An address for Harvest Festival
We have just sung We Plough the Fields and Scatter, one of those great traditional Harvest hymns, full of gratitude for abundance, and rightly so. I feel the contrast with the story of Ruth. I really felt it when Naomi arrived back in Bethlehem and says, “I went away full, but I have been brought back empty.” And almost in the next breath we’re told that they arrived at the beginning of the barley harvest. Naomi is empty. The fields are full. Both things are true at once.
And Ruth survives because the harvest is not gathered completely. We talked at Lammas of the old tradition of leaving John Barleycorn in the fields after harvest and we said then that it’s echoed in China where you throw a handful of rice back when the rest has been taken. And Ruth gleans. She follows behind those who are harvesting and gathers what is left. In the ancient law, you were not supposed to strip every last thing from the field. There had to be something left at the edges for the poor, the widow, the stranger. A good harvest was not one where the person who owned the land managed to extract absolutely everything from it.
I keep thinking about that. What would it mean not to extract absolutely everything -from the earth, from each other, from ourselves? To leave something at the edges. Some food. Some money. Some time. Some attention. Some energy. The table in front of us is one small answer. What we have received does not have to stop with us.
But there is something else about Ruth that I love that is less frequently spotted. Nobody in the story knows where they are in the story, I mean no one has the big picture. Naomi cannot see beyond the enormous losses she has suffered. Ruth does not know what will happen when she goes out that morning looking for somewhere to glean. She simply goes into a field and, “as it happened”, it belongs to Boaz. They cannot see the whole pattern because they are living inside it.
That takes me back to Hildegard’s extraordinary picture on the front of the Order of Service. We can look at it from outside and see the circles within circles, the whole mandala turning. But that isn’t how we experience our own lives. We experience one tiny point within the pattern. This grief. This relationship. This work. This beginning. This ending. This particular September morning. The wheel turns, but most of the time we don’t know exactly where on the wheel we are.
And that’s what is so hard about this being human, isn’t it? Ecclesiastes says that God has set eternity in our hearts, and yet our lives are temporal and fleeting. We have this strange capacity to sense the whole and yet we cannot see it. We live one point at a time.
Which brings me to a thought I rather love: I say this a little tongue in cheek but.. perhaps life really is pointless.
Not pointless in the sense of meaningless. Quite the opposite. Pointless because a circle has no point. There may not be some final place in the distance where everything is resolved, everything has worked, we have finally become the people we intended to be and can announce that we have finished.
We are so used to imagining life as a straight line. What am I achieving? Where am I going? What is this leading to? Have I made progress? And Ecclesiastes offers something wonderfully counter-cultural: perhaps the meaning is not waiting for us at the end. Perhaps the meaning is in the living of the life. In the labour. In the contrasts. In weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing, planting and uprooting. The joy is in the cycle, not the end goal.
Gunilla Norris says that we work with the garden we have inherited. Joan Chittister reminds us that nothing can be forced to ripen before its time. Ruth goes out to glean without knowing what the day will bring. Perhaps there is some freedom in all of that. We don’t always have to understand our place in the pattern before we live it.
Plant when it is time to plant. Harvest when it is time to harvest. Rest when it is time to rest. Receive when you need to receive. Give when you have something to give. Grieve what ends. Delight in what ripens. And don’t demand that the wheel become a straight line.
Perhaps most of the time we receive only fragments of the whole -glimpses, moments, tiny pieces of the pattern. And perhaps that is enough.
Fragments of Holiness
Sarah York
We receive fragments of holiness,
glimpses of eternity, brief moments of insight.
Let us gather them up for the precious gifts that they are,
and, renewed by their grace, move boldly into the unknown.
Amen.
