Human beings have celebrated Harvest for about as long as there have been harvests – and maybe even before, in the case of nomadic peoples. Ancient Greeks gave thanks to Demeter, the goddess of grain, who was known by the Romans as Ceres; and the 3 main festivals of the Jewish year (dating back over 3000 years) all originated with agriculture: the Feast of Unleavened Bread (which later became part of Passover) was a thanks-offering at the beginning of the grain harvest; the Festival of Weeks (50 days later) celebrated the end of the grain harvest; and Tabernacles (or Booths or Sukkot) was an autumn thanksgiving for the wine harvest in particular – but acted also as a general harvest thanksgiving, marking the end of the agricultural year.
Given the sheer precariousness of life for most people throughout history, there’s nothing surprising about the way a successful harvest was a time of great rejoicing (presumably with corresponding lamentations and fear for the future, on the not infrequent occasions when the harvest was desperately disappointing).
In medieval England, Lammas Day (from the Old English, meaning ‘loaf-festival’) was widely kept on 1st August, and marked the first fruits of the harvest. Originally this involved offering the first-cut sheaf of corn to one of the fertility gods, in the hope of receiving a good harvest; a custom that later developed into making a loaf from the first corn to be harvested, which was brought into church, and then broken and used in Holy Communion. A Christian festival, with very obvious pre-Christian origins, combining elements of the feast of the Celtic sun god Lugh, and the Jewish festival of Shavuot.
It wasn’t until the middle of the 19th century that the Church of England gave any official liturgical recognition of the importance of Harvest. In 1838, the Bishop of Hereford had asked the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, to allow a harvest festival – but was refused ‘on the ground that one would then be obliged to have a thanksgiving for everything’ (quoted in Owen Chadwick The Victorian Church p517). But the tide was turning, and in 1843 Parson Hawker, the famously eccentric vicar of Morwenstow in Cornwall, devised a liturgy that combined elements of Lammas Day, with the long kept secular tradition of ‘harvest home’.
It quickly caught on – and like the ‘timeless’ traditions of the English monarchy (which in many cases actually go back only to late-Victorian times) was soon thought of as having been around forever. But as the biblical writer known as Qoheleth put it ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ – and Parson Hawker was simply giving a modern gloss to some very ancient foundations (and in the process, providing the Church with an opportunity to offer some sort of moral lead, by offering a more respectable alternative to the days of drunkenness that tended to follow harvest home, with a ‘special service in church, followed by dinner of beef and plum pudding and beer’ (Chadwick, ibid).
From Lammas at the beginning of the harvest season to Harvest Festival itself at the end, when the long and almost unimaginably arduous job of finally gathering the crops safely into the barns was celebrated with great feasting – it can all seem a bit like relics of a bygone age (in the same sort of league as Plough Sunday or Rogation Days – rural church festivals which have generally fallen by the wayside, largely on the grounds that they reflect farming patterns that have long since ceased to exist). Something anachronistic and quaintly rustic, something to be celebrated (if at all) slightly ironically – and only ever ecclesiastically. We have no national equivalent of the great American celebration of Thanksgiving (a federal holiday kept on the fourth Thursday of November, and dating back to 1789) as an occasion to give thanks for the fruits of the Earth.
But Parson Hawker didn’t have it all his own way, and the idea of unalloyed joy and celebration at Harvest Festival wasn’t universally shared in ecclesiastical circles – as is clear from the grudgingly sour observation in the Anglican classic The Parson’s Handbook (published in 1899) ‘Harvest Festivals have been much abused by excessive displays of greengrocery, but this is no reason why they should not be observed’. But that greengrocery just kept on coming – to be supplemented by flowers, tinned food, fish, even coal – depending on the area. All entirely appropriate, as a thanksgiving for the fruits of the Earth. When the festival is over, the harvest gifts are either given away to those in need, or sold and the money raised given to the poor.
Harvest has long been a time when some modest redistribution of food occurred – sometimes as a requirement of law. ‘When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard: you shall leave them for the poor and the alien’ (Leviticus 19: 9) – a practice that found expression in the story of Ruth being graciously allowed to follow the reapers and collect what was left (Ruth 2: 8). Which is a very practical recognition of the way that the Earth’s harvest is not (and never has been) equally shared. And because the Kingdom (however understood) will never be a reality unless and until it is. Moral or religious or even legal prompts can sometimes help to give people a bit of a steer.
But Who (or What?) are we thanking at Harvest Festivals? The traditional understanding of God, as a (more-or-less) benevolent, all-powerful being is very much alive and well, among both those who are regular churchgoers, as well as many of those who stay well clear. And at Harvest Festivals most people are thanking that sort of being, in the same kind of way as a child might thank a parent for a present.
