Harvest spirituality
Choosing hymns for a harvest festival is not usually that difficult. If you leave out ‘We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land’, you will be shot. If you don’t start with ‘Come, ye thankful people, come’, questions will be asked. But if you stop and look at these traditional harvest hymns, what are they saying about our church?
Of the traditional harvest hymns, how many actually mention Jesus? Put the hymn- book down, no cheating! There is one, precisely one. If you look deep enough into ‘To Thee, O Lord, our hearts we raise’, we find the lines ‘May we, the angel- reaping o’er, stand at the last accepted, / Christ’s golden sheaves for evermore to garners bright elected.’
It is hardly surprising that the Victorians turned their thoughts from the harvest of the fields to the ingathering of the faithful, as death was far more freely spoken about in their day than in ours, and many of the traditional harvest-hymns follow this pattern. But that so few of them make any connection between the ‘angel- reaping’ and Jesus’ redeeming work on the cross and in the resurrection is striking.
If our harvest festivals are among the most important festivals of the
rural church, if indeed they make the rural church truly rural, then the spirituality they show should give a window onto the spirituality of the rural church as a whole. The hymns speak of God, not of Jesus; the thanks is for a harvest which may or may not have been good; the focus is on the creator. The people gather together in the same place as they have always done, singing the same hymns that they have always done, for the most part knowing the fields and the meadows which produce the gifts adorning the church. You can almost sense an element of the Old Testament here – the gift of the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey, the peace which allows crops to be grown without the enemy treading all over them in battle, that reading from Deuteronomy 26 which speaks of the offering of the first fruits in a basket to the specific place where God will place his Name.
But although God usually provides, there is also the bleaker side: ‘Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.’ Habakkuk 3:17-18 (AV). A rejoicing through gritted teeth, through floods,
through foot-and-mouth, through bovine TB, through potato blight, through swine fever, through late frost.
The resilience of our rural folk is exemplified by the knowledge that things don’t always turn out for the best. It makes it easier to rejoice in the good when we know what the bad feels like. But perhaps it might be worth thinking a little harder how we can move Old Testament thinking into the New Testament, when God’s love is revealed in Jesus, when we can know forgiveness and
resurrection, and when the angel- reaping can be looked forward to with confidence.
Stephen Cope
Secretary of the Rural Theology Association
www.countyway.org.uk
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rural spirituality
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