“What is Art?”

Amidst the mistral winds of June, 1888, Vincent van Gogh painted his Harvest (Wheat Fields) series of ten paintings which provided him opportunity to experiment with color and technique. He worked quickly, “just like the harvester, …intent only on the reaping,” and blended striking hues of gold, copper, and bronze with yellow, red, and brown. The lush expressionistic masterpiece Wheat Field with a Reaper he painted in July 1889, gleams with a swirling sea of grain in impastoed layers of yellow-orange with white highlights seen in many of his Saint-Rémy paintings. A benevolent sun stands against a sky of aquamarine and seems to shine from the canvas uninterrupted by shadow or shade. The view is from the upper story of the building where van Gogh had sought recovery and shows the field’s gray-white boundary wall without any sense of confinement.

Van Gogh, Wheat Field with a Reaper (1888), Van Gogh Museum

Van Gogh wrote of its “vague figure toiling away… in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold,” as a modernist expression of “sacred realism” with calm, religious hope in the face of death and his own demise. Association of grain with life suggested humanity’s vulnerability and resiliency in passionate reds and golds composed in balanced synthesis with the greenery and browns of verdant earth. These colors he complemented by mysterious orange and blue tones of the cosmos—a palette strikingly similar to his The Resurrection of Lazarus (1890). In spite of grain’s susceptibility to ruin from fire and wind, or harvest with scythe and sickle, the fields serenely endured as tangible evidence of incomparable beauty, fecundity, and energy of the divine order. The death reaper fulfilled the sower’s purpose in the grand mysterious cycle of life.

Tolstoy’s exposition on aesthetics in What is Art? (1897) embraces a wide range of creative expression from painting and sculpture to literature, folklore, and liturgy. He characterizes their highest forms as conveyance of their makers’ regard for human dignity and the natural world in ways that astonish, mystify, and benefit the common good. That Tolstoy points to Millet, Lhermitte, Gogol, and Pushkin as aesthetic exemplars is significant for their use of agrarian themes to present such universal values. Great painting and writing engender struggle and beauty by depicting meaningful ideas or memorable associations with people and places. Such understanding is at risk in contemporary society at once smart and ignorant. Information technologies can be exploited to distraction for endless browsing and displace contemplation of relationships to the earth and to others.

The characters who inhabit Tolstoy’s stories have heroic capacity, even when cast as loners and losers. They walk familiar paths to work together in the fields and better understand the people and world around them. Among the most stirring moments in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is when landlord Konstantin Levin, who sought the full life of mind, love, and labor, joins a scythe-wielding brigade in an afternoon of great satisfaction: “He… wished for nothing, but not to be left behind the peasants, and to do his work as well as possible.” In a day of tension over progressive approaches to a more sustainable future, considerations of Ruth and Boaz, Barbizon harvesters, and Port William farmers continue to offer meaningful interpretations of land use, technology, and the human prospect.

     Praise God for the harvest of farm and field,

     Praise God for the people who gather their yield,

     The long hours of labor, the skills of the team,

     The patience of science, the power of machine.

     Praise God for the harvest of conflict and love,

     For leaders and people to struggle to serve,

     To conquer oppression, earth’s plenty increase,

     And gather God’s harvest of justice and peace.

—Brian Wren, “Praise God for the Harvest” (1968)

Mediation of Ancient Urges

Contemporary agrarian art and literature offer insightful if complex perspectives on the transformation of such rural landscapes and ways of life. Stories and paintings are elegiac and abstract as well as hopeful, with expressions of agrarian renewal evident in newfound appreciation for regional heritage and stewardship of the land. These considerations juxtapose values related to the natural world with those of private development and global capitalism. There is little to regret about archaic rural prejudices, grinding aspects of exhaustive dawn to dusk farm labor, and highly erosive tillage practices. Small town redevelopment efforts are leading  to examine in new ways how local stories and resources might be shared to better contend with shifting labor patterns and demographic change. Harvest bees and church benefits still aid neighbors in times of special need. More broadly, the harvest experience abides with seasonal urgency because of its changeless and necessary provision. The instinct unites humanity worldwide through rituals of planting and harvesting and thanksgiving.

