NO THOUGHT OF THE HARVEST
Rev. Cliff Reed, Minister Emeritus
Service address on Sunday 6th June 2021
I suppose worrying about the future has been one of the features of the pandemic. Worrying about our future health, worrying about the future of the economy and how it will affect us, worrying about whether planned holidays and visits to family and friends will ever tak e place. We worry about the future course of the pandemic – when will it end? Will it ever end? What surprises has it got in store in the form of new variants and third, fourth or however many waves in this country and around the world. And alongside the pandemic, and not unrelated to it, there are worries about climate change, the environmental crisis and the future of human civilization and human life on this wonderful but badly abused planet. It is possible to worry a great deal about the future – but if we do, what good will it do? Does worrying about the future do us any good? Does it have any point? Does it benefit our mental, physical or spiritual health? We don’t want to be irresponsible about the future, but is it possible to be responsible about the future while at the same time not be weighed down by fretting about it? That would be quite a trick if we could manage it! Well, maybe we can. Some have certainly thought so.
Fifty-seven years ago, on an April evening at the Annual Meetings of our General Assembly in I be a remarkable and memorable act of worship. It constituted the Youth Meeting and was devised by the then Vice-President of the Unitarian Young People’s League (UYPL), Martin Davies, Six other UYPLers took part in leading it of whom, incidentally, three were later to become ministers who served our movement for many years. Now, I wasn’t there, nor do I have a copy of the service, but I do have a report of it that appeared in UYPL’s newsletter, ‘The Young Unitarian’ (TYU). The title of this act of worship was ‘Take No Thought of the Harvest’, a line from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Choruses from “The Rock”’. The fuller quotation goes:
All men are ready to invest their money
But most expect dividends.
I say to you: Make perfect your will,
I say: take no thought of the harvest,
But only of proper sowing.
Although I can’t tell you what was said at that service I do know that it took the form of a dialogue between a ‘Seeker’ and a ‘Sceptic’, while the other participants presented the attitudes and impressions of the young people of the time on subjects that affected and concerned them. The TYU report – written by another old UYPL friend of mine, Gordon Lowthian – mentioned what some of these were – “violence, money and human relationships.” They were illustrated with readings and music. The readings included Wilfred Owen’s dark and powerful First World War poem, ‘Strange Meeting’, about two dead soldiers from opposing armies who meet in some dim underworld:
…some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
One says, Strange friend…here is no cause to mourn.
The other replies, None…save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours
Was my life also…
For them there is no future, and the poem ends with the words, Let us sleep now…
This is a poem about the futility and waste of war and violence, and perhaps of the misplaced loyalties and allegiances that drive people to kill: None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
And maybe this is why one of the pieces played in the service came from ‘West Side Story’, Leonard Bernstein’s re-telling of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in the setting of 1950s New York and its rival gangs. In his report Gordon mentions what he calls the “gang theme” from ‘West Side Story’. Maybe this was ‘Rumble’, which accompanies the deadly gang fight between the Jets and the Sharks, or maybe it was ‘Jet Song’. This is about the power of the gang to provide a sense of security and belonging to disaffected youths, but which also creates the obsessive loyalty which leads to volence and death for no good reason:
When you’re a Jet,
You’re a Jet all the way
From your first cigarette
To your last dyin’ day…
You’re never disconnected!
You’re home with your own
When company’s expected
You're well protected
…
When you’re a Jet
You stay
A Jet.
This is what gang culture offers – what amounts to a pointless present and an ultimately hopeless future, or no future at all.
Another piece of music in the service was ‘Money’ by the Beatles. Released in November 1963, it is an ironic commentary on a life and a society obsessed with material and financial gain, where the acquisition of money for its own sake pushes everything else aside, an obsession that is destructive of human values and productive of a false and ultimately pointless view of the future. To illustrate points made about human relationships there were readings from Stan Barstow’s novel ‘A Kind of Loving’ (1960), with its bleak portrayal of a man trapped in an ill-considered marriage.
