What’s the point of celebrating the harvest?

We reap what we sow: a once young man’s guide.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A soot stained burnt-out harvester sits in a recently harvested field.

A burnt-out harvester, Lonesome Farm, Oxfordshire.

Nick Jones.

I plan next week to visit a small nursery school, called Young Haymakers, for their Harvest celebration where toddlers to five-year-olds will sing songs about tractor wheels going round and round, with vigorous manual actions as they shake, shake, shake the apple tree.

We’ll have a Harvest snack at tiny tables, a prayer and then they’ll give me the Harvest gifts from their families for those who may be hungry.

It is, of course, a delight, one of the happiest duties of a parish priest and I’ll miss it terribly as I hand it over to a new Rector. But, while I take nothing away from the sheer joy of thanksgiving of these children for the fruits (and vegetables) of this harvest and for those who farm them, I can’t help but wonder what Harvest, as a festival, really means for grown-ups.

The metaphor has been just too rich to avoid this season. We reap what we sow – and we witness that from Ukraine to Gaza and Lebanon, from Sudan to a United States that teeters on the brink of self-destruction as the world’s beacon of democratic values.

One might add to this sorry list the longer-term grim gathering-in from the world’s reliance on fossil fuels, a failed harvest of biblical-scale abomination as we destroy our planet’s natural capacity to host us. Truly, we have sown a wind and, in so many areas of human endeavour, we look like we reap a whirlwind (literally, in the case of weather crises such as Hurricane Milton).

There are prophetic voices that cry out in our human wilderness, from those who foresee the demise of the US at the hands of a shallow nationalism to those few on the political stage who predict an all-out war in the Middle East as the only possible conclusion to the escalation of revenge attacks between Israel and its neighbours.

The ancients saw famine and failed harvests as judgments for their sin, their divergence from the divine will. It’s unlikely that our world is going to accept such culpability any time soon. To do so would require a humility that we have lost, along with losing our religion.

We need to be careful of ascribing too much of a prophetic voice to Young. This was, after all, a fairly bombed-out singer-songwriter of the start of the Boomer generation.

Setting aside the reaping of whirlwinds from millennia ago, I’m going to invoke a popular folk song from a little over half a century ago. I do so because, in 1972, we lived in a more innocent world, before we knew how industrialisation could destroy our human species and when a western hegemony in democracy was taken for granted. Little did we know the precipice on which we were perched.

The song is by the folk-rock colossus Neil Young and is called, appropriately enough, Harvest. It is, lyrically, one of his more obscure works and to listen to it now is to struggle to get past a strangulated hippy voice that verges on self-parody.

But it repays the effort. Young’s lyrics are infused with religious reference and imagery, but no claim should be made for his affirmation of the Christian faith. Nonetheless, we’re entitled to view art through the prism of what informs us and, as such, Harvest yields its fruits. Young may well be singing about his lover, but it’s in love that all truth is explored.

Listen to it. Young’s Harvest opens with the lines “Did I see you down in a young girl’s town/ with your mother in so much pain?” Through a scriptural lens, this sounds like the pain of incarnation, the sharing of Mother Mary’s agony in visceral human experience.

It continues: “Will I see you give more than I can take”; for the confessing faithful, we’re at the foot of the cross here. “Will I only harvest some?”; we can, all of us, only harvest a little of the mystery of that event. “As the days fly past, will we lose our grasp?”; of course we will – time is finite. “Or fuse it in the sun?”; an uncanny pre-echo of climate change worthy of Nostradamus.

We need to be careful of ascribing too much of a prophetic voice to Young. This was, after all, a fairly bombed-out singer-songwriter of the start of the Boomer generation. But it’s also true that we should be careful of where we look for prophetic voices.

For Young, the Harvest is indeed a cruel and painful event, which we can only understand in part. We do indeed reap what we sow, but there may be purpose to be found in that. And the Harvest is indeed bitter, but in it we may glimpse a plan: “Dream up, dream up, let me fill your cup/ With the promise of a man”.

Or, okay, it’s just a song, harvesting a good deal of cash for its writer and singer. I’m no big fan of Young. But it might just have told me more about the Harvest than singing All Things Bright and Beautiful.

Review

Belief

Books

Culture

Music

11 December 2024

1 min read

Belle and Sebastian's suffering singer on the struggle and the hope

On the edge of ‘Nobody's Empire’: something good will come.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A singer, wearing a hat, pulls his head back holding a note, and a mic.