So what about those whose understanding of God is very different? Or those who, whilst subscribing to the traditional view of God, take the view that there’s no one (or nothing) corresponding to such a thing in reality? They’re a constituency that the Church has, shamefully neglected – offering instead only an ecclesiastically-sanctioned version of God. What about all those disenfranchised religious outsiders, with noses pressed against the beautiful (but impenetrable) stained glass windows of orthodoxy?
Many of them will continue to turn up to services such as Harvest Festival, but find the language and assumptions on offer, almost unbearably grating – as well as painfully excluding. Because for anyone of normal intelligence, the Big Questions (of ethics or metaphysics) are forever inescapable. ‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’ wasn’t just something that troubled Cilla Black. Paul Tillich saw the entire religious enterprise as arising from the way human beings respond to such issues of ‘Ultimate Concern’.
Many, of course, see religion as a way of bringing closure to all those pesky metaphysical puzzles that interfere with the smooth running of everyday life. Less ambitious (or impatient) souls see religion as providing a framework (or safe space) within which such questions can be taken with the seriousness they deserve. A means of keeping the conversation about reality going, in ways that do not insult anyone’s intelligence (or strain their credulity). So is it possible, at harvest time, for people like that (people like us?) to be grateful to no one in particular?
It’s a question that all members of SOF will have had to face – and continue to face. Because it gets to the very heart of our understanding of the nature of God. A realist God (one ‘out there’, in some sense) is (at least on the surface) a whole lot easier to engage with, than a non-realist one. There’s a whole lot more epistemological solidity about a God who ‘really exists’. But if that’s not the way we see things (and we don’t/can’t ever choose how we ‘see things’) – we’re either forced to abandon religion altogether – or find some understanding of God that works for us. That understanding may (of course) eventually turn out (in John Hick’s sense of eschatological verification) to be an incorrect one – but we’re where we are, and have to do something with whatever religious and psychological materials we have to hand. It’s an act (or leap) of faith either way: to hitch our wagon to the realist version – or to the non-realist one (or indeed, to dismiss it all as a load of nonsense, and live an entirely secular life).
Whilst not meant entirely seriously, the ‘Black Cat Analogy’ isn’t meant entirely flippantly either. Many versions exist, but one of the most popular suggests that: Philosophy is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat; Metaphysics is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn’t there; and Theology is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn’t there, and shouting ‘I found it!’
Quite apart from the quibble that metaphysics is actually a branch of philosophy, we can also speculate as to whether all the rooms are equally dark. But the point is well made – in that, if we’re honest, we’re all of us, all of the time fumbling in the dark – and ever prone to the temptation of claiming to have found whatever it was we were looking for. Wittgenstein famously used to immerse himself in cowboy films by sitting in the very front row of the cinema – as part of a desperate attempt to blot out the questions that were forever tormenting him. The relief was only ever temporary, of course – but maybe that’s all any of us can hope for.
At its best, religion (like cowboy films or inebriation or Morris dancing) provides a life-giving (because transient – and therefore demanding continued attention) way of dealing with existential puzzlement and ennui – and at its worst, provides something solid, fixed, unyielding (and therefore neither needing, nor inviting ongoing reflective effort). At its best, religion keeps the conversation open – and at its worst, claims there’s no more to be said. At its best, religion is open to all possibilities – and at its worst, sees itself as the only game in town.
At its best, religion expresses all the different ways in which we can celebrate and give worth to life – and at its worst, demands acquiescence to the only version deemed acceptable to the ecclesiastical authorities. In which latter case, if the (only) version of God deemed acceptable to the ecclesiastical authorities ever loses its hold on people – the idea of celebration premised on such a God might look under threat.
Which is why it’s vital to do all we can to demonstrate that other models of divinity are both available – and accessible. Because Harvest is not just about giving thanks, important though that is. It’s also about taking the needs of the poor and dispossessed in at least as serious a way as did the author of Leviticus. And that is bound to act as both a stimulus and an opportunity – to do what we ought to be doing the rest of the year as well, by being far more ambitious than simply allowing those who are struggling to do the equivalent of gleaning the field of Boaz. Is offering crumbs from our tables really the best we can do? Or might we think more in terms of inviting today’s gleaners to share our meal, rather than allow them to subsist on the basis of foodbanks or supermarket dumpsters?
If we worship a God of love and generosity (in other words, if we see love and generosity as our guiding ideals and principles) we’ll be unable to sit easy, surrounded by our plenty, without feeling compelled to do something to improve the lot of those whose days are spent just trying to get by. And if we have any sense of Cosmic Gratitude for our good fortune, we’ll be unable to see it in terms of simply something we deserve. Every day (despite Lord Melbourne’s reservations) needs to be seen as a Harvest Festival, in that every day is both an opportunity and an obligation to give thanks – and to resolve to do more than just permit those on the margins to carry on gleaning around the edges of our society.
Tony Windross is the former vicar of St Nicholas’ Church, Pevensey, Sussex.