Nice Work If You Can Get It

The Infants School children came to church this morning to deposit their Harvest gifts, sing some songs, and listen to me reflect on the season for a minute or two. I decided to think about work: the fact that at Harvest we focus on farmers (and the children often sing about them), and a younger cousin of mine decided she wanted to be one, but hardly any of us will have much contact with that kind of life. 'I wonder what you will be when you grow up?' I asked Years 1 & 2, and got a variety of answers. The traditional train driver was the first, followed by scientist, vet, police officer ('so I can stop bad guys being bad' the little girl in question claimed) - and fairy. I didn't ask the Reception class what they thought.

As they left, I remembered that although fairy may seem an unlikely career trajectory, there is a professional mermaid operating in St Ives in Cornwall. She was the one who posted the video of her priest uncle accidentally setting himself alight during an online service early in the first lockdown (the Revd Beach, to add to the sense that the whole thing was scripted by a higher power). In fact, trying to recover the facts today, I find there are quite a lot of professional mermaids about. Perhaps it's not inherently less likely than anything I do.

Harvest 2021

I am still on leave but I don't mind breaking into the succession of holiday snaps to report briefly on what we did for Harvest this year. In fact it was all very modest. The Infants School came to the church on Wednesday at the end of September for two short services, one for Reception and one for the older children, with no parents present, as they did last year, so it was very low-key. They sang, brought their gifts, listened to me talk in very short order, said a couple of prayers, and went away taking their gifts with them to be taken up to the Food Bank. No other organisation made its presence felt at all.

For the Sunday we kept our Harvest Festival, as such, at the first resumed Sunday Space service. Before the first lockdown last year we'd already decided to experiment with a non-eucharistic service once a month which wasn't consciously directed at children, and thus wasn't a 'Family Service', because no families had been there for quite a long time; but we'd only managed to do one when everything was shut up, and that was really the old Family Service pattern. For the resumed and renewed version, I shrunk the liturgy down to the very bare minimum which required the congregation to do nothing more than respond to the Kyrie, say 'Amen', 'thanks be to God' and 'hear our prayer' at appropriate points. We had one reading, and I talked about it. The much-reduced music group accompanied five hymns, and, for the prayers, aside from blessing the Harvest gifts, I brought the Blessed Sacrament from the aumbry in a monstrance, and placed it on the altar on the simple Step-Pyramid-like stand helpfully made from a nice bit of oak by Jack ('Just don't drop it on your foot'). Prayers done, we sand 'God be in my head' a couple of times, and back the Sacrament went. That is what will happen in the future. 

It was short, simple, and focused on Scripture and prayer, but the addition of low-key sacramental adoration adds the Catholic element I am anxious to preserve. There are two main problems: first, it's a bit heavy on contributions from me, the only other voice being a reader's: I want that to change. Secondly, we don't have anyone to serve refreshments afterwards, which I think is quite vital. That's got to be a priority!

In the Waiting Room

The Infants School were in church this morning for their Harvest Service - or services, split into three year groups, and very minimal and simple. I looked at the tinies in Reception and, reflecting that this was my eleventh Harvest in Swanvale Halt, could have sworn that some of those little faces were ones I'd seen before, coming through the school for a second go.

In the evening, older and naughtier children were hanging around the church, surreptitiously smoking fags and eating radioactive foodstuffs from the kebab shop. They asked how old I was. 50. 'Whaaaat? Mate, you're on the way out!'

And sometimes, brethren, that's a comfort ...

Back to the Beginning

The Harvest Festival service had broadly speaking gone well enough. In amongst all the excitement, I’d delivered a sermon about creation, wonder and human responsibility, which was a bit involved but one which I hoped had been carried through by sheer enthusiasm. At the church door I was accosted by a gentleman who said he would like to ask me a bit further about some of the things I said – the things, particularly, about the idea of creation extending over a colossally long period rather than the apparent seven days of Genesis, to which I had explicitly alluded. We had a discussion the details of which I will not bore you with, but they culminated in the following exchange:

Mr 7-Days: You teach false ideas and in a world which has abandoned God frankly it’s very dangerous. This is why we part company with the Church, with the Church of England and the Roman Catholics. The churches abandon the Scriptures and they take up with things like gay marriage and women being in teaching positions, which is also against Scripture, because they want to be popular.

Me: I would say that you’re underestimating the degree of conscientious thought which contributes to those decisions.

