It's
Time for the Harvest
by
David Doersch
The winter
ice finally loosens into a wet, drippy spring. The soil is
muddy, too muddy for tilling. Finally, you get a break.
The sun has been out for three days now, and a brisk, dry breeze
has been blowing across the fields. The soil is looking dry enough
to turn. You check the weather report, they say you have
another two days of sunshine and then it’ll be showers again.
OK. Fire up the tractor, pull it over to the plow with its
15 discs of steel and its many long rake-like teeth of metal.
You hook these two machines together, test the hydraulics, the
drive shaft, oil the plow, check the air pressure in the tires.
All is good. Let’s go before anything stops us.
For long hours, you disc the ground, watching the fecund soil turn
over in rich, black rows. Its deep fertility speaks to you
in its velvety color, its earthy scent and in the ease with which
well used land turns, ready for this year’s planting. By
the end of that long day, you’ve turned all the soil.
Tomorrow is planting.
Weeks go by. The days grow hot, sultry and still. The
sound of insects becomes your steady companion. Weeks pass
in which you weed your land, you inspect your rows. You
spend long, sweaty days on the tractor pulling up tree stumps that
will interfere with the harvest, or filling holes and rerouting
drainage. You repair the fences that keep the livestock from
the crops. But really, you’re waiting. Waiting while the
remarkable mysteries of nature allow this crop to grow, mature
beneath the hot summer sun.
Day after day you check the progress. The ears of corn are
blessedly free of parasite and blight. But the kernels
aren’t mature yet, three more weeks...two more weeks...next
week. Start checking the weather reports to get a feeling
for when you can do the harvest. Monday? Looks like rain.
Tuesday and Wednesday should be clear. Plan on Wednesday.
Give it a day to dry out after the rains. Wednesday comes,
you have the equipment ready, all hooked up and lubricated and as
many parts of the multifarious machine that you can check you have
checked. Sky looks cloudy. Air smells of rain.
You have some choice words for the incompetence of the National
Weather Service which you speak to the wind so that no one in
polite company might hear you. You wait. One hour, two.
Rain comes. Rain comes hard. You sigh in resignation
and go return the equipment to its storage and park the tractor in
its shed, out of the rain. Maybe in a couple of days. When
Nature is ready.
By Saturday, all of the right elements seem to be in order.
The sun is shining, the air, though thick, is moving with a slight
breeze. The corn is dry and ripe, the ears are begging to be
pulled from the stalks. Your equipment is loaded and primed
and ready, and, because it is the weekend, you have a team of
helpers here to support the harvest. With their help, you
may be able to get it all in and stored in one day. You turn
to your helpers, all college-aged and home for the weekend.
They are dressed in a variety of work clothes, some sensible, some
fashionable, and all disgustingly clean. Well, they won’t
be clean by day’s end. They look up at you ready for the
work and you say the words that your father spoke to you when you
were young. Words that his father spoke and his father’s
father back to the time of your family’s first arrival in the
new world. “It’s time for the Harvest.” Words that
herald a time of backbreaking labor, endless sweat and grime,
bugs, mechanical dangers and noise. “It’s time for the
Harvest.” Words that also herald the fruition of dreams,
the continuation of life and hope through the impending winter.
“It’s time for the Harvest.” Words that triumphantly
announce that what you will now take from the land, through your
labor and your toil, is that which you have earned through your
long and careful husbandry of the soil. “It’s time for
the Harvest.”
Our lives are like that farm, in many ways. We find the open
space between the storms of life to work and open the soil of our
soul so that we might be ready to receive the seeds which will be
planted there. Seeds of possibility, seeds of strength,
spiritual nourishment, seeds of community. Through long
weeks and months of continuous effort and growth, those seeds
sprout. Sometimes they are choked with weeds, or the soil in
some patches wasn’t as fertile as we had hoped. Sometimes
the storms of life so overwhelm the field that the fragile new
crop is beaten down. And sometimes, just sometimes, we get
it right and our crop matures. Our hopes, our developing
lives, our spiritual searching moves from a growing point to a
maturing point. A point in the discovery process where we
have the opportunity to say “a-ha!” Where we learn a
thing, absorb a concept, move to a new level spiritually,
philosophically, dynamically. Our crop comes ready for the
harvest.
I lived for some years in Omaha, Nebraska on a small premium
alfalfa farm. And, my personal experience is that harvesting
is a tremendous amount of work. Sometimes it can be done
alone, and though that has its intrinsic satisfactions, I always
found it far more satisfying to have the big harvest party, where
many people would come out to help us get the hay in, and stock it
in the barns. Throughout the sweatiest part of the day, we
would toss and stack bails of hay, each weighing between 60 and
100 pounds. First we would stack them on the wagon, and then
when the wagon looked like it could hold no more and in fact
resembled more a drawing from Dr. Seuss than an actual piece of
farm equipment, we would carefully back the over-burdened vehicle
into the barn, and begin the airless, dusty, truly miserable
process of filling the hayloft. Then we would pause for a
pitcher or two of iced tea, take another handful of
anti-histamines, then it was back to the fields to get the next
load.
