A View From The Vicarage - October

Dear Friends,

A Thanksgiving for Harvest Thanksgiving?

As you read this, we’ve entered the autumn of this quite extraordinary year, John Keats’ famous season “of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. Despite the familiarity of Keats’ well known and familiar words, this particular autumn is a time in which so many of our old certainties and preconceptions have crumbled into dust, for many it feels as if the mists are impenetrable and the mellow fruitfulness has been eaten away from the inside by unseen adversaries. This feels like a time when nothing is quite what it appears.

Into that sense of gloom and despondency bursts the reassurance of Harvest Festival. This, of  course, will be a Harvest Festival time like none we’ve ever known denuded of Harvest suppers and lunches and devoid of the communal singing of the perennially popular harvest hymns. Will it feel like a proper Harvest Festival without the singing of “Come ye thankful people come” or “We plough the fields and scatter”? Perhaps for some rather akin to The Last Night of the Proms without the singing of “Rule Britannia.” Yet, it strikes me that in common with the furore caused by the BBC’s initial decision about the latter, Harvest this year is perhaps more important than ever. In a year when so many of the events which hallmark and delineate our lives have fallen victim to this insidious killer, when so many of our old certainties are being challenged and undermined as perhaps never before we need reminders of permanence and immutability, we desperately need things that we can trust. Harvest reminds us of that very permanence and immutability that seems so lacking elsewhere it reminds us that those words from the Book of Genesis remain true even amidst the Coronavirus pandemic. “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” (Genesis 8: 22 ESV) As a reminder of the changing of the seasons, Harvest is surely a potent symbol of that rhythm upon which all life depends. Harvest also reminds us that although the Psalmist can write: “What is man that you are mindful of him?...you have made him little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and honour” (Psalm 8; 4-5) despite this elevation of human beings above the rest of creation we are not separated from it, Psalm 8 goes on to explore the responsibilities which human beings have for the rest of the created order, responsibilities that we appear to be shirking at the present. Harvest reminds us of the interconnectedness of all life and that we are as dependant upon the fecundity and vagaries of the earth as all of the other myriad forms of life who share this planet with us. If you are in any doubt about that then surely the havoc caused both locally, nationally and globally by a microscopic virus with a lust for travel should surely also be the wake-up call that we all need.

Yet, harvest is even more than all of that, because it is also a testament to the skill, dedication and determination of those who go out in all weathers and at all times of the day and the year to care for the land and the seas and to gather in the bounty that they provide. As such, Harvest reminds us that human beings are at our best when we work in harmony with the natural world, when we fulfil that precious task of caring and nurturing creation not squandering its precious resources.  

Shakespeare was surely correct when he put into the mouth of Hamlet the line “What a piece of work is man.” (Hamlet Act 2: 2) Human beings are without doubt as both Shakespeare and the Psalmist both agree remarkable creatures and when we’re at our best what we can achieve is little less than stupendous but isn’t it helpful in this time of global crisis to be reminded of our place within the order of creation, lower than the angels but only a little and one with the rest of creation.

Happy Harvest

With my love and prayers as ever

Ben.