The first Friday in October is clearly big in the Harvest Festival world, and a large proportion of our local churches and chapels seem each to have their harvest services and suppers tonight. I suspect that not quite so many people attend Harvest Festival as used to, but it is even so one of the success stories of the church year, and I hope all of these local Harvests will have had a good attendance.
The present situation of political deadlock in the USA, and the deaths of many economic migrants off the coast of Italy - two of today's headline news stories - are both a reminder that Harvest these days is more global then ever, even if at the level of the local church and chapel we may pretend to old-fashioned self-sufficiency with our local apples and potatoes and sheaves of corn and all those traditional harvest hymns. In reality the economies of the world mesh together to such an extent that today, three days or so into the American shut-down and with the dollar at its lowest for many a year, worried noises from all across the world are beginning to be heard in the news media. We live in a world where jobs are being exported, or outsourced to low-wage economies, while increasing numbers of people are travelling in the opposite direction, some at immense risk, hoping that our streets may be paved with gold. Our economies are increasingly dependant on the cheap labour both of workforces in Chinese economic zones or Bangladeshi sweatshops, and also (however hard a line may we talk up on immigration) of those who come voyaging to our shores hoping for a better life and a share of our wealth, whether they arrive legally or illegally.
Hmm - thinking about it, maybe that's why the old traditional Harvest Festival still attracts - it takes us away from the messy mixed up realities of today and allows us to bury ourselves in a sepia tinted simpler past that even then probably never really quite existed.
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