Safely gathered in

– the past and future at harvest festival

I’m glad to be back in the reddening landscape of the fruitful fall. The return of the cold and damp has us reaching to the back of the cupboards for the autumnal wardrobe, and for the well-thumbed recipes for solid wintry fare. We may not be able to burrow down and hibernate until the spring, but we can nevertheless arm ourselves with the comforts and consolations of the darkening season.

I well remember the harvests of my childhood, half a century back: the sunburn and calamine lotion; riding high on the combine with old Jack Cunningham, who every now and then would leap from his seat and hurl himself on some startled rabbit that had broken cover at the approach of the all-devouring monster through the sheltering wheat. We kids loved to rattle round in the back of the trailer, until the full tank of cascading corn fell in a dusty golden deluge, filling first our wellies, then the trailer itself. Then we clambered out and clung to the sides, riding in bumpy style between field and farm.

Harvest Festival was quickly upon us, and focus moved from farm to church, where every holy nook was festooned with decorative loaves, ‘corn-dollies’, and whatever vegetables the keenest gardeners could coax from the soil. There was a feast: the village hall was filled with rickety chairs and trestle-tables, not too far short of groaning with the prodigious weight of food produced by a brigade of highly competitive ‘good plain cooks’.

At the service in church, quite contented farmers were seen with their more familiar wives, sucking mint imperials, and standing like sentries in reinforced tweed. Nothing would get past these serious men who’d come to pay their annual dues to a God who held the success of the harvest in his hands. They sang Harvest home with gusto, thankful that all was safely gathered in, and daring to hope for the following year.

Every harvest contains an unspoken fear of failure, the dread that hunger may come seeking and finding us one day soon, just as surely as it finds so many others across the globe. And while I would not recommend churchgoing as an insurance policy in quite the way the farmers of my childhood seemed to practise it, it’s good to see the universe not as a random accumulation of cells, but as a place of order and purpose, the work of a loving and creative God. Our gratitude then might yield thanksgiving, and invite generosity – to the poor and hungry; to those fleeing war; even these days to the very fabric and fibre of the earth itself.

First published in the Appleton Advertiser, November 2024. Apologies that there is no new written homily to publish this week.