Cultural tensions rise in the wake of climate change, global food security needs, and concern about impacts on soil biomes and wildlife. Establishing balance involves mediation of the ancient urges for veneration and exploitation, and the serious critique of technocratic limits in agricultural improvement. Wendell Berry’s writing offers a fertile field of practical recommendations for how persons living anywhere can apply the useful habits of memory, attention, and reverance to promote the good life. Wendell Berry recognizes the primacy of earth care to support all other human endeavors, and likens this to holy service: “The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it…. It keeps the past, not as history or memory, but as richness, new possibility.”

Earl Roberge, Stalks of Wheat (c. 1960), Franklin County Museum; Pasco, Washington

Whether on a Midwest farm or in a Chicago high-rise, one can live with fidelity to place by learning and practicing the home arts and community building. Family care and homemaking need not require moving “back to the land.” In any setting folks can summon moral courage to eat together, shop locally to support practicioners of local crafts, connect young people to worthwhile endeavors, and affirm the values of environmental stewarship. Policies and practice of self-reliance and promotion of the common good that characterized republicanism in the ancient world are relevant more than ever in an era of threatened landscapes, endangered species, and marginalized labor. Environmental ethicist Julie Crouse characterizes Berry’s ongoing literary conversation about these matters as a “sacred harvest” for renewing the common good by promotion of connections among people, landscapes, and spirituality. In the context of farm work for participation in the market economy, or mental work for healthy imagination and discernment, Berry calls the external standard of such endeavors the “Great Economy,” or the “Kingdom of God.” The goal is to promote abiding, abundant harvests and the long term wellbeing of individuals in community.

Berry has explored these ideas most fully in his novels and short stories about the Coulter, Catlett, Branch, and other families. They dwell together in imaginary Port William, for which the author’s native Port Royal, Kentucky, serves as a touchstone. The place is not a utopian metaphor as its residents navigate with failure and success through cross-currents of old ways and modernity’s encroachments and benefits. In “That Distant Land” (1965), a rural neighborhood crew gathers for tobacco harvest in the sweltering August heat, and Berry casts a scene that resembles field laborers of ancient times: “They drove into the work, maintaining the same pressing rhythm from one end of the row to the other, and yet they worked well, as smoothly and precisely as dancers. To see them moving side by side against the standing crop, leaving it fallen, the field changed, behind them, was maybe like watching Homeric soldiers going into battle. It was momentous and beautiful, and touchingly, touchingly mortal.” The classical allusion is not incidental. In “The Agrarian Standard” (2002), Berry invokes lines from Virgil’s Fourth Georgic about “an old Cilician” who cares for a small plot of land that produces abundantly because of an ethic “rooted in mystery and sanctity” that values giving back to the health of the soil—an affectionate agarian stewardship for the sake of present and unborn generations.

Mentalities of moderation foster individual identity as well as social cohesion to sustain both culture and soil. In his foreword to Of the Land and the Spirit (2008), an anthology of Walter, Lord Northbourne’s writings on ecology and religion, Berry (like Lord Northbourne) points to perennialist matters of ultimate purpose as expressed by Jesus to, “[S]eek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness...,” in order to be provided food, drink, and clothing. Berry suggests that mastery of agriculture, husbandry, weaving, and other skills are assumed in this context, and that Jesus demonstrated faith by prayerful service to others in feeding and healing them. In these ways, literary, artistic, social, and vocational endeavors in any age represent harvests in which anyone can participate.

