#490 For me the only feast at all is Autumn’s Harvest Festival
Christmas and Easter may be feasts
For congregations and for priests,
And so may Whitsun. All the same,
They do not fill my meagre frame.
For me the only feast at all
Is Autumn’s Harvest Festival,
When I can satisfy my want
With ears of corn around the font.
It is a solitary life being a church mouse. Only one of my predecessors ever achieved fame, thanks to the pen of Sir John Betjeman and his Diary of a Church Mouse. Like that mouse of years gone by, I am always delighted when the Harvest Festival comes around, with its promise of bread to steal and apples to nibble. I believe it’s going to be a busy Sunday, with the Harvest Thanksgiving, an auction of fresh goods, and a massive harvest lunch to follow. Lots of chances for a mouse to fill himself up. If you see me sleeping in a pew in the afternoon, don’t wake me.
By the way, have you seen the picture of the leek people created at Woosehill Church’s harvest festival last week?
Fr Sam writes
I have spent the last six years living in central London in a second-floor flat with the Circle line rumbling underneath. While exciting in many ways, this did make gardening difficult. Over the last couple of months, I have been enjoying getting to grips with the Rectory garden, tidying, pruning, and, slowly, planting.
Getting soil on my hands has certainly changed how I feel about the Harvest Festival this year. I know my limits and, as I plant, I know that I am trusting forces beyond myself for the growth of my garden. If I get growth and life and beauty and fruit, that will be thanks to something much more powerful than me.
I can’t do it all. I can begin. I can help. But then I have to stop, and watch, and wait.
This Sunday
This Sunday at St Paul’s we celebrate our Harvest Thanksgiving, hearing of the thanksgiving of the people of Israel coming into their new home after long journeying through the wilderness in the book of Deuteronomy, and then of Jesus’s words “I am the bread of life” from the Gospel of John.
Eternal God, you crown the year with your goodness and you give us the fruits of the earth in their season.
Services this Sunday
8am BCP Mass St Paul’s (Fr Sam Tanna-Korn)
9.30am All-Together Mass St Paul’s (Fr Sam Tanna-Korn)
10am Morning Worship Woosehill Church (Revd Cara Smart)
11am Community Eucharist St Nicholas’s (Revd Judi Hattaway)
Harvest collection & auction
We have a tradition that our Harvest collection should be of fresh goods and produce rather than tinned goods. We will then auction off these goods over coffee after mass for our church charities (and then we collect tinned/dried goods for the foodbank in the spring).
So please bring fresh goods and produce to St Paul’s this Sunday!
Autumn Bazaar & Grand Draw
The St Paul’s Autumn Bazaar this year is on Saturday 8 November 12 noon to 3.00pm at the Parish Rooms. Save the date!
Grand Draw tickets are on sale now from Liz Gallagher or Teri Austin.
This week’s calendar: a mixed legacy
Next week’s calendar includes two very different men. On Monday the church commemorates William Tyndale, translator of the scriptures into English, who was executed for his Protestant beliefs in the Netherlands in 1536. Later in the week is the feast of St John Henry Newman, a pivotal figure in the Oxford Movement that brought the Catholic tradition back into the Church of England, who ultimately “swam the Tiber”, became a Roman Catholic, and ended his life as a cardinal.
These two men had very little in common and yet they are together part of our Church of England inheritance.
