Harvest and the Labours of the Months

Harvest and the Labours of the Months

A sermon by Kenneth Padley

Revelation 14.14-18, John 6.25-35

‘Who is going to feed you?’

This is the arresting question posed by a sign near the Pitton turn of the A30, just north of Salisbury.

‘Who is going to feed you?’

The sign is one farmer’s protest at recent changes to British taxation. It is an expression of concern about the viability of their business and a provocative reminder that everyone on this planet is dependent on the output of farms and fisheries.

‘Who is going to feed you?’

Harvest festival serves a similar purpose to that poster within the Church’s year. It smears a little grittiness onto the calendar, reminding us of the reality of rural life, a context from which most in the developed world have become utterly detached, yet on which we are entirely dependent. Harvest festival invites us to pause and give thanks for the sweat and toil which is conducted day in day out, often in adverse conditions and at anti-social hours, frequently by migrant labour and/or those on low wages, in order to give us today our daily bread.

That said, it is tempting to dismiss harvest festival as a thing of pastiche, a retrospective on idealised village life invented by rapidly urbanising communities in the nineteenth century. Something about it evokes thoughts of Miss Marple and Cider with Rosie – well, certainly the Cider if not the Rosie. So let me offer a few more Christian perspectives on food and farming which might enrich our harvest platter.

Back in the Middle Ages, some churches were decorated with a cycle of the agricultural year known as the Labours of the Months. Twelve images depicted different activities from the farming calendar, tasks that were needed for the sustenance of families and flourishing of society.

One such sequence was painted in Salisbury. It was here on the vaults of the Presbytery near the east end of the cathedral. The painting was probably made in the 1240s before the original scaffolding came down. We know what these beautiful paintings once looked like because they were recorded in 1789 by an antiquary called Jacob Schnebbelie. Schnebbelie sketched the Labours of the Months because he knew that they were about to be covered in whitewash. Matters were further complicated in the 1870s when Labours of the Months were restored to the presbytery ceiling – but a different scheme and in a different order. The Victorian restorers from the London company of Clayton and Bell were seemingly unaware of Schnebbelie’s sketches (which survive to this day)[1], taking instead their inspiration from generic thirteenth-century English manuscript calendars. The end result is not what there used to be, but it does at least offer a reimagining of the medieval original. Activity starts with digging and sowing in March and April, followed by hawking and the picking of flowers in May and June. It moves round to reaping and threshing in July and August, and the gathering of fruit in September and brewing in October. Finally, as autumn turns into winter, the felling of timber in November and the killing of pigs in December culminates in indolent months beside the fire in January and the drinking of wine in February. And then the whole cycle begins again.

The presbytery of a cathedral is a striking canvas for depicting the Labours of the Months. This was the holiest place of the building, especially as conceived in Salisbury. Our presbytery was the site of the high altar and perhaps intended as a shrine to St Osmund. It was a space largely reserved for the canons – paradoxically among the few people in medieval society who did not work the land for their living. I wonder why they felt their lives should be overshadowed by the earthy tasks that occupied the worries of the secular world beyond their holy walls? Maybe those priests needed reminding of the principle of St Benedict that work is prayer and prayer is work – orare est laborare. Or maybe they were being prompted not to become too detached, summoned back to the fundamental synthesis of feasting and fasting which enmeshes the liturgical year with the agricultural seasons.

‘Who is going to feed you?’

Our lives today are – on average – less nasty, brutish and short than those of our medieval forebears. Nonetheless, the anxieties which beset the Middle Ages have their modern equivalents.

In a seminal article just five pages long and written nearly sixty years ago, American historian Lynn White argued that western Christianity has caused much of the modern ecological crisis through claiming that humans have God-given dominion over the planet and the right to use it for our own ends. Lynn White was not arguing for less religion, but rather that the churches should remodel their understanding of our relationship with the natural order. In particular, White cited the example of Francis of Assisi as someone who, ‘tried to depose man from his monarchy over creation and set up a democracy of all God’s creatures’.[2]

Now, whatever we make of that, much has been written and said since White’s article about the need for better Christian stewardship of the environment, caring for creation and curating resources for the long term. But this stewardship model has itself been critiqued in recent years. Theologian and historian Richard Bauckham for example points out how much of the stewardship model is predicated on those earlier assumptions of domination which Lynn White so derided. It is a simple misstep from God’s choice to ‘make humankind in our image… and let them have dominion’ (Genesis 1.26) to a conception of people as activist intermediaries between God and non-human species. Because, in attempting to sort things out, we so often make things worse, don’t we? This is not to advocate for standoffish disinterest, because that would be a recipe for burning even more fossil fuels until it is even more too late. However, it is to indicate the need for a change in our underlying assumptions, towards a greater appreciation of our symbiotic participation in nature, a relationship where hierarchy is qualified by community, and our creatureliness is regarded as more fundamental than our distinctiveness.[3]

‘Who is going to feed you?’ asks the farmer’s sign.

An answer from God comes in Jeremiah 3.15 when he says ‘I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will feed you with knowledge and understanding’. There is a strand of scriptural thought which invites us to view harvest in terms of God’s teaching and destiny. Thus in today’s gospel we heard Jesus describing himself as bread from heaven, food for our minds and sacramental encounter for our souls. And we heard also the book Revelation use harvest as a metaphor for our final end at the eschatological reaping of the angels.

Jesus teaches that man cannot live by bread alone. But we know also that man cannot live without bread at all. So between now and such time as ‘all be safely gathered in’, the challenge of harvest aligns our Christian duty towards those who need food and water with our environmental obligations to be doing the right thing for the long term. This is a recipe for temperance and generosity, informing both philanthropy towards the needy, and an ever more sustainable use of resources.

In order for farmers to continue to feed everyone into the future, and to avert a whitewashing of the labours of their months through climate catastrophe, we need to recover something of that reciprocity of faith and nature with which an unknown artist decorated the ceiling of this cathedral eight centuries ago.

[1] Sketches in the archive of the Society of Antiquaries and finished drawings in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Reeve and Horsfall Turner, ‘Mapping space, mapping time’ Antiquaries Journal (2005), 57-102.

[2] White, Lynn, ‘The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis’ in Science (1967), 1203-07 at 1206.

[3] Bauckham, ‘Stewardship in question’ in Bible and Ecology: rediscovering the community of creation (London, 2010).