“There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save only this stranger”
Thanksgiving is a strong reminder of our identity with God. Somehow pumpkins and zucchini, apples and gourds, wheat and grapes, remind us of our being spiritual creatures who are precisely not defined by the things of this world. But neither are we in flight from the world. Harvest Thanksgiving honours the whole created order as spiritually given. Somehow all the elements of our natural, social, and political lives are gathered up into the primacy of our spiritual relationship with God in God and to God. Theology is all about the prepositions! Everything is gathered into thanksgiving.
The Fall is the season of gathering, the season of thanksgiving. And yet, it is the time of nature’s slow and graceful dying. Here in the Maritimes, it is a glorious death and spectacularly so this year. The bright and gentle array of the Fall colours in the clear, soft brightness of the October air will give way to the sombre greyness of November in the dying of the year. The paint brush of God’s palette has never seemed more vivid and intense than this year, it seems to me. And yet, we are in the midst of death and life.
But the Fall is more than the annual cycle of nature’s death and hoped-for rising and our reflections must be more than that awareness of the cycles of death and rebirth. No. The Fall is the season of spiritual harvest. It is really all about the idea of gathering, of everything each in its special creaturely distinction and character being gathered to God in whom and with whom and by whom each and everything has its truth and being.
There is the harvest festival, if you will, of all Angels in The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels at the end of September. It celebrates the community of spiritual and intellectual beings of which we, too, are a part. And in the passing of this month, what do we come to except the great harvest festivals of spiritual life in The Feast of All Saints’ and in the sombre Solemnity of All Souls’? Yet in between, juxtaposed, as it were, between the Angels and the Saints, is our thanksgiving in the land, the festival of Harvest Thanksgiving. But this, too, is profoundly spiritual.
They are all communal events. They are all the celebrations of the different moments of our spiritual lives in the Company of All Angels and the Communion of All Saints even in and through the grave of the common death of All Souls. They are the celebrations of our spiritual identity with God and in God and for God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. His death and resurrection is the greater death and resurrection into which we have been privileged to enter. At the heart of his sacrifice is thanksgiving. The thanksgiving of the Son to the Father is offered on the Cross in the midst of our death and dying, in the midst of the greater desolations of sin and sorrow.
Harvest Thanksgiving is a perennial feature of human cultures in one way or another, a profound awareness of what is given in some sense by God in the beauty and order of nature, however fickle and uncertain at times nature may be. We can only work with the givenness of things and this is especially true of farming. It is about working with what is given in the order of creation, of what is distinct, each in its kind as Genesis constantly emphasises, and yet united in God. Harvest Thanksgiving mirrors the activity of the Word of God going forth in creation but returning as well in the gathering of the fruits of creation back to God. Man is “nature’s high priest” as George Herbert puts it, the “secretary of God’s Praises” in that gathering and return of all things to God. Our humanity gives voice to the praises of pumpkin and squash, of zucchini and apple, in the simple awareness of the essential aliveness of all created things.
Harvest Thanksgiving in this sense is about thinking nature and thinking with nature to its sources and being in God’s infinite thinking. The beautiful colours of autumnal glory and the diversities of the fruits of the fields and orchards through human labour, what are they but an image of what is united and one in God, the one white light refracted into a spectrum of colours as in a prism? The diversity of things is a reflection of their unity in God, the beauty and goodness and truth of everything that goes forth from God and returns to God. That going forth and return is our life of prayer and praise, our participation in the wonder and beauty of God himself.
Harvest Thanksgiving traditionally is a movable feast that falls in accord with the various timings of the harvest. Hence, the Prayer Book, itself a reflection of an older sensibility about our connection to the land, provides a set of readings specifically for Harvest Thanksgiving with readings from Isaiah about God’s Word in creation going forth and returning with purpose, not in vain, and from John’s Gospel which centres the whole of thanksgiving in the Bread of Life discourse of Jesus. It is a strong reminder of the Eucharist as the great thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is profoundly spiritual in the gathering into the Church the fruits of the harvest. That is to honour God as the principle of our lives.
But thanksgiving is more than Harvest Thanksgiving. Monday in Canada is our national Thanksgiving Day, a time to reflect upon what belongs to our spiritual and rational freedoms, however much compromised and debased in the sordid and depressing politics of our times. Our thanksgivings are for many things. It has become the custom to keep this Sunday as Thanksgiving Sunday both for the Harvest and for all other things. Our Canadian Prayer Book holds these different aspects together in the readings from Deuteronomy and from Luke’s Gospel. Deuteronomy offers a paean of praise to God for the “good land of brooks of water that spring out of valleys and hills”, “a land of wheat and barley and vines and fig-trees and pomegranates”, “a land of oil-olive and honey”; “a land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness”, but, above all else, the land is the place of blessing God “for the good land which he hath given thee”. It is the place of our spiritual understanding and life. That is at the heart of our lives by “keep[ing] the commandments of the Lord thy God, walk[ing] in his ways and fear[ing] him”, honouring him in awe and wonder.
Luke’s Gospel is the classical gospel of thanksgiving. It challenges us about the primacy and spiritual significance of thanksgiving. Only in turning back and giving thanks are we made whole, literally, saved. The Gospel begins with “ten men that were lepers”, “stand[ing] afar off and lift[ing] up their voices saying “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us”. Jesus means Saviour. The Gospel ends with Jesus saying to the one whom he calls a stranger, “Arise go thy way, thy faith hath saved thee”. What is that saving but our being made whole in Christ, in our return to God through his loving sacrifice? The one who turned back symbolises the meaning of thanksgiving. It is more than healing, it is our being whole in Christ.
“He was a Samaritan”, Luke tells us, a “stranger”, Jesus says. Once again, Jesus uses the Samaritans as a means to critique Israel and, indeed, the whole of our humanity for our failings of love towards one another and towards God. The parable of the Good Samaritan is how the Samaritan, the stranger, as it were, shows us what it means to be neighbour. To be neighbour is to be near one another; in short, with one another. Thanksgiving is a communal affair. It is about our being companions with one another in the company of creation redeemed, our being in the company of God. The word companion means with bread, com panis, our being together in the breaking of the bread and never more so and never more profoundly than in the Holy Eucharist.
Here, in the moment of communion, we are who we are in the truth of God and in the truth and beauty of the whole of creation. God gathers us to himself in the gathering of all things back to himself in Christ’s sacrifice. “Today, thou shalt be with me in paradise,” Jesus says on the Cross to the penitent thief. Thanksgiving reminds us of that greater paradise in the image in Revelation as a garden in the midst of a city. Instead of taking, it is about giving back. It is an image of the reconciliation of urban and rural, a unity that is our wholeness and completeness as found in God. It is found in our turning back and giving thanks with the whole of our being. The extravagant gestures of the stranger who “saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks”, what is that except an image of what is looked for in us in our liturgy, in our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving? Only so can we hope for our wholeness, our salvation.
“There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save only this stranger”
Fr. David Curry
Harvest Thanksgiving 2024