Tower and Town, September 2023 (view the full edition)Clergy Letter: God's own fieldHarvest, in the agricultural sense, is already past. All is safely (or soggily) gathered in and the appealing blocks of barley and hay baling our landscape into a pop-up sculpture park have all but disappeared. The Church's Harvest celebrations - now extended as a 'Creationtide' season into October - are in one sense, then, a delayed thanksgiving for the yield of former months. That needn't trouble us, however, for they are just as much focused on a rather less specific future point: the anticipated end of the world believers know as the Last Judgement. For many, this is merely one of the vestiges of a Christian worldview with little bearing on present times, a sickle blade blunted by unbelief. Nevertheless, the idea of a harvest that separates the righteous from the unrighteous often crops up in Jesus' teaching and has gained a new edge as we witness the ecological ends of our actions, more fearfully evident with each passing, and slightly warmer, year. The once-familiar Parable of the Wheat and the Tares tells us that good and evil inevitably grow together in this life: one is easy to mistake for the other and this fact should caution us away from prejudice or self-righteousness. But it is also a warning that the real myth is the one that imagines our actions have no lasting or eternal consequences. They do, of course - and to ignore this is simply to hasten the day. As Christ's parables demonstrated, compelling stories not only reflect life as it is, but re-shape the world as it might be. People naturally 'storify' their lives and interpret even the most random experiences with narrative meaning. We cannot help it: we are made that way and have minds which automatically give to things a beginning, a middle and an end. As an annual celebration of that truth, the forthcoming Literature Festival is a great blessing to our town. May its harvest of words offer many seeds for our renewal. Bishop Andrew |