Johann Raphael Wehle, And They Followed Him (detail, 1900), Lithograph on cardboard, 4 x 6 inches, Columbia Heritage Collection

Poetry and Pictures — Author Howard Nemerov and Photographer John Clement

Themes of change upon the landscape mixed with agrarian wonder characterized many poems by Pulitzer Prize winning author Howard Nemerov (1920-1991). Although the New York native spent much of his life in academia, he traveled widely through the New England countryside and with publication of his 1955 collection The Salt Garden, Nemerov’s refined, contemplative verse took on more practical tones in defense of the land. Poems like “Midsummer’s Day” and “The Winter Lightning” reflect upon the timelessness of the seasons and consider a consilience with humanity’s ephemeral presence. In “A Harvest Home” an abandoned vehicle stands in a recently harvested field (“So hot and mute the human will / As though the angry wheel stood still / That hub and spoke and iron rim”), while marvelous creatures of the wing appear throughout the day—jays “proclaim” dawn, afternoon crows “arise and shake their heavy wings,” and an owl “complains in darkness.”

John Clement, Bringing in the Sheaves (2005), John Clement Gallery

Color images of “Northwest Drylands” photographer John Clement like May Grain Abound, Wheat Moon, and Bringing in the Sheaves show the influence of two prominent American watercolor artists whose works he has closely studied since starting his career in the 1970s—Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth. Although the substantial portion of Homer’s paintings depict realistic Eastern landscapes and ocean scenes, Impressionistic views like Schooner at Sunset captured Clement’s imagination just as they inspired a generation of modern American artists like Wyeth and his father, Nathaniel. Clement studied the watercolors of the younger Wyeth and learned that the drier Pennsylvania prairie and underlying abstractions in paintings like Christina’s World held lessons in originality for photography of the arid Columbia Plateau grainlands.  Clement’s unpeopled landscapes, which earned him induction into the Professional Photographers of America International Hall of Fame, typically feature evidence of humanity’s presence—barns and fences, retired farm machinery, and fields of maturing grain. His ideas about the “saturating luminosity” of dawn and dusk suggest affinity with the nineteenth century American Luminists and pioneers of twentieth century color photography whose detailed agrarian views beneath soft, hazy skies engender feelings of tranquility and spiritual appreciation.

Sacred Harvests

British folklorist George Ewart Evans remained sanguine about contemporary small farmer and rural community prospects. But he recognized the possibilities of new cooperative relationships by which growers could pool resources to buy machinery and share storage and marketing facilities. He characterized these arrangements as “a return on a higher level to the structure of the Middle Ages.” The situation was not unprecedented in Evans’s view, as he cited the introduction of the heavy Saxon carruca plow to Britain in early medieval times and the enclosure movement as changes that necessitated innovative cooperative practices. The “break” in appreciation of the old ways of labor, thrift, and economy, Evans wrote in the 1960s, “has chiefly been in the oral tradition: a farm-worker of the old school, a horseman for instance, had latterly no apprentice to take up his lore; and the young—the true bearers of the tradition—have in this respect been receiving a speedily diminishing heritage. It is not so much that they are not interested…; they have now so few points of reference against which to measure it.”

Mutual dependency among neighbors and community members was more than virtue. It was necessity when harvest-time was essential endeavor and ritual for all able-bodied persons including field laborers, cooks, and craftsmen. The rise of mechanization that has reduced exhausting manual labor and technologies to facilitate communication and transportation will not abide nostalgic appeals to preserve the old ways. Evans characterizes such doomed efforts as “misguided romanticism” that is impossible in practical application and ignorant of the abiding dynamics of rural life through the ages. Aspects of social cohesiveness evident in harvest operations of former days have also diminished an isolated parochialism that limits wider multicultural understandings as well as individual opportunity in life. Moreover, a host of political and environmental conditions that threaten the wellbeing of farmers and rural communities cannot be understood apart from participation in global solutions.