There were original songs in the service, written and sung by Rosemary Goring, but I don’t know what they were or what they said. Perhaps, though, they echoed some of the sentiments being expressed at that time by a young singer-songwriter, who turned 80 recently, named Bob Dylan. In that same year of 1964 he released his seminal album, ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’, with its title track that protests against the status quo, against the world that the older generation have bequeathed to the young, and looks to the creation of a new and better world. The 1960s were to be a hopeful and optimistic decade for many ung people and maybe ‘Take No Thought of the Harvest’ was part of this. It took issue with “”values, ambitions and mindsets that were seen as stale and regressive, and instead called for something new, something more humane as well as more human, something more spontaneous to replace the ruts into which people were all too often thrust for the rest of their lives.
It was new, it was fresh, it was exciting – but it also had deep roots. It was by no means the first time that people had thought such thoughts, had sought to break restrictive moulds and free the spirit. And nor should it be the last, because we are always in need of being reminded that false and destructive structures – be they physical, political, mental or religious – are always around and always need to be challenged. That is why the ‘Black Lives Matter’ phenomenon has arisen today, even though it is hardly the first time that these issues have arisen in one way or another. Things don’t stay the same. Things do change, albeit slowly and haltingly; sometimes for the better, but by no means always. There are steps back as well as steps forward, and we can’t always tell the difference at the time. The old evils, the old negativities, are always lurking in the dark recesses of the human psyche, ready to crawl out anew, so requiring a new generation of humanity to call them out, to expose them, resist them and show that there is a better and more loving way to go.
And this better way is not about trying to fix or determine the future, trying to control or dictate to future generations what they must do. Rather it is about how we live now, because ‘now’ is the only place we can live. We are called to live lovingly and creatively, we are called to be good stewards of the earth, we are called to treasure the wonders of this incredible planet, we are called to do justly and to walk humbly – and we are called to do these things now. Hopefully, and hope, if it is not obsessive and misdirected, is a part of our spiritual resource – hopefully, by living wisely and well now we will bequeath a better world to those who come after us – but it is the living well now that is our business. That is all we can do.
The author of Ecclesiastes reminds us that the fate of any plans we make is ultimately beyond our control, “since you do not know what disasters are in store for the world” (Eccles. 11:2). We must still conduct our own lives as best we can but we cannot count on the future, “for you do not know whether this or that sowing will be successful, or whether both alike will do as well” (Eccles. 11:6).
For the author of Ecclesiastes this life is full of uncertainties, the only certainty being “the days of darkness” (Eccles. 11:8) at its end, but that is no reason not to live a full life in the present, unclouded by a future which is not ours anyway: “The light of day is sweet, and pleasant to the eye is the sight of the sun, However many years a person may live, he should rejoice in all of them” (Eccles. 11:7-8),
Jesus too rejects an obsession with the future and tells us to live in the now, “Can anxious thought add a single day to your life?” he asks. “Do not ask anxiously ‘What are we to eat? What are we to drink? What shall we wear?”’ Rather we should focus on living in the present with our minds set “on God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else” (Matthew 6:33), meaning the rule of love that is “God’s kingdom and his justice.” If we live lovingly, as citizens of God’s kingdom, says Jesus, “all the rest will come to you as well.” His radical conclusion challenges the way in which we so often think, clouding the present with our fear. Jesus says, “So do not be anxious about tomorrow; tomorrow will look after itself. Each day has troubles enough of its own” (Matthew 6:34).
And this, I think, is the message of those lines by T.S. Eliot. “Most expect dividends” when they invest but this is to lock yourself into an uncertain and maybe futile enterprise. “I say to you: Make perfect your will” – which is another way of saying “Set your mind on God’s kingdom and his justice.”
“I say: take no thought of the harvest,
But only of proper sowing.”
The sowing is how we live now, which is within our power. The harvest is beyond our sight and beyond our power. If we sow properly today that is as much as we can do. If we sow well there is a chance of reaping a good harvest, but we cannot count on it, we cannot control all that might affect it or even blight it, so for now take no thought of it. The future is not built by us worrying about it, the future will be the creation of others living in their own time. We can only live in our own time, and how we do that will affect our successors, but we cannot see how. So let’s see to our proper sowing in the here and now, and take no thought of the harvest.