Mr 7-Days: Well, I think that too much conscientious thought might be the problem. We need less thought and more reading.

At that point I thought there probably wasn’t very much further we could go. We did end up shaking hands and Mr 7-Days thanked me for being willing to talk ‘because a lot of Church people just won’t engage at all.’ Well, what kind of liberal would I be if I blamed him for taking a different position from me?

We did indeed touch on some very interesting areas. How, indeed, as Mr 7-Days asked me, do we know what we think we know? We all accept on trust vast acreages of alleged facts which lie outside our direct experience. There’s a famous essay by George Orwell questioning, I think, how we really know the world is round; that's a matter of calculation. In fact, I was perturbed enough over the last few days to spend a little while looking up such matters as mineralisation, radiometric decay, and the tracing of mitochondrial DNA. 

I sympathise with Biblical fundamentalists, and not only because every discussion I ever have with someone who radically disagrees with me necessarily leaves me thinking how secure my own beliefs are. People like Mr 7-Days aren’t stupid or ignorant, except to the extent that they are ignorant by choice. They’ve found themselves edged into the position where, to safeguard the things they really do value, the outer ramparts of truth have to be patrolled and defended without the slightest thought of conceding a wing or wall to the enemy outside. No seven-day Creation, no God. I have my own fundamental positions. I believe that once you erode belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist – an idea which Mr 7-Days certainly wouldn’t accept – you’re a long distance down the road to atheism. That seems, doubtless, like an extreme position to some, but I’d defend it, and so I know where the Biblical literalists are coming from. Where they go to is another matter.

And Harvest Festival is just supposed to be a nice occasion when the Infants come to the church and sing and we all Plough the Fields and Scatter over a pile of tinned ham, pasta, and Angel Delight.

Ironically, for the last week I've been holidaying on the Dorset coast, where you can't move for dinosaurs and where every tea shop has an ammonite either on its sign or in the corner. The whole region is a standing insult to Biblical fundamentalism.

Folk Religion

There is now only one Harvest service to go. It is the big Harvest service, but I'm presiding and not preaching so apart from keeping going and projecting my voice above the hubbub it shouldn't be too problematic. We have now had: Harvest Songs of Praise at the Day Centre; Toddler Praise Harvest; Harvest for a local nursery; Harvest for the Infants School. It isn't even as though we are a particularly agricultural area. Our former curate went to look after a group of churches in the middle of Norfolk, and their Harvest goes on for weeks, which makes sense in the context: I shouldn't think Swanvale Halt church is within five miles of a working tractor, and what I believe is our nearest farm grows everything under miles of polytunnel (q.v. The Archers). There are lots of 'Farms' around with Range Rovers parked outside, but nothing grows in such locations apart from the residents' investment schemes. It is a good thing, this occasion to give thanks to God for the bounty of the earth, remember how dependent, ultimately, we all are on the natural world, and how not all of us have the same advantages, but it always surprises me how engrained it is in people's consciousness. 

Not far away from here is a church whose previous incumbent-but-one ran it into the ground. Among his idiosyncrasies was scorning such festivities as the Harvest Festival and Remembrance Sunday, which he denounced as 'folk religion' and would have nothing to do with. Now our Anglican Harvest Festival, as we now know it, we owe to that equally idiosyncratic High Churchman Parson Hawker of Morwenstow, that latter-day Celtic Saint who was almost definitely the first Anglican clergyman to celebrate Mass in a chasuble (home-made) and led his pets into church in a procession. But he was very much in favour of 'folk religion'; High Anglicans who came after him were often more fastidious.

'Harvest Festivals have been much abused by excessive displays of greengrocery', declares Percy Dearmer in The Parson's Handbook of 1904, 'but this is no reason why they should not be observed'. Such observation, suggests this most tasteful of clerics, could take the form of the principal Mass of the day, provided 'the appointed order of Psalms and Lessons at Mattins and Evensong not be interfered with'; or, alternatively, there may be 'a procession and Te Deum after Evensong'. However, the great Percy warns,

As for the decorations, let them be mainly flowers and greenery. A few typical fruits of the earth, such as grapes and corn, might be added; but these should not be placed on the Holy Table nor on any of its ornaments, and all should be removed after the Te Deum in the evening.

