The celebration of Harvest Festival this year has made me realise that I am seeing some things with new eyes. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. As we accumulate new experiences each year, of births, marriages and deaths and much besides, so when the church seasons cycle around they come afresh bearing new gifts and insights.
The Creation-tide worship and our Green Week events have opened my eyes, this year, to the intricate balances of the processes and cycles built into God’s creation.
For example, have you noticed the tall Lime tree stump in the graveyard known as Paradise at the East end of the cathedral? I have often walked past and wondered why it’s been left there. Now I know, thanks to Patrick, the Cathedral Head Gardener, that the stump is a great ‘deadwood habitat’. The large fungi on the truncated tree trunk provide the perfect home for all sorts of insects. Something apparently dead is life-giving and teaming with biodiversity. I see that dead tree completely differently now.
In this past year I’ve also come to a deeper understanding of myself as part of a generation that has consumed resources, accumulated ‘stuff’ and thrown things away to an unprecedented degree. (Where exactly is ‘away’, anyway, on our small planet?) We may now even seek to guard this lifestyle, but it hasn’t necessarily made us happy.
Its fifty years since the former Bishop of Winchester, John V Taylor wrote the book ‘Enough is enough’, calling on us to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of excessive consumption. His work, though written without our current awareness of climate emergency, is still powerful in its current relevance and theological insight.
You may know a striking scene in Madmen, the American TV series set in an advertising agency in the 50s and 60s. Leading man Don Draper takes his family out for an idyllic picnic in the picture-perfect sunny countryside. The convertible car, the chic clothes and fancy food speak of wealth, modernity and ease. Afterwards they drive off and – shockingly – simply leave all the plastic packaging and waste from their meal behind them, on the grass. They are modern people, living without a care about the implications of their lifestyle.
Christian faith teaches that we can change, see things differently and behave differently. We can learn to live gently on the good earth respecting its delicate balances and discovering again how to do this in a sustainable way. Where there is love, there is hope. With love, we can have courage to ask, how do I need to change? Even more searching we may dare say, what is it that needs to die in me, in order to discover new life and joy?
Autumn, with its mellow fruitfulness and generous harvest comes as nature dies back. The fallen leaves will feed the soil in preparation for the spring. As a poet has said of autumn,
‘Deep in the dark earth, the year is young.’
I hope that each of us will find new eyes to see our relationship with the good earth, and one another, and be prepared to let go of old habits and assumptions, to embrace new life and be a blessing to generations to come.
I’ll close with a traditional Gaelic prayer that takes for granted our inbuilt relationship with Gods creation:
The seed is Christ’s, the harvest his; may we be stored within God’s barn.
The sea is Christ’s the fish are his; may we be caught within God’s net.
From birth to age, from age to death, enfold us, Christ, within your arms.
Until the end, the great rebirth, Christ, be our joy in Paradise.
Amen.
Please take care of yourself and others.
With blessings and best wishes,
The Very Revd Catherine Ogle
Dean of Winchester
