Giving Thanks

Yesterday we kept our Harvest Festival, as we usually do on the first Sunday after the Easter Octave. Here in Dunedin it has a rather different feel to it than it did twenty-five years ago in my previous parish in Wallasey, on the other side of the Mersey from Liverpool, where I had the uneasy feeling that the occasional pentangle or pointed hat would not have seemed out of place. I was always a little taken aback by the rather tribal, indeed totemic, aspects of the observance there. People whom I had never seen before, either in or out of the pews, made their annual appearance at Evensong before mysteriously disappearing for another year.

At All Saints Margaret Street, on the other hand, Harvest Festival was entirely forbidden as some kind of nonconformist rite appropriate to Congregationalists or Methodists - although I always thought that (to those not familiar with it) Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament must have looked a little bit like the New Testament equivalent of the Wave Offering.

Here in New Zealand, however, Harvest Festival seems to be little more than an edible form of ecclesiastical interior decoration.

However, I note that in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer (and perhaps elsewhere as well) Harvest Festival is called Thanksgiving for Harvest, and this strikes me as a very important difference. After all, the very centre of Christian observance in every season, autumnal or not, is the Eucharist, a name which itself speaks of thanksgiving before all else.

So what is the principal focus of our worship? Surely it must be thanksgiving, thanksgiving for our creation, our redemption, the beauty of the world, the joys of love and friendship, knowledge, discovery, and a limitless host of blessings which come to us from the hands of our Creator. And then of course, there is the staggering hope, indeed the expectation, of overwhelming, unending bliss. I rather think that a mere hour or so once a week is not too much time spent in returning thanks together for what has been granted to us in time and eternity.

But, with all the talk of evangelism, does the general population think the Church has much to do with joyful thanksgiving to a God worth thanking? Do we ourselves? Meister Eckhart said that if the only prayer you ever said was Thankyou, it would be enough. Perhaps we should ask ourselves what he meant.

Light from further East

Monday was the feast of St Isaac the Syrian, sometimes called Isaac of Nineveh because he was briefly bishop of that city in the sixth century before going off into the mountains of what is now Iraq to be a hermit and to become, according to Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, "one of the most widely read spiritual writers on Mount Athos. His name is known to every monk in Russia and he is venerated as a saint in the Russian Church. [And] we have seen ordinary believers, neither monks nor theologians, who know entire passages of Isaac by heart and are able to quote long passages from his discourses."

"[...] Word of St Isaac has crossed not only time but also confessional barriers. As early as the ninth century he was read by the Byzantine and Syrian Orthodox Churches, as well as by [Isaac's own] Church of the East; each group produced its own recension of his writings. In the fifteenth century Isaac broke into the Roman Catholic world while remaining at the same time one of the most popular ascetical writers of the Eastern Orthodox Church. In our day his writings continue to draw the attention of Christians who belong to various traditions but share a common faith in Jesus and are engaged in the quest for salvation. During one scholarly conference, after I had delivered a paper on the practice of prayer in St Isaac, three people came up to me, one after another: a cistercian nun, a protestant layman, and a buddhist monk. All three were wondering how much of Isaac's teaching of prayer, which I had expounded, was consonant with their own tradition. Then a franciscan friar informed me of the existence of St Isaac of Nineveh's retreat house in New Zealand: the house is run by both Catholics and Anglicans."

Not bad, I think, for an obscure mountain solitary who belonged to a church (often now called the Assyrian Church) which has been out of communion with with everyone else since the fifth century - and usually derided as heretical as well. St Isaac's writings are important because they are clearly based on his (and his tradition's) actual experience of God, and not just on academic speculation. Helpful though the latter can often be, it's the music the matters, not the score.