieties, Thanksgiving in itself and in terms of the harvest is a profound spiritual reminder of our connection to the land and to one another. It is a counter at once to the endless narcissisms of our age and to the utilitarian logic that results in our dominance and destruction of nature and ourselves. Harvest Thanksgiving which we celebrate today is actually a movable feast in our country parishes depending on the timing of the  harvest in its various moments. It is, more importantly, a strong affirmation of the goodness of creation and a reminder to us that the goodness of the land and of human labour derives entirely from the goodness of God.

We are blessed in our comings in and our goings out because of the going forth and return of God’s word in Creation and Redemption. In other words, our lives in and through our engagement with the order of creation (without which there could be no harvest) is really about our relation to God, the source and the end of all good things. And as the lessons from Deuteronomy teach us, the blessings of the fruits of creation depend radically upon our heeding the commandments of God. What does that mean? Nothing less than that the world we engage in is fundamentally intelligible and orderly; in short, good. God’s commandments are not arbitrary. In God, power and wisdom are one quite unlike what we experience in ourselves and in the disorders of our world and day.

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