Day: October 9, 2022

“For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven,
and giveth life unto the world”

Harvest festivals are an ancient and integral feature of the civilizations of the world. They belong to the universal acknowledgment of “the givenness of things” in Marilynne Robinson’s apt phrase. Harvest festivals celebrate in one way or another the nature of our human interaction with the created order and the recognition that the harvest cannot be taken for granted. The harvest is a gift, not a right, not an entitlement.

Harvest festivals belong to human reflection about ourselves in relation to the natural world. We are essentially intellectual and spiritual beings embodied and embedded in cultures. Harvest festivals are one of the ways in which that intellectual and spiritual reality about our humanity shows itself culturally and historically. The great Medieval cathedrals, for instance, often depict the labours of the months as tagged to the signs of the zodiac thus showing the interaction of human labour with the seasons of the year in terms of planting, vine-dressing, and harvesting, especially of grain and grapes; hence the symbolic and sacramental significance of bread and wine.

It might come as a bit of a surprise, then, to discover that there were no provisions for Harvest Thanksgiving services in the classical Books of Common Prayer. Such services were only introduced in 1862 in England. The provisions for “A Form of Thanksgiving for the Blessings of Harvest” only appeared in Anglican Prayer Books in the 20th century. In other words, it is an entirely modern development.

Why? The classical and traditional pattern of the church year by no means ignores the cycles of nature: there is Rogation Sunday and the days of Rogation, there are the Ember Days in each of the four seasons, August 1st is Lammas Day or ‘Loaf-Mass day’ which celebrates the first-fruits of the grain harvest. Various prayers and Collects reference the goodness of creation as an expression of the goodness of God. There are prayers ‘For Rain’, and ‘For Fair Weather’, prayers, too, ‘In Time of dearth and famine’. And there are Thanksgiving prayers ‘For Rain’, ‘For Fair Weather’, and ‘For Plenty’ in terms of the “special bounty” of “our land yield[ing] to us her fruits of increase” (BCP, 1662).

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