“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).
Our prayers and thanksgivings are fundamentally rooted in the Scriptures as integral to the worship and praise of God. The liturgy is really about the gathering of the whole of creation to God through prayers and praises. The primary emphasis, scripturally and liturgically, is to God as the origin and source of every good. Thanksgiving is to God and for what God provides in creation and redemption. Thanksgiving is what we give in return for what God has given; in short, life in all its abundance and fullness. Every Sunday is really a celebration of Christ’s Resurrection, itself the new creation and life which is, we might say, Paradise Plus. It is not a return to Paradise but our participation now in the greater Paradise of God. Thus the point to remember is that thanksgiving is essentially an intellectual and spiritual activity; our service is “this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” (BCP, Cdn. p.83). Our task is to place Harvest Thanksgiving within that larger spiritual understanding.
Our hymns this morning reflect this sensibility. Most of our harvest hymns are Victorian and 19th century in origin. Yet only one of our hymns this morning is specifically a harvest hymn, ‘St. George’; the other two are thanksgiving hymns more generally speaking. The last is the great Lutheran classic, Nun Danket, with words and music from the 17th century, albeit translated from German into English in the 19th century.
The ‘modern’ Harvest Thanksgiving services reflect a profound sense of the disconnect of ourselves from the world as a result of the industrial revolution and technological progress which, for all its benefits, has changed our relation to the natural world and to ourselves. “All is seared with trade; bleared, smeared/with toil;/And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell:/ the soil/Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins poignantly notes.
The ‘modern’ Harvest Thanksgiving services seek to reclaim a sense of connection to the land as sacred, as the indigenous peoples, too, remind us, and to the sanctity of human labours in the land, and to God as Creator and Redeemer; to the world as “charged with the grandeur of God” as Hopkins says, despite our follies. They complement the great novels, poetry, and art of the 18th and 19th centuries that depict the shift from rural to urban, from field to factory as in the novels of Dickens and Hardy, for instance, or in Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting of the Cromford Cotton Mill, what Sir Kenneth Clarke memorably called “the romance of industrialization”. Yet that sense of a disconnect and unease has only increased in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries with liberalism’s illusions of the isolated self, separated and in flight from nature with its constraints, and even from the body which becomes simply an object.
The wisdom of the ages and the sages may help us to recover a larger and more universal understanding of our humanity as intellectual and spiritual creatures at once grounded in the land and grounded in the life of God. St. Francis of Assissi’s marvelous Canticle of the Sun, one of the earliest literary works in Italian, composed in the Umbrian dialect in 1225, recalls precisely this sensibility. ”Praise be to thee, my Lord, with all thy creatures,” it sings, naming Brother Sun and Sister Moon, Brothers Wind and Air, Sister Water, Brother Fire, and even Sister Death. It exudes a wonderful sense of intimacy and connection between our humanity and the whole of creation. It looks back to Genesis and to the Benedicite, Omnia Opera, the song of Ananias, Azarias, and Misael, as well as echoing, it seems to me, the ancient Greek philosophers such as Empedocles with respect to the contrast and the complementarity of the elements of earth, water, air and fire.
The whole of creation sings the praise of God by virtue of the particular being of each created thing. It belongs to our humanity, as Herbert suggests, to be “the worlds high Priest” and to be the “Secretarie of thy praise”; in short, to endow nature’s purposes “with words that make them known,” as Shakespeare puts it. Such is our vocation as intellectual and spiritual beings: to articulate with words the praises of the whole of creation to God.
The eucharist readings for Harvest Thanksgiving underscore this spiritual sensibility that informs all our doings. They ground our feastings and delight in the good things of creation in Christ, “for the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven and giveth life unto the world.” Harvest Thanksgiving belongs to God’s word which goes forth in creation and redemption, not in vain but with holy purpose. Wheat from a thousand fields and grapes from a thousand vines become, through human labour, bread and wine but then become something more: nothing less than the sacramental means of our participation in the life of God.
Thus Harvest Thanksgiving is simply eucharist, the word means thanksgiving. It highlights our truest and highest freedom, not from the world but to God and to the world in God. In turning back and giving thanks we are made whole, as the quintessential thanksgiving Gospel reminds us (BCP, p. 308), for we are recalled to the most comprehensive and complete sense of our humanity: we are at one with creation in the praises of God. Thanksgiving is the counter to human presumption and pride which results in separation and division; it is really humility which connects us and unites us with God and his creation. Thus Francis ends his canticle: “Praise ye and bless ye my Lord, and give Him thanks, and be subject to Him cum grande humilitate, with great humility”. This is life to God and with God in the honouring of the good order of creation, at one, we might say, with Brother Pumpkin and Sister Squash!
“For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven,
and giveth life unto the world”
Fr. David Curry
Harvest Thanksgiving, 2022