"Artistic heritage, on occasions, can appear to become [a] professional middle-class substitute for religious observance or belief."
Harvest Thanksgiving, we are told, is a Victorian invention (1843, to be precise), and its celebration now is little more than unhelpful nostalgia. The same mindset that can be seen in clergy responses to criticism of the redesign of Victorian churches also seem to animate this view of Harvest Thanksgiving:
Much of the current concern arises from a longstanding sense that the Victorians left us a regrettable, even loathsome, legacy ...
Harvest Thanksgiving, then, is unhelpful - and perhaps somewhat reactionary - Victorian nostalgia. A nostalgiac yearning for the agrarian past symbolised by Harvest Thanksgiving is suggestive of a set of values - settled, ordered, attachment to place - inappropriate for urban and suburban modernity, and unwelcome amidst contemporary political and cultural values.
What if it is the case, however, that such nostalgia is not a negative? What if heritage and nostalgia actually orient us towards a richer, 'thicker' understanding of human flourishing. Something of this was suggested by Andrew Rumsey - author of Parish: An Anglican Theology of Place - in a recent article:
Contemporary nostalgia ... is not ridiculous, nor is it bound to become morbid and dysfunctional: indeed, at times of accelerated change, a little “living in the past” can be a vital means of regaining one’s bearings, as well as consoling and creative.
'Regaining one's bearings' - it could be suggested that this is precisely what is required in a polity, economy, and culture in which bearings have been lost, in which a vaccuous neo-liberal order (the offspring of the marriage of the Right's economic liberalism and the Left's social liberalism). As Red Tory Philip Blond has stated, this order has resulted in "the weakening and destruction of the social bonds that create the communities within which we can flourish and prosper". Similarly, Blue Labour writer Paul Embery points to a neo-liberal order "elevating the global over the local, and the cosmopolitan over the communitarian" with the result that its "promised land turned out, for millions, to be a desolate wilderness".
In such a political, economic, and cultural context, Harvest Thanksgiving does indeed call us to 'regain our bearings', to rediscover the politics of gratitude and gift, place and labour. In other words, the very characteristics rejected by the prevailing order as having worth, dignity, and significance. Harvest Thanksgiving draws us from the delusions of the neo-liberal order to behold the goodness and grace of what Wendell Berry terms "the Great Economy":
That we can prescribe the terms of our own success, that we can live outside or in ignorance of the Great Economy are the greatest errors. They condemn us to a life without a standard, wavering in inescapable bewilderment from paltry self-satisfaction to paltry self-dissatisfaction. But since we have no place to live but in the Great Economy, whether or not we know that and act accordingly is the critical question, not about economy merely, but about human life itself.
Heritage and mission do not have to be viewed in perpetual conflict, but, rather, as reaching for the same goal.
Dismissing Harvest Thanksgiving as Victorian nostalgia might impede the Church's mission, and - somewhat ironically - be a quite bourgeois collusion with the neo-liberal order. By contrast, a joyous welcome for the nostalgia surrounding Harvest Thanksgiving and its heritage can be a means of regaining our bearings, of a polity, economy, and culture oriented afresh to gift and gratitude.
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