Reverend Ann's Letter

September 2025

Autumn is now on its way and with it, of course, our Harvest Festivals.  The celebration of harvest is one of thanksgiving but also it is also important as a mark of continuity through time.

Harvest can be a powerful reminder of what, many have become disconnected from: our dependence on the natural world and cycles of planting, growth and gathering, with each stage involving its combinations of human endeavour, patience and dependence on conditions outside of our control. Theologically we’re reminded that nothing grows without the seed that falls into the earth and dies so that it might yield a rich harvest.

However, I’ve also come to recognise it as a festival that connects us with place and with all those who have gone before us in our particular communities.  All those who have worked and lived off the land for hundreds of years.

Thomas Merton said “It is essential to experience all the times and moods of one good place.”, and harvest can put us back in touch with the particularities of where we live, in all its times and moods; to come to know it as a place of encounter, of presence, of gift.

“The Lord is here” is a central conviction of Christian faith. The Incarnation is the truth of God known in one place and time so that God can also be known in each place and time. God continues to dwell amongst us – to ‘pitch a tent’ with us, to ‘tabernacle’ amongst us (John 1.14) Amongst the many rich associations of that word is a connection with the Jewish Harvest Festival of Tabernacles (sukkōt). The Jewish feast has a double focus – marking the ingathering of the harvest and God’s provision in the the fragility of exodus. The tabernacle (sukkah) refers to a small fragile structure that evokes both the temporary dwellings of farmers in the fields during harvest and the ‘tents’ in which the people lived on their long journey to the promised land.

During the festival of sukkōt faithful Jews build a temporary tabernacle and spend time in it as a vivid meditation on these twin themes, remembering that in fragility, both of journey and growth, we are called to deeper dependence on God. This harvest we might share their meditation, and give thanks for the place God has called us to be; and how God is known here in all its times and moods.

Go well.

Ann