Needlepoint Grain and Grapes Altar Kneeler, National Cathedral, Washington, D. C. (2019), Columbia Heritage Collection Photograph

Public awareness of land stewardship takes on special significance in a day when an unprecedented surge of industrial and technological change has led to some 15% of American farms producing nearly 80% of the nation’s food supply. At the same time science writers contribute to a new genre of environmental despair in the wake of global warming and population growth with troubling titles like The End of Plenty, Red Sky at Morning, Countdown, and Death and the Afterlife. (The phenomenon started with publication of The End of Nature in 1989 by mild mannered Methodist Bill McKibben, who now warns in Falter [2019] of significant disruption to world crop production and decrease in grain protein levels due to climate change.) The United Nations reports that world grain yields have flatlined since 2000, and that nearly one billion developing world inhabitants are at risk of chronic malnourishment after decades of decline. Medieval era population peaked at approximately 300 million inhabitants but rose to a billion by about 1800, doubled to two billion in 1927, and reached three billion in 1960. Demographers predict this exponential growth rate will result in ten billion by 2040 and bring attendant challenges for food resources, species diversity, and stewardship of the soil.

Titles and shapes in the surreal agrarian artwork of contemporary Canadian artist Jo-Anne Elniski reflects these concerns. The Last Harvest depicts a fulminating sky in vivid swirls of yellow, purple, and white that rain down upon rows of grain that wave in the same garish colors. Other works by Elniski like Field of Gold and Prairie Harvest appear as flaming fields of abundance that rise to confront brightly lit horizons of pink, orange, and yellow. The depictions are awesome if unsettling. Yet concerns expressed through art and literature also present opportunities for intervention and progressive change.

Thresholds and Theology

Lewiston, Idaho artist W. Craig Whitcomb has painted rural scenes for a half-century in watercolor and acrylic with subject matter ranging from isolated Northwest grain elevators to English thatched cottages and Japanese landscapes. His Amber Waves (2008), finalist for the first annual “H’Art of the Palouse” Banner Competition, shows an immense abandoned grain elevator in vivid rusty reds and blues rising from a field of ripe grain. Vibrant watercolors of grain and legume fields scenes by Palouse Country artists Jacqueline Daisley, who lives on a farm near Pullman, Washington, and Andy Sewell of Viola, Idaho, have appeared on the posters of the Pullman-based National Lentil Festival.

Andy Sewell, National Lentil Festival Poster (2008), Columbia Heritage Collection

Works by Seattle’s Roger Feldman, winner of the 2005 Prescott Award in Sculpture, reflects his study of theology and art education. Raised in the Palouse Hills, Feldman has created large site-specific sculptures in the United States, Canada, and Europe. He meticulously plans each installation by visiting the location to “dream about the possibilities” before rendering a small 3-D scale maquette from mat board before fashioning a larger, more refined model from wood. For Threshold (2013) at Laity Lodge, an ecumenical retreat along the Frio River in Texas’s Hill Country, Feldman conceived of three interconnected chiseled limestone monoliths including a 15-foot tall tower to represent the three-in-one concept of the Trinity. The work’s title is derived from Hebrew words used in the Old Testament (saph, miptān), a raised beam at the edge of a threshing floor, to signify the boundary between the outside world and sacred space for contemplation and worship.

Roger Feldman, Threshold (Laity Lodge near Leakey, Texas, 2013), Courtesy of the Artist

Tradition and innovation have presented cultural tensions since the dawn of civilization, and responsible appropriation of lifeways from each contributes to humanity’s wellbeing. Like Van Gogh paintings of gleaners and reapers with factory smokestacks on the horizon, great agrarian art and literature contribute to better understandings of tensions that involve emotion and reason, and local and universal values. Among other recent developments in grain production, the advent of minimal tillage operations using specialized power equipment has greatly reduced soil erosion on American farms while increasing yields.

