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.