What’s the point of celebrating the harvest?

We reap what we sow: a once young man’s guide.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A soot stained burnt-out harvester sits in a recently harvested field.

A burnt-out harvester, Lonesome Farm, Oxfordshire.

Nick Jones.

I plan next week to visit a small nursery school, called Young Haymakers, for their Harvest celebration where toddlers to five-year-olds will sing songs about tractor wheels going round and round, with vigorous manual actions as they shake, shake, shake the apple tree.

We’ll have a Harvest snack at tiny tables, a prayer and then they’ll give me the Harvest gifts from their families for those who may be hungry.

It is, of course, a delight, one of the happiest duties of a parish priest and I’ll miss it terribly as I hand it over to a new Rector. But, while I take nothing away from the sheer joy of thanksgiving of these children for the fruits (and vegetables) of this harvest and for those who farm them, I can’t help but wonder what Harvest, as a festival, really means for grown-ups.

The metaphor has been just too rich to avoid this season. We reap what we sow – and we witness that from Ukraine to Gaza and Lebanon, from Sudan to a United States that teeters on the brink of self-destruction as the world’s beacon of democratic values.

One might add to this sorry list the longer-term grim gathering-in from the world’s reliance on fossil fuels, a failed harvest of biblical-scale abomination as we destroy our planet’s natural capacity to host us. Truly, we have sown a wind and, in so many areas of human endeavour, we look like we reap a whirlwind (literally, in the case of weather crises such as Hurricane Milton).

There are prophetic voices that cry out in our human wilderness, from those who foresee the demise of the US at the hands of a shallow nationalism to those few on the political stage who predict an all-out war in the Middle East as the only possible conclusion to the escalation of revenge attacks between Israel and its neighbours.

The ancients saw famine and failed harvests as judgments for their sin, their divergence from the divine will. It’s unlikely that our world is going to accept such culpability any time soon. To do so would require a humility that we have lost, along with losing our religion.

We need to be careful of ascribing too much of a prophetic voice to Young. This was, after all, a fairly bombed-out singer-songwriter of the start of the Boomer generation.

Setting aside the reaping of whirlwinds from millennia ago, I’m going to invoke a popular folk song from a little over half a century ago. I do so because, in 1972, we lived in a more innocent world, before we knew how industrialisation could destroy our human species and when a western hegemony in democracy was taken for granted. Little did we know the precipice on which we were perched.

The song is by the folk-rock colossus Neil Young and is called, appropriately enough, Harvest. It is, lyrically, one of his more obscure works and to listen to it now is to struggle to get past a strangulated hippy voice that verges on self-parody.

But it repays the effort. Young’s lyrics are infused with religious reference and imagery, but no claim should be made for his affirmation of the Christian faith. Nonetheless, we’re entitled to view art through the prism of what informs us and, as such, Harvest yields its fruits. Young may well be singing about his lover, but it’s in love that all truth is explored.

Listen to it. Young’s Harvest opens with the lines “Did I see you down in a young girl’s town/ with your mother in so much pain?” Through a scriptural lens, this sounds like the pain of incarnation, the sharing of Mother Mary’s agony in visceral human experience.

It continues: “Will I see you give more than I can take”; for the confessing faithful, we’re at the foot of the cross here. “Will I only harvest some?”; we can, all of us, only harvest a little of the mystery of that event. “As the days fly past, will we lose our grasp?”; of course we will – time is finite. “Or fuse it in the sun?”; an uncanny pre-echo of climate change worthy of Nostradamus.

We need to be careful of ascribing too much of a prophetic voice to Young. This was, after all, a fairly bombed-out singer-songwriter of the start of the Boomer generation. But it’s also true that we should be careful of where we look for prophetic voices.

For Young, the Harvest is indeed a cruel and painful event, which we can only understand in part. We do indeed reap what we sow, but there may be purpose to be found in that. And the Harvest is indeed bitter, but in it we may glimpse a plan: “Dream up, dream up, let me fill your cup/ With the promise of a man”.

Or, okay, it’s just a song, harvesting a good deal of cash for its writer and singer. I’m no big fan of Young. But it might just have told me more about the Harvest than singing All Things Bright and Beautiful.

Article

Attention

Comment

Digital

19 June 2024

3 min read

When standards fail, what next?

Media’s fragmentation reflects our own shattered attention.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Associate Minister at Holy Trinity Clapham, London.

Seat on an underground train carraige, a passenger holds and reads a newspaper.

Evening Standard headline 2013.

Derek Key, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

News about newspapers is never good news. So, the not wholly unsurprising announcement that London's daily Evening Standard will only be printed weekly comes with sadness. There are fewer commuters and those who are on the tube or overground are making use of the Wi-Fi. Even the paper's editor, Dylan Jones, recently admitted he never reads a print newspaper. These shifts are hardly breaking news anymore, but they do need us to take out our earphones and pay attention.

Earlier this year, as if predicting the newspaper’s daily demise, Lord Hague wrote, 'Even a few years ago you would see, on the London Tube, a high proportion of people reading the Evening Standard, cheek by jowl sharing the commentary on the fortunes of the capital. Today, they sit with headphones on in their fragmented worlds.'

Most of us haven't noticed, because our heads are down staring at our screens, but he's right. Hague argues that we should fight against the plight of local newspapers, but even a recent ‘editorial pivot’ to local London news couldn’t save its daily edition. It's a newspaper known for pivoting a lot over the decades, but this is a step change.

Losing the daily printing of a two-century-old institution is more than the end of an era. Even for someone like me who has lived in London recently, the change in our reading habits that Hague describes is one that is unmistakable. I'm sure I will look wistfully at the empty trays of newspapers, without the obstacle of a newspaper in my face as I descend the steps to the tube.

The people are what makes these institutions: whether it’s the bellowing by the tube at rush hour, or those who write the articles. Journalist Tom Leonard's sepia-toned reflection is that the Standard was 'the closest you could get in the real world to a newspaper in a classic Hollywood film, with reporters and photographers actually rushing out together on stories… and editors actually occasionally saying dramatic things like “hold the front page”.’ But we're losing more than nostalgia, and even more than the life-altering job losses.

At the heart of that liberation wasn't agony-aunt good advice, but the heralding of good news for all people.

We are going through the largest shift in information dissemination since the arrival of the printing press five hundred years ago. They called that the Reformation. What will they call this? The Fragmentation? Or the Liberation? Information is not always illumination, and the new world we are creating is indeed an increasingly fragmented one. There's the threat to democracy, as Hague soberly warns. Never before have we felt the need to hold power to account, yet without the focused resources to do so.

And it's focus itself we're also losing. My scattered senses fling me to the urgent, rather than the important. They take me to ephemera rather than what really matters. Our attention spans drive us to snippets rather than stories, bitesize over background. It could be argued that rather than the power residing in the newspaper editor, the power is now in the hands of the person holding their phone, but let's not be naive about the quality and the neutrality of what we consume, and the echo chambers we're locking ourselves in. The power of the daily habit of reading what we will and won't agree with is the power of the printed press. Holding the Bible in your hands, in your own language for the first time was challenging, confronting, but also liberating. At the heart of that liberation wasn't agony-aunt good advice, but the heralding of good news for all people. This good news included repairing of the fragments that broke people apart from each other. It became the must-read.

As we adapt to a new standard in news, perhaps some old news might reveal a new standard.