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.