LAMMAS DAY was nearing once I began to jot down this. The first combines were chewing their way through the winter barley, whose blond ears hung down in heavy ripeness. Soon, it will be the turn of the winter wheat.
Long ago, the primary bread baked from the brand new grain was taken to the church in thanksgiving, and for blessing. Some say that the loaf thus blessed was quartered and placed on the corners of the barn to guard the sheaves that will soon fill it. Hlafmæsse — “Loaf Mass” — they called the festival in Old English: a distant ancestor of the Victorian invention of Harvest Festival. Both are thanksgiving for this earnest that there shall be food for the approaching winter, and the hungry spring that can follow.
Giving thanks for the brand new bread — literally a eucharist — was as natural as respiration . . . and straightforward good manners; for it acknowledged that the earth is indeed the Lord’s, and all that therein is; that he giveth us our meat in due season. As that great spiritual teacher Meister Eckhart (1260-1329) once said of prayer, “If you the one prayer you said in your life was ‘Thank you,’ that will be enough.” That sense of dependence did no harm: its lack, I suggest, does quite rather a lot.
For we pampered and, frankly, greedy moderns easily forget how precarious our food supply was only just a few generations ago. For many around the globe, it still is. Unless we grow vegetables and fruit, as I even have done all my life, we easily forget that things have seasons, and sometimes things fail. Of course you possibly can have strawberries at Christmas, dear, just import them; but, not so way back, (higher) strawberries got here from England’s wealthy soils only in early June — should you were lucky. The seasonality increased the pleasure.
My garden, after a difficult spring when the asparagus was late, is now wealthy in tomatoes, beans, leeks, potatoes, and celeriac. The branches of the apple trees are bending under the burden of what might be a high-quality 12 months. Sometimes, within the evening cool, because the swifts (here, they leave on about 6 August) wheel overhead, and work is over, I sit with a glass of wine, lost in easy wonder at all of it. And gratitude.
THREE things those forebears, whom many moderns dismiss (in the event that they consider them in any respect) as so quaintly old-fashioned, ignorant, and silly, can teach us: first, humility: recognising our own littleness, that we usually are not on top of things; second, that we’re a part of a cosmic web where all the pieces affects all the pieces else; third, that to not take things as a right is one technique to wisdom. Surely it’s one component in that complex word “fear” — awe, respect, a way of 1’s own littleness and powerlessness — of the Lord, which, Proverbs 9.10 says, is where wisdom begins.
But, properly, together with gratitude, comes a way of the preciousness of the gift — nonetheless quotidian, even expected, it might be — for the Giver is within the gift. When someone whom we love gives us something, we value it partly due to them. Here again, our ancestors could teach us much; they hated waste — indeed, couldn’t afford it — and can be appalled by the surplus and waste which might be normal in our culture: over-eating, discarded food, clothing worn only once. . .
We wasteful, greedy Westerners live, for now, in a fools’ paradise — but, were there major disruption to shipping lanes, people can be hungry in every week. No must go into the folly of (for instance) using irreplaceable fossil fuel to bring mangetouts from hungry Zimbabwe to be offered (and infrequently not sold), ever so cheaply, on our supermarket shelves. Global trade, with its imbalances and inequities, could have served wealthy countries well, but whether it has served humanity as a complete, or the planet — our common home — equally well is one other matter.
MOST of the medieval and later writers who’ve been my lifelong companions had a really clear sense of the holiness of the “natural world”. They also sensed the necessity for correct stewardship of the earth. They had a horror of “waste”: the cavalier, profligate misuse of what had been “won”, with human labour and sweat, in tilling the sector and tending what the Lord made to grow to ripe fullness from the dead seed within the earth.
One of the worst things that you could possibly say of somebody (of whatever rank) was that they were a “waster”, or wastrel. Cut down too many trees, thus spoiling the timber crop and the pannage for everybody’s pigs, and you could possibly expect to be delivered to the judgement of your fellows; overfish your ponds, and also you went hungry on fast days. And how easily those with power could waste the common weal, or hoard it for themselves. If the earth is indeed the Lord’s, our use of it and its resources must be an ethical issue — an idea that current economic discourses seem unable to handle.
IN SO many places in my reading I even have encountered sheer wonder on the holiness of our world. Examples, just as they seem in my grasshopper mind: Psalms 104 and 147; Henry Vaughan’s poetry (written in a locality that later enraptured Francis Kilvert); Thomas Traherne’s vision of a standard summer landscape transfigured with glory right into a theophany, a Laudate Deum.
I believe of Wordsworth’s profound sense of Nature — filled with splendour and glory — as an ethical force; of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur”; of Eleanor Farjeon’s “Morning has broken”; and so many others.
Sometimes, the poets and visionaries are wiser guides to life and understanding, calling us back to what matters, than is our world of getting and spending, which is just too much with us, as Wordsworth said. We must learn to be content with less. Enough is — well, enough. We within the wealthy countries can’t eat two dinners directly (though some do try). Can we learn — can we teach ourselves — to scale back demand, not increase supply? Can we construct a theoretical economics that isn’t premised on an increasing number of growth, but on a gentle state; and on sharing justly?
EVEN now, all isn’t lost, if our rulers are smart enough, our societies are brave enough, and we ourselves are humble enough to vary. That means starting by giving thanks for — by loving, cherishing, caring for — our still-holy world, our spoiled Eden. The rest will follow. Even, like those lilies and the sparrows in Jesus’s example in St Matthew’s Gospel, we would trust that each one manner of thing shall be well, even though it isn’t for us to see how.
And the long run begins now, with each of us. Edmund Burke once remarked: “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little bit.” Those words are cut deep in lovely slate within the pavement in a ravishing garden near Cambridge. Over the years, I even have taken lots of my pupils to that garden.
Dr Charles Moseley is a Life Fellow of Hughes Hall, Cambridge.