Now, many years have passed since I pitched a bail of hay. I
can’t remember the last tractor that I gassed up for farm work,
or the last time that I raked the hay to let it dry and prepare it
for bailing. But I know that the process prepared me in so many
ways for my life. I could go on and on about the virtues of the
young living an agrarian lifestyle. But more to today’s
point, it made me keenly aware of the cycles of nature. The
Wheel of the Year, as it is called in Pagan traditions.
Throughout the growing season, whenever I find myself outside, and
I suddenly can scent the impending rain, or I can feel the days
begin to shorten, as I do now, I am suddenly taken back to that
alfalfa farm, standing beside my dad in his well worn,
really-need-to-be-washed, overalls. I can hear him making
some wise comment about the seasons, or the coming of the rain.
Or I can hear him just quietly ask me to hand him some tool that
is out of his reach as he tinkers endlessly with the machinery.
When I, as a young teenager, would inevitably complain about the
work we were about to do, my father would wisely point out that
“someone’s got to get it in, you can’t leave it in the
field.” “The crop won’t harvest itself.” “We’ve
begun this process, and now we have to see it through.”
And, ultimately, I remember the tremendous sense of accomplishment
looking at those two barns, stuffed to the gills with some two
thousand bails of perfectly seasoned alfalfa. And the
adolescent in me would also realize that this was merely the first
harvest, there were two more to come.
What do you need to harvest? What lies ripe in your field,
ready for you to actualize? What do we as a spiritual
community need to harvest? What works have we begun
together, allowed to ripen, tilled and toiled and shielded from
the torrents of disconnectedness and conflict? What lies
ready for our labors to finalize? And shall we, together,
roll up our sleeves, agree to do the work to bring in the promise
that lies ready in our fields?
I have the good fortune to serve on the Ministerial Search
Committee for this community as we seek a new minister. In
preparing this sermon, I found my mind returning again and again
to this analogy of a spiritual and/or community harvest, and while
I had originally planned my comments to be more broad and general,
it seems that my Muse had other designs.
Our church has gone through a long winter. A long, bitter
winter of conflict and damage. The fields were not in prime
condition for our planting or tilling, when Janet arrived.
Much work still needs to be done on this metaphoric farm,
repairing fences, building bridges, fixing the well, etc. if we
are ever to actualize our harvest. “But we have committed
to the labor,” as my father would say. We have begun the
process and through Janet Newman’s wise leadership and gentle
tenure, we have planted the seeds of healing, and allowed them
some time to grow. But the work is not done, nor can it be
done by only a few. Our healing as a congregation involves
many things. And as the search committee moves forward in
trying to assess our community’s interests and needs for a new
minister, we find that there exists a wide range of opinions on
who that new minister needs to be, on what her skills need to look
like, or what his abilities and interests need to encompass.
Originally, the search committee scheduled some four or five
cottage meetings as a means of hearing directly from the members
and friends of this congregation what they felt about the future
of this church, our strengths, our weaknesses, our challenges, our
ministerial needs and most of all, our hopes.
During our first cottage meeting, two things became apparent right
away. First, that the meetings would most likely be lightly
attended, but that there was a need for everyone to be heard.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it was stated by a member
of the congregation attending the first cottage meeting that this
was the process of healing. That sitting in that room and
discussing our five cottage meeting questions together, hearing
one another’s opinions and perspectives on the church and our
spiritual lives together. This is the process of
healing. This is the work of the harvest. This is
rolling up our sleeves together and pitching bails. It can
be grimy, sweaty work that is filled with difficulties, but it
yields the greatest results. It brings in the harvest. We
knew that we needed to schedule more meetings so that we might
allow everyone that wants to to participate. We now have 11
cottage meetings scheduled. This harvest is critical to all
of us, and we need everyone to help bring it in.
The promise of a community of faith, like a farmer’s crop, does
not harvest itself. This congregation has made a commitment
to create, and keep a healthy community of faith in the liberal
religious tradition here in Williamsburg. And much like a
farm, we survive and renew this pledge with each year’s harvest.
“We’ve begun this process, and now we have to see it
through.” If you have not yet signed up for a cottage
meeting, I urge you to do so in the lobby today. To speak
your truth, to hear the truth of others, so that together we may
do the difficult work of harvesting our future.
It's time
for the harvest.
David Doersch and his wife
Liz Wiley are members of our congregation. David is lead
singer, songwriter, and founder of the band Coyote Run.
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