by CCW | 10 October 2021 08:00
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[1]). 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.
The idea of thanksgiving as an affirmation of creation provides a strong critique to our contemporary fears which see the world as evil and one another as a threat to each other. This is basically a gnostic view of the world; dualistic and dogmatic in its unintelligibility. It leaves us exposed to the random and the arbitrary, on the one hand, and to a negative freedom realized in a flight from the body and nature, on the other hand. In both cases, we exist in contradiction with ourselves and in alienation from the world and ourselves. Even our claims to care quickly turn into accusation and judgement. We are not really concerned with one another but with ourselves.
Thanksgiving requires the recognition of what is other than ourselves both in terms of the created order and of one another. As such thanksgiving is the free recognition of the essential goodness of creation and thus of one another. It is about the real truth and dignity of our humanity. It means taking delight in the goodness of creation and in the essential goodness of one another.
The deeper meaning of thanksgiving is not just for what good things we have received out of the bounty of creation and human labour; thanksgiving is, most profoundly, to God and as such gathers us into the very life of God. As God says in the lesson from Isaiah, “so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth … it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereunto I sent it.” And in the Gospel, Jesus says “I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth in me shall never thirst.” It is this sensibility that shapes the understanding of our being blessed in our comings in and our goings out. It is about our participation in the goodwill and order of God in Creation and Redemption.
The greater gathering of the harvest is about the harvest of our souls to God. Such is “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” because we take delight not only in all that belongs to creation but in God himself. In our rural parishes, Harvest Thanksgiving is no doubt a wonderful feast for the eyes with the bounty of the harvest gathered into the churches like barns and equally, of course, a feast for the belly! But Thanksgiving in its larger sense is a feast for the soul. It is, perhaps, nowhere better expressed than in a short and personal prayer, a kind of mantra, used by the poet-preacher John Donne: “Blessed be God that he is God only and divinely like himself.” This frees us to God himself by granting us a free relation to our world and to ourselves. It is not about what we get but about what we give. Thanksgiving to God is the highest form of prayer and it is our dignity and delight in all our comings and goings.
Fr. David Curry
Harvest Thanksgiving, 2021
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