From the Parish Priest

You can tell that summer is almost over! Children have gone back to school, the smell of barbecues seems to have vanished and evenings are spent instead looking at holiday videos. Another yearly marker that autumn is approaching is when people talk about Harvest and begin to make plans for this year's thanksgiving.

At St. George's Church, our Harvest Thanksgiving is on October 16th, with a Barn Dance held the previous evening. Unlike most Church celebrations, which date back hundreds of years if not to the time of Christ himself, Harvest is really a very recent addition to the calendar. It doesn't appear in the Book of Common Prayer simply because it wasn't introduced until the mid 1800s {\153} 20 years after that book was published. Prior to that time August 1st, Lammas Day, was kept as a thanksgiving for the fruits of the earth, but at Morwenstow in Cornwall an autumn Harvest was held from 1843 at a time when the harvest was being gathered in. This gave birth to our modern celebrations for the Harvest, although it's interesting to see that the cutting of the corn is getting earlier and earlier, so maybe August is actually the most appropriate time to keep the Thanksgiving.

In the Parish of Waterlooville, with little or no traditional farming, it's important to see Harvest as rather more than fields of golden corn and super large marrows. Everything we have comes from God, the creator, and Harvest is a good time to give him thanks for all his gifts to us. We may well get these "gifts" from Asda, McDonalds or Matalan, but it is from God that they originally come. Our thanks is to him, and to the people around the world who help to re-create these gifts to form the food and the goods we buy. Maybe part of our Harvest Thanksgiving 2005 is to ensure that when we buy things, we choose to support those shops and those producers which pay their workers a fair and living wage. Don't forget {\153} look out for the Fair Trade label!

Fr. Mike Sheffield