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THINKING THROUGH THANKSGIVING

Canon Jeremy Davies (Sunday 1st October 2006)

When I was a curate I regularly dined with a fellow curate who had the adjoining flat to mine. He recalled for me the importance of saying grace at meals, which I had largely abandoned through over-exposure at school and university. But I used to be irritated that Adrian (my fellow curate) was such a pernickety eater, picking through the dish that I had so painstakingly prepared to remove what he called ‘foreign bodies’. In frustration, I would say to him “if we are going to thank God for his good things before we eat, would you mind eating what he (and I) have prepared for us?” On 8 October we shall be celebrating Harvest Festival in the Cathedral. It is one of those residual feasts that live on in the religious folk memory of this country, even when our reliance on good harvests is no longer a life and death issue – at least not in our part of the world. As a result – though I’m sure deep in rural Wiltshire, Harvest Festivals are still kept with great fervour – the Cathedral, rather removed from the daily hazards and problems of farming today, is a bit perfunctory in its keeping of Harvest Festival. We say grace as it were to thank God for his good things but are a bit casual about the implications of saying thank you. I have just received, at the time of writing, the excellent journal of the Bible Society called ‘The Bible in Transmission’, which focuses this summer on ‘Sustainable Development, a biblical perspective’. The willingness to engage with the ecological crisis and how we steward the resources of the planet, use them, share them, husband them and maybe change our lifestyle, suggests a different way for us to think about harvest. Some global issues are already affecting farmers in Wiltshire but they also, and much more urgently and desperately, affect people in other deprived and developing parts of the world. At the moment, the dash for oil preoccupies the minds of western governments and provides the subtext, one suspects, for much of the tension and warfare in the world today. But soon the most precious commodity on our planet may be water as flood and drought, causes of the most damaging of the world’s disasters, become more frequent. As harvest festivals come round again, is this an opportunity for the Christian community to engage more actively in the ecological debate? As Jane Williams says in her article, ‘Theologies of the Environment’: “our response to God’s world shows a lot of what we believe about God and what such a God expects from those he has created. If Christians make no moves to care for creation, perhaps what we are really saying is that we believe that God thinks we are irrelevant”. Maybe at harvest time we need not only to say grace but to put our thanksgiving into practical effect, reflecting our words in the lives we lead and the actions we take.

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