The emerging New Agrarianism of the twenty-first century moves beyond nostalgic romanticism to moderate use of industrial energy within the context of natural systems for soil fertility. Wise approaches to innovation respect stewardship of land and the long term wellbeing of others. Duke Divinity School environmental theologian Norman Wirzba writes of a New Agrarian ethic that honors modern science as well as ancient religious appreciation for the transformative mystery of soil, water, and grain for human sustenance. Implicit acknowledgement is also made of fair compensation for farmers and other workers. “How we make bread, how we share and distribute it, are of profound moral and spiritual significance,” he writes in Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating. “[E]very loaf presupposes decisions that have been made about how to configure the social and ecological relationships that make bread possible.”

Tim Dearborn of Fuller Theological Seminary and author of Taste & See: Awakening our Spiritual Senses (1996) tells of Jesus’ reference to bread in the context of material well-being and spiritual strength. During his temptation in the Wilderness (Luke 4:4), Jesus quotes the familiar Old Testament passage, “[M]an does not live by bread alone” (Deuteronomy 8:3), which recognizes legitimate needs for “daily bread” physical sustenance (Matthew 6:11) provided through divine provision and sacrifice. Sharing food and faith goes hand in hand with prayer (“grace”) and communion with family and friends for the vital, sinuous experience of daily feasting. In this way, meals can transform mundane consumption into enriching spiritual experience that honors grains, greens, and other foods, but recognizes their material essence, cultivation, harvest, and preparation as rooted in meaningful service. The tragedy of religious piety is not materialism Dearborn writes, “but that in a particular way we are not materialistic enough.” By dividing aspects of human existence into sacred and secular realms, one can also render possessions, physical needs, and the land into domains separate from their divine source and protection.

Frustrations with farm equipment repair and long hours of solitary fieldwork may appear scarcely related to religious faith. But farmers and other members of St. Macrina’s Episcopal Church near San Francisco regularly meet to share the challenges of twenty-first century farming with area millers, bakers, brewers, and consumers. All contribute perspectives on grain as a “community crop” and how each group can participate in consequential efforts to strengthen cultural ties and serve as stewards of the land. In 2015, St. Macrina co-founder and Agricultural Chaplain Elizabeth DeRuff established The Bishop’s Ranch Field on Russian River Valley church property near Healdsburg, California. Young and old gather there throughout the year to plant, till, and harvest heritage grain that is milled for communion bread and distributed throughout the diocese. “We want to see local farmers succeed and be part of local communities,” explains Rev. DeRuff, “and to learn with them about ‘belonging’ as well as ‘having.’”

Although based in Baltimore, landscape artist Katherine Nelson has regularly traveled cross-country since 2001 to the Palouse’s undulating grainlands. Her fluid charcoals and dye sublimates capture the summertime chiaroscuro of swirling slopes, saddles, and swales laden with wheat, barley, and legumes. Nelson has also contributed to Oregon State University’s Art About Agriculture program and to Glen Echo, Maryland’s Yellow Barn Gallery exhibitions. She traces threads of her fascination with the region to her diplomat father’s interest in Turkish rugs: “I remember their luxuriant textures and shapes which influenced my affection for rolling landscapes. The Palouse is a tapestry of woven connections among seasons, fields, and people. The effect is thoroughly spiritual and provides a place of reflection, solace, and beauty that overcomes the noise of the outside world.” To emphasize the rhythmic effects of light for line and shadow, Nelson works entirely in black-and-white which evokes heightened awareness of layering, texture, and movement. “My ‘Portraits of the Palouse,’” she explains, “are metaphors for the human prospect. ‘Harvests’ to me are exhibitions that depict the land as hallowed space through views of heritage farm architecture and landscape vistas. Implicit rural values relate to the natural environment, hard work, and community, and are relevant anywhere.”