The more Romanist Ritual Notes is even firmer:

Thanksgiving for the Harvest ought not to be treated as a festival of the Church and should not be allowed to displace a feast of red-letter rank, and certainly not a Sunday or feast of the 1st class. If a special mass be celebrated - with the permission of the bishop - it should be additional to the parochial mass of the day and conform to the rules for solemn votives ... It is most undesirable to deck the church with displays of bread, fruits and greengrocery. Such articles, if offered for presentation to the sick and poor, should be arranged decorously and inconspicuously, but not within the chancel or sanctuary.

However a priest could mark the Harvest by adding the prescribed Collect to the Collect of the Sunday at Mass, offer the compilers.

Of course what you have in all this, quite apart from considerations of taste, is a perfectly understandable concern to defend the church building and the Sacred Mysteries to which it is dedicated from being taken over by non-religious concerns and interests. Sanctity should be defined, calibrated, and generated by the sacrifice of Christ, and the business of the Church is to state and restate that sacrifice forever. That's what the Church is for.

And yet at the same time it's all unspeakably prissy. God's presence is not only signified by the Mass and nothing but the Mass, still less the calendrical rules and rubrics by which is quite rightly governed. There is room for Godly vulgarity.

And here is some: the Harvest Loaf, made by a mother from the congregation and placed resplendently on the Holy Table (which also bore, at least for the Infants Harvest, a gigantic brass stone-studded cross and a pair of positively outrageous Gothic candlesticks in the same style). I think it looks fantastic.

To spare Bd Percy from in sepulchro gyration at the horrendous sight, I have not photographed the masses of tinned goods and pasta surrounding the Holy Table and waiting to be shipped off to the Food Bank in Hornington.

Stocktaking

The 1st of August used to be known as Lammas Day, Loaf Mass, the occasion when bread was baked from the first-ripe corn of the year's crop and offered to God to ask for a blessing on the rest of the harvest. The modern version of Harvest-tide is a bit away yet - we usually mark it at the start of October - but as this is holiday time, and therefore a quiet period so far as Church matters go, it provides a useful window to take stock of where the church is and what we might do in the future: to do some thinking, planning, and catching up at a time when the usual pressures of the weekly and monthly round are somewhat relieved. If Lammas involves thanking God for his good gifts, it's a helpful moment to examine how our resources are used to their best advantage and his best glory. At least, this is what I usually tell myself as August starts, even if it doesn't always turn out like that. Or often.

My version of spiritual stocktaking this year is to put together an audit of where I see the church standing and what we've managed to do over the five years since I arrived in Swanvale Halt. If part of my role is the management of change, basic parameters and principles for that change need to be worked out. I have on file records of PCC Away Days and study sessions thinking about this going back at least to 2003, and they always reach the same sort of conclusions and come up with the same sort of ideas, so I think what we really need is the assessment of somebody from outside. I've posted what I've assembled off to the Parish Development Office at the Diocese and will see what they say.

More personally, during August stocktaking usually involves assembling my accounts for the past year with the aid of Psyche the Goth accountant to whom I send all my bits and pieces for her to put into the right places on the right forms. This includes the calculation of my allowances for heating and lighting the Rectory, devised according to an impenetrably complex formula by the Church Commissioners. This used to be done annually via what we all knew as The Pink Form (once referred to, formally, in an email from the Diocese as 'Those Wretched PUK Forms'), which got sent out around Easter and then typically sat in clergy in-trays for months before actually being filled out and returned. However, this year the Church has moved onto a system allowing clergy to make their return online. I say, 'has moved': more accurately it's announced that this is to happen and it still hasn't. A few days ago we all had an email apologising for the delay and promising we would get more information by the end of July. Well, hello August.

Thin Ice for Harvest

The infants' school began assembling for their harvest celebration about twenty-five to nine on Wednesday. I had an order of service, which had my name prominently next to the bits I was doing. I wasn't doing the 'talk - God's Harvest Gifts', obviously, because that didn't have my name next to it.
In troop the children and assorted teachers, parents, grandparents and tiny siblings. All goes wonderfully as they present their gifts and do their little turns. Then comes the 'talk'. The headmistress beams expectantly at me. Ah.
I then go into five minutes of complete insanity tearing round the church asking the children about their favourite foods. They rather suspiciously all seem to like vegetables although one says pasta. I realise that I am starting to descend into lunacy as my discussion of trout becomes far too detailed and curtail the madness.
Do anything in church with enough authority and you can get away with it. But it's not a habit one should get into, I suspect.