TWO memories: a really small me in a surplice much too big, following crucifer, choir, and vicar (Uncle Alec), through a five-barred gate opposite the varsity into Farmer Greatorex’s field. The wind off the Westmoreland hills stirred the white surplices, and blew away my uncle’s words as he, well, bleated prayers about something I didn’t understand. Then we went back into church, and my mother told me we had been Blessing the Crops. I used to be no wiser.
Twenty-odd years later: evensong within the church on this hamlet to which we had just moved. The 4 lads within the choir, outgrowing cassocks that reeked of mould from their damp cupboard within the vestry, followed the milkman’s embarrassed son as he carried the cross out of church. We went down the lane to the Hythe, whence you get a great view towards Ely over the extent fen. Surrounded by cow parsley and a foam of meadowsweet, Robin the Vicar blessed the crops — mainly unlovely sugar beet.
Almost forgotten, now, those summer processions just after the Fifth Sunday after Easter (BCP); yet my Hymns A&M (1875 ed.) has a bit headed “Rogation Days”. I got here to excited about them (not without some nostalgia) since the village is starting its yearly planning for our fair. I run the bookstall.
A charter of King John granted the holding of that fair on the three Rogation Days before Ascension. Nowadays, it happens on the early May Bank Holiday; and that straightforward, secular, “rational” change speaks volumes to me about how our culture has turned its back on the centuries that made us — and, worse, makes us so easily forget that we’re utterly, precariously, depending on seedtime and harvest, growth and decay; on an internet of life — the very earth — that we treat so badly.
“Where does bacon come from?” my country-bred daughter once asked her primary-school class. Hands shot up. “Asda!” said a brilliant little lad. . .
ONCE, Rogationtide — days of fast and intercession — mattered. King Alfred’s laws made them as special as another holy day. People prayed for bounteous harvests, since hunger was at all times just across the corner. In 1816, within the Philippines, a few volcanoes burped and caused 4 “years with no summer” across the globe, as they were known. In Europe, what crops there have been rotted within the fields. People did starve.
Those processions — Gang (“walking”) Days in “Cross Week” — were echoed throughout Europe for hundreds of years before. Germany had its Bittag in Kreuzwoche. But the more extreme of Elizabeth I’s clergy, like Edmund Grindal (later Bishop of London), fearful that those processions perpetuated an excessive amount of Catholic “superstition” — more exactly, that individuals were having an excessive amount of fun. In 1571, he tried to get them reformulated as sober beating of parish bounds — turning them into something about property and ownership, bluntly, about control, the need for which grows like a cancer in our culture.
Yet we will not be on top of things.
Here is where the Genesis stories might be so helpful. In stories, you may say things that you just cannot in philosophy, and vice versa. The garden is created; its inhabitants, including humankind, are created, too. The garden needs tending; the accounts nowhere suggest that Adam (the Hebrew pun on his name links him with the earth whence he got here) and Eve are on a everlasting holiday. They are to co-operate with their Creator in tending his garden: stewards — not monarchs — of all they survey.
But then comes that temptation of the short fix: of power; of proudly denying your home within the scheme of things. And the garden is shut for ever, and we eat our bread only within the sweat of our brows.
ONCE, Rogationtide publicly acknowledged our precarious dependence on earth’s bounty. That dependence hasn’t modified, even when we now hide our vulnerability behind global markets and low cost sea transport, and pretend that we will control nature with chemicals and fertilisers.
None of those things is necessarily bad; what’s dangerous is that we, in affluent countries, have come complacently to see ourselves as masters of something external to us that we call “Nature”, to be manipulated to our profit. But we’re self-evidently a component of that very same nature, that infinitely complex web where, because the cliché goes, a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil triggers storms in Texas.
Everything, nevertheless tiny, affects the whole lot else. The very soil beneath our feet is alive. No serious scientist could now repeat Bishop Wilberforce’s sneer (against Darwin), on the 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, that he wouldn’t “acknowledge [his] cousinship with the mushroom”. The web of which we form part reaches in all places, from the smallest micro-organism to the untiring stars.
Time in addition to space, too. What I do now is affected by what my ancestors did then — just as they irrevocably modified the world, so we, with way more power at our greedy disposal, are irreversibly changing things for our youngsters. And for the poorer. “We plough the fields and scatter Our poisons on the land”, went the favored Sixties and ’70s parody.
SPRING has at all times brought promise, not guarantee. This spring — the wettest for many years — must shake us out of any complacency. My granddaughter’s farmer fiancé and his family in Lincolnshire saw their winter wheat and barley ruined. Last autumn, they may not lift their potatoes for the water on the fields.
This yr’s cereal yields will probably be the smallest for half a century — in the event that they might be harvested. Lambs of their 1000’s have died of cold and wet. This yr, Farmer Greatorex (were he alive) couldn’t have put his black-and-white Holsteins out to the luxurious recent grass; for they might have sunk as much as their hocks in sodden soil.
We should entreat God’s blessing on the earth and its ecology that it should still sustain us. We can never deserve that blessing: it’s well to recognise that.
Our asking must be humble, with penitence for what our species has done and is doing. We needs to be looking hard at how we expect (or, relatively, don’t think) about other creatures; at how our pleasure and luxury may cost a little the earth; at structures and attitudes in our societies which ignore — even deny — the innate holiness of the whole lot.
And — just as God seems to love being asked — thanks matters. Recently, I asked a young man, quirkily learned, what Rogation meant to him: “Oh, it’s preparation for thanking at harvest festival.”
Not bad. Harvest still has some hold on popular imagination. It’s not old, nevertheless it is sensible. The Rector of Morwenstow, Robert Hawker (a great poet, incidentally, now almost unread, whose repute once challenged Tennyson’s), invented that festival in 1843 and it was immediately popular. He knew how one can engage his Cornish parishioners, and treated all creatures great and small seriously. He kept a pet pig and welcomed his nine cats into church. One cat he excommunicated, so it is alleged, for mousing on Sunday. Eccentric? Yes, but higher that than a chilly efficiency that sees all creatures — and this loved earth itself — as mere things.
People may say: “Well, our considering like that won’t make much difference.” Perhaps: the default structures of our society do have huge inertia. We inhabit what have turn out to be comfortable prisons, as Marx saw. But butterflies (those left in our impoverished summers) do flap their wings.
Edmund Burke remarked: “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little bit.” One day, there is perhaps storms in Texas.
Dr Charles Moseley is a Life Fellow of Hughes Hall, Cambridge.
