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.

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Development

4 April 2023

5 min read

Don't patronise: what the R20 means for development

The R20 meeting at the G20 global summit sheds light on development. Christopher Wadibia makes the case for a change in perception.

Chris Wadibia

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development.

Swami Govinda Dev Giri Maharaj, Dr. Valeria Martano, and Archbishop Henry Ndukuba, are greeted by R20 founder Yahya Cholil Staquf.

G20religion.org

God is dead,' wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882, in an effort to argue that every European imagination, community, and enterprise developed by faith in the Christian God would inevitably degenerate relative to Europe's dwindling commitment to belief in the former. Nietzsche's argument preceded the once popular secularisation thesis. The view that societies would increasingly adopt non-religious values and institutions as they modernise influenced global development discourse in the 20th century following World War II.

However, in 2023, a year that marks more than 140 years since Nietzsche first popularised the atheistical three-word phrase ‘God is dead’, anyone familiar with the mechanics and forces driving the modern global development project would point out that faith-aligned actors play a pivotal, and even in some cases, unrivalled role. These actors promote growth, progress, and development globally, especially in the Global South.

Albeit, Nietzsche once argued that Europe's declining belief in the Christian God signaled God's death, the fact that at least 85% of the world's over eight billion people claim some form of faith. Couple that with the reality that faith actors deliver the majority of local development services in many regions across the globe, and the suggestions is that God has risen from the grave and traded European burial clothes for globalised vocational attire. Far from being dead, God is alive and more engaged in developing the earth than ever before.

Aside from state and private-sector investment, since the second half of the 20th century, the faith sector, comprised of thousands of actors, has become increasingly responsible for developing the modern world. A recent study on faith-aligned impact investment, completed by researchers at Oxford University's Said Business School, showed that four of the world's most influential religious groups (Christianity, Islam, Dharmic, and Judaism) collectively hold at least $5 trillion in net assets. The study linked this $5 trillion in assets to faith-aligned investment in addressing social and climate-oriented challenges globally.

The study, which analysed over 360 distinctive organisations, attributed over $260 billion to Christian-aligned capital. Given the difficulty of securing accurate data on the total assets and capital held by the world's many thousands of churches and Christian organisations, it should be acknowledged that this estimate sits far below the real net assets in Christendom that have been invested into global development. However, a key takeaway from this study is that Christian-aligned capital remains a game-changing force in the global development sector. After all, those organisations serve the approximately 2.4bn Christians alive today.

'The R20's mission was grand but straightforward: fill the gap in world leadership that stresses politics and economics rather than faith and spirituality.'

In November 2022, two weeks before the G20 summit in Bali which brought together the leaders of the 20 countries with the world's biggest economies, another gathering took place in Indonesia that attracted less publicity. For the first time ever, the R20 (the G20 Religious Forum) united leaders from the major religions of the G20 countries whose heads of state would flock to Bali a few weeks later. The R20's mission was grand but straightforward: fill the gap in world leadership that stresses politics and economics rather than faith and spirituality as resources to provide solutions to pressing global challenges.

One of the R20's more high profile speakers was Archbishop Henry Ndukuba, who currently serves as Anglican Primate for the Church of Nigeria. In his speech, Ndukuba cited the violent persecution of Christians and liberal Muslims in the majority Muslim region of Northern Nigeria. The R20's goal of elevating faith and spirituality in the hierarchy of resources that can be enlisted to engage with global issues should be viewed as noble. However, in practice, the concept of the world's major faith communities petitioning global peace and development stakeholders to be recognised as legitimate contributors to the sacred project of redeeming the brokenness of the world reeks of obsequious servility.

Moreover, this unequal power relation fatefully overlooks the substantial contributions to peace and development made every day across the world by faith actors. Many of the world's major faith traditions share the vision of developing the world into a place devoid of disease, poverty, and suffering. The global faith and spirituality sector is truly not without its imperfections, but for centuries this multi-faith comity has invested immense resources into making earth look more like heaven. It does so by leveraging faith as a conduit to gather assets that aid in the deeply holy process of chiseling away at the degenerative evils and satanic forces plaguing the world until all that remains is the latter's Edenic base.

The time has come for the world's faith actors to stop begging secular state actors to recognise them as stakeholders committed to promoting global peace and development. Getting on with the heavenly work of building God's cosmos, in anticipation of the New Creation, requires faith that God will provide the right people, ideas, and resources and that secular state actors should be viewed as partners instead of patrons in this divine enterprise.

'The work we do in the present, then, gains its full significance from the eventual design in which it is meant to belong.'

N.T. Wright

Secular state actors should better understand what is driving those faith actors and the desire to balance the partnership. In his influential book Surprised by Hope, NT Wright argues that continuities will exist between Christian work completed in service to God in the present age and the eternal life that God's people will enjoy in the New Creation. Wright reasons,

'The work we do in the present, then, gains its full significance from the eventual design in which it is meant to belong. Applied to the mission of the church, this means that we must work in the present for the advance signs of that eventual state of affairs when God is ‘all in all’, when his kingdom has come and his will is done ‘on earth as in heaven’.'

Every day a faith actor funds a school, hospital, or social development project somewhere in the world. They see these projects function in God's ongoing programme of redeeming the world by means of the intellects and imaginations of themselves and those who benefit. In their eyes, all are made in God's own image. In a world where they see sin's footprints manifest by way of suffering, violence, and destruction, every actor inspired by the faith in their heart to challenge the existence of the former should recognise that the impulse to build a better world is a nudge from heaven foreshadowing the New Eden to come.