LAMMAS DAY was nearing when I began to write this. The first combines were chewing their way through the winter barley, whose blond ears hung down in heavy ripeness. Soon, it would be the turn of the winter wheat.
Long ago, the first bread baked from the new grain was taken to the church in thanksgiving, and for blessing. Some say that the loaf thus blessed was quartered and placed at the corners of the barn to protect the sheaves that would 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 will be food for the coming winter, and the hungry spring that will follow.
Giving thanks for the new bread — literally a eucharist — was as natural as breathing . . . and simple 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 only prayer you said in your life was ‘Thank you,’ that would be enough.” That sense of dependence did no harm: its lack, I suggest, does quite a lot.
For we pampered and, frankly, greedy moderns easily forget how precarious our food supply was only a few generations ago. For many around the world, it still is. Unless we grow vegetables and fruit, as I have done all my life, we easily forget that things have seasons, and sometimes things fail. Of course you can have strawberries at Christmas, dear, just import them; but, not so long ago, (better) strawberries came from England’s rich soils only in early June — if you were lucky. The seasonality increased the pleasure.
My garden, after a difficult spring when the asparagus was late, is now rich in tomatoes, beans, leeks, potatoes, and celeriac. The branches of the apple trees are bending under the weight of what could be a fine year. Sometimes, in the evening cool, as the swifts (here, they leave on about 6 August) wheel overhead, and work is over, I sit with a glass of wine, lost in simple wonder at it all. And gratitude.
THREE things those forebears, whom many moderns dismiss (if they think of them at all) as so quaintly old-fashioned, ignorant, and stupid, can teach us: first, humility: recognising our own littleness, that we are not in control; second, that we are part of a cosmic web where everything affects everything else; third, that not to take things for granted is one way to wisdom. Surely it is one component in that complex word “fear” — awe, respect, a sense of one’s own littleness and powerlessness — of the Lord, which, Proverbs 9.10 says, is where wisdom begins.
But, properly, along with gratitude, comes a sense of the preciousness of the gift — however quotidian, even expected, it may be — for the Giver is in the gift. When someone whom we love gives us something, we value it partly because of them. Here again, our ancestors could teach us much; they hated waste — indeed, could not afford it — and would be appalled by the excess and waste that are normal in our culture: over-eating, discarded food, clothing worn just once. . .
We wasteful, greedy Westerners live, for now, in a fools’ paradise — but, were there major disruption to shipping lanes, people would be hungry in a week. No need to go into the folly of (for example) using irreplaceable fossil fuel to bring mangetouts from hungry Zimbabwe to be offered (and often not sold), ever so cheaply, on our supermarket shelves. Global trade, with its imbalances and inequities, may have served rich countries well, but whether it has served humanity as a whole, or the planet — our common home — equally well is another matter.
MOST of the medieval and later writers who have been my lifelong companions had a very clear sense of the holiness of the “natural world”. They also sensed the need for proper 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 field and tending what the Lord made to grow to ripe fullness from the dead seed in the earth.
One of the worst things that you could say of someone (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 everyone’s pigs, and you could expect to be brought to the judgement of your fellows; overfish your ponds, and 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 has to be a moral issue — a concept that current economic discourses seem unable to address.
IN SO many places in my reading I have encountered sheer wonder at the holiness of our world. Examples, just as they appear 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 normal summer landscape transfigured with glory into a theophany, a Laudate Deum.
I think of Wordsworth’s profound sense of Nature — full of splendour and glory — as a moral 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 too much with us, as Wordsworth said. We must learn to be content with less. Enough is — well, enough. We in the rich countries can’t eat two dinners at once (though some do try). Can we learn — can we teach ourselves — to reduce demand, not increase supply? Can we construct a theoretical economics that is not premised on more and more growth, but on a steady state; and on sharing justly?
EVEN now, all is not lost, if our rulers are wise enough, our societies are brave enough, and we ourselves are humble enough to change. That means beginning 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 might trust that all manner of thing shall be well, although it is not for us to see how.
And the future 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.” Those words are cut deep in lovely slate in the pavement in a beautiful garden near Cambridge. Over the years, I have taken many of my pupils to that garden.
Dr Charles Moseley is a Life Fellow of Hughes Hall, Cambridge.
charlesmoseley.com