Stuart Murdoch performs, St. Paul, Minnesota, 2024.

Andy Witchger, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Nobody's Empire: A Novel is the fictionalised account of how Stuart Murdoch, lead singer of indie band Belle and Sebastian, transfigured his experience of Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME) through faith and music.

The book has two Belle and Sebastian songs as its keystones. The first, ‘Nobody's Empire’, gives the book its title and is a description of how it feels to have ME:

‘I clung to the bed and I clung to the past

I clung to the welcome darkness

But at the end of the night there's a green green light

It's the quiet before the madness’

Murdoch has been living with ME since the 1980s and is an outspoken advocate for those who have the condition. His experience, as described in ‘Nobody’s Empire’, has been that ‘We are out of practice, we're out of sight / On the edge of nobody's empire’. That is also the experience of Stephen, the central character in Nobody’s Empire, a music loving romantic in Glasgow in the early 1990s who has just emerged from a lengthy hospital stay having been robbed by ME of any prospects of work, a social life or independent living. In Glasgow, he meets fellow ME strugglers who form their own support group and try to get by in life as cheaply and as painlessly as possible.

As the story progresses, he finds he has the ability to write songs and wakes to the possibility of a spiritual life beyond the everyday. Later, he leaves Glasgow with his friend Richard in search of a cure in the mythic warmth of California. Because Murdoch is fictionalising his own experience, Nobody’s Empire offers its readers compelling insights into the experience of ME, particularly the experience of having the condition in the early days when it was little understood. He writes, too, with an engaging ingenuous and childlike curiosity about life and his own experiences.

Nobody’s Empire adds to the conversation about what faith means to rock’s stars.

The second song ‘Ever Had a Little Faith?’ is included towards the end of the novel as one of the early songs written by Stephen. This song, in which the line ‘Something good will come from nothing’ is repeated, is actually an early Belle and Sebastian song that was only recorded for a later album Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance. It is a song that was inspired by a sermon preached by Rev John Christie, Minister at Hyndland Parish Church in Glasgow, the church Murdoch attends. He has said of the song: "The sentiment was based on a sermon that our then minister, John Christie, preached about simply getting through a dark night, and the hope of morning."

This Easter morning sense that good will come from the nothingness of being on the edge of nobody’s empire is an experience of transfiguration. Revd Sam Wells, Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields has preached perceptively on prayer in terms of incarnation, resurrection, and transfiguration. The prayer of incarnation is a prayer for God to be with us in our difficult circumstances. The prayer of resurrection is a prayer for God to change and fix our difficult circumstances. Then, in response to a possible situation of need, Wells says of a prayer of transfiguration:

“God in your son’s transfiguration we see a whole new reality within, beneath and beyond what we thought we understood. In their times of bewilderment and confusion show my friend and her father that they may find a deeper truth to their life than they ever knew, make firmer friends than they ever had, find reasons for living beyond what they ever imagined and be folded into your grace like never before. Peel back the beauty and strength of their true humanity, transform and transfigure from this chaos and pain something new, something good, something of life.”

This is where Stephen’s story and Murdoch’s experience takes us as there is no fix for ME, as for many other health conditions or disabilities, and Stephen/Murdoch ultimately has no desire to be fixed, as ME becomes an important part of identity for them. Instead, Nobody’s Empire takes us up the mountain through Stephen and Richard’s California experiences, as was the case for Jesus and his disciples at the Transfiguration, so we can see beyond and come to know a deeper reality. As Wells puts it, the prayer of transfiguration is to “Make this trial and tragedy, this problem and pain a glimpse of your glory, a window into your world, where I can see your face, sense the mystery in all things, and walk with angels and saints.”

Faith has featured compellingly in a significant number of relatively recent books by rock stars including, among others, Surrender by U2’s Bono, Walking Back Home by Deacon Blue’s Ricky Ross, and Faith, Hope, and Carnage, the record of conversations by Nick Cave and the journalist Sean O'Hagan. Murdoch’s Nobody’s Empire adds to the conversation about what faith means to rock’s stars and how that is expressed through their music but offers an alternative take both as fiction and as a story in which faith and music combine to transfigure life and ME in ways that enable good to come from nothing:

“Do you spend your day?

Second guessing faith

Looking for a way

To live so divine

Drop your sad pretence

You'll be doing fine

You will flourish like a rose in June

You will flourish like a rose in June

Ever had a little faith?

Ever had a little faith?”