Katherine Nelson, Ideas About Infinity (detail, Grainfields from Steptoe Butte, 2018), Charcoal and dye sublimate on opaque and sheer fabric, 3 x 9 feet, Collection of the Artist

Crace, Berry, and Progress in Modern Times

Jim Crace’s 2013 dystopian novel, Harvest, transports readers to a sixteenth century English village to experience a week of celebration, intrigue, and disturbance that marks the end of harvest. Area residents gossip and gather in the barley field but are more concerned with the recent arrival of several vagrants than the momentous events about to engulf them. The story is told from the standpoint of Walter Thirsk, who after residing there for a dozen years is himself a relative newcomer to a place. “We should face the rest day with easy hearts,” he muses, “and then enjoy the gleaning that would follow it, with our own Gleaning Queen the first to bend and pick a grain. We should expect our seasons to unfold in all their usual sequences, and so on through the harvests and the years.”

National Colonial Farm, Piscataway Park, Accokeek, Maryland

The strangers who camp nearby are refugees from enclosure of open lands, and their coming coincides with that of a man of uneasy silence the villagers call Mr. Quill for the peculiar instrument he carries for his work: “We mowed with scythes: he worked with brushes and quills. He was recording us, he said, or more exactly marking down our land.” Quill is making a map and compiling numbers, measuring locations of streets, houses, and fields. He informs his rustic hearers that such work is about “improvements” being done on behalf of the manor estate’s absentee heir who is zealous for improvements to enlarge the estate by enclosure and replace fieldworkers with sheep which will also render gleaning obsolete. “We know enough to understand that in the greater world,” Quill explains, “flour, meat, and cheese are not divided into shares and portions for the larder, as they are here, but only weighed and sized for selling.” The old order of Enough is being displaced by More. To be sure, pre-enclosure landscapes were not idyllic spaces since commoners depended on hard labor and the vagaries of the seasons for their welfare. But conditioned by faith and custom, daily anxieties were moderated by community fellowship and shared resources from the commons.

Kentucky farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry’s book A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997 (1998) is rooted in lifelong experience on the land and considerations of beauty, hard work, crops, and the natural world:

                  Harvest will fill the barn; for that

                  The hand must ache, the face must sweat.

                  And yet no leaf or grain is filled

                  By work of ours; the land is tilled

                  And left to grace. That we may reap…. (No. X [1979])

One of Berry’s first public addresses on trends in consolidation of family farms and land care took place in July, 1974, at the “Agriculture for a Small Planet” symposium held in conjunction with Spokane’s “Expo ’74.” The world’s fair was promoted as the first international ecological exposition and Berry’s passionate talk, delivered from scribbled notes on a large yellow pad, included a call for “a constituency for a better kind of agriculture.” The presentation inspired organization of the Northwest Tilth movement for sustainable farming, and also became the nucleus of Berry’s best-selling book The Unsettling of American: Culture & Agriculture (1979). 

Barn and Fence Rails, National Colonial Farm

In his 1979 essay, “The Good Scythe,” Berry grapples with the meaning of progress in modern times. He recalls buying a “power scythe” for cutting grass on a steep hillside near his home, but soon found that the anticipated advantages of reduced labor were offset by the machine’s temperamental motor and considerable racket. The turning point came when a neighbor showed him an old-fashioned scythe that was comfortable to handle and efficient. “There was an intelligence and refinement in its design that make it a pleasure to handle and look at and think about,” Berry observed, and he promptly replaced the powered machine and gas can with a wooden-handled Marugg scythe and whetstone. Berry does not dismiss mechanical innovation; the scythe, after all, is an improvement on the sickle. But he found the episode to have “the force of a parable” about life, labor, and definitions of progress. He advocates a time-honored approach for judging claims of saved labor and short cuts, and warns against the embrace of technological solutions that tend to bring longer working hours with greater equipment expense.

Mirabilia and the British National Service

In the fall of 2012, the congregation of Toronto’s St. Anne’s Anglican Church teamed with the NetherMind artist collective to sponsor Mirabilia (meaning “Things causing wonder”). Some 2500 people attented the nine-day festival exhibition, lecture, and worship series held in connection with the church’s 150th anniversary. The contrast between contemporary experimental art and ancient architectural setting could not have been more striking. Designated a national historic site, St. Anne’s features an imposing Byzantine Revival dome supported by Caen stone columns and decorated with religious scenes painted in 1923 by J. E. H. MacDonald and other members of Canada’s famed Group of Seven. Mirabilia’s large-scale installations included Mary Catherine Newcomb’s immense Osiris’ Advance (Ten Thousand Soldiers) of upright grain stalks covering a wide circle between several rows of pews and a priest’s table draped in a green and gold altar cloth embroidered with heads of wheat.

St. Anne’s longstanding ecumenical tradition involves local artists and musicians for church programs, and in his festival sermon, “What Does God have to do with Art?”, Rev. Gary van der Meer noted that some visitors had found some of the art insufficiently religious. His message opened with the story of Elijah and the Widow of Zaraphath (I Kings 17:8-16) in which the prophet is divinely directed in a time of famine to ask a desitute widow for bread. Such pitiful circumstances put the woman and her son at risk of starvation, but she consents to feed the stranger. Showing remarkable generosity, she shares their meagre supply of flour and oil. Elijah then miraculously restores their provisions until the famine ended. “Wonder is happening at St. Anne’s,” proclaimed Rev. van der Meer in his Mirabilia homily, and explained the sacred nature of creative expression in theological terms:  “We are created in the image of God and therefore are creators. Our artists are living with God’s image in them by creating the art that is here. Artists are engaged in the sacred by living out God’s creating image in their own creating. …God is the first and supreme artist. …[W]e should learn more about art to learn more about God.”

St. Anne’s Church-NetherMind Mirabilia Exhibition (2012), Cheryl O’Brien Photograph

In an effort to revive Great Britain’s traditional Anglican Harvest Service and promote stewardship of land and food, members of the royal family joined with civic and business leaders in 2010 to launch a series of agrarian-related initiatives including British Food Fortnight to foster school gardening projects and charitable food distribution. Royal patronage in cooperation with church leaders also sponsored the first National Harvest Service in a half-century which was held at Westminster Abbey on October 16, 2013. The service opened with Henry Alford’s popular congregational hymn, “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come” (“…raise the song of harvest-home!”), followed by homilies from Owen Patterson, Secretary of State for Environment and Rural Affairs, and Dr. Richard Chartres, Bishop of London. Actor Damian Lewis read lines from Henry Birtles poem of unpretentous gratitude, “The Harvest”:

Let’s  gather as a band of one, in symphony

across the land
To thank our Lord for Harvest reaped and

gratefully as one let's stand
To think of those, for all their toil who've readied

plough, who've nurtured soil 
The farmers in the fields, the cold; the hardened

hands, the fens, the wold
So many aspects of a life, a challenge most will

never know
For we in houses snugly sleep, whilst in the biting

winds and snow
…And through this nation memories walk, depth

of image ever strong

Of distant days and innocence; of man and Shire

Horse ploughing on
Of wheat sheaves standing in the sun and

laughing girls coming home
…For all the romance of these scenes, look not

through glass of tinted rose
Ask farming people what it's like and though the job

is one they chose

It takes its toll; the troughs are long and cold and

deep
The flattened barley, missing sheep and so much

more that blights their show
But on and on and on they go, until that day of days

has come
The tractor's parked, the combine's quiet; the crop

is in, the Harvest done.

Since the revived Westminster commemoration, the National Harvest Festival has grown to some 400 parishes and schools in Great Britain and includes services at the grand cathedrals of Canterbury, Lincoln, and Ripon. Related events now include British Fortnight restaurant menus to “rekindle the tradition of regional British foods and the harvest,” designation of farm discovery trails and heritage crops, and community harvest celebrations and concerts. Devon Master Blacksmith Andy Hall created the official traveling British Harvest Torch sculpture that features a wrought iron vessel holding a grain sheaf and is hosted by participating churches in accordance with the National Harvest Service schedule.