Harvest
Rev. Jenny Justice Oct. 16, 2005

One morning just before dawn when I was around 10 years old, my mother woke me from a sound sleep to summon me on an adventure. My sister, brother, and father joined us with about 30 aunts, cousins, uncles, great-uncles and third cousins in the warm muggy June air of Greyton Beach, Florida. We single-filed down the planked walkway to the dock reaching out into a lake. Groggily and gingerly we boarded low-riding motorboats. Five or six of us crowded into each dinghy and we processed in the early pink-tinged light across the lake to an inlet leading to a much larger body of water. On the other side of the shimmering expanse were tall, thickly growing reeds. Plunging through blooming water lilies we sludged into the rushes until I could barely see the sky above them.

Just as I feared we were trapped forever in the grassy forest, an opening broke the solid wall before us and we were chugging down an inland waterway with high embankments on either side. Spilling in grand purple profusion down the sandy knoll were plump, ripe blackberries. Buckets and bowls were handed around and we began to pluck the generous harvest of succulent fruit. Soon fingers and tongues were royally dyed as we sampled the results of our labors. For several hours we reaped nature's reward until both our stomachs and bowls were brimming. After a brief stop to refuel in a small town at the end of the waterway, we made our slow satisfied progress back to Holeman's Hangout by the dock. Our Aunt Bell led the women relatives in making blackberry cobbler for breakfast, hot and steaming as we poured cooling fresh milk over the top. It was my first harvest.

Others that followed that one: waiting for the honeysuckle that grew behind our house to reach full bloom and spending contented hours drink the sweet nectar; ignoring the stinging scratches from thorns to dive into a grove of raspberry bushes; the satisfying miracle of my first vegetable garden and making pickles out of my own home-grown cucumbers.

With leaves turning and falling around us and pumpkins appearing on doorsteps, it seems an appropriate time to consider that there is rich purpose in labor that can be perceived only through the harvest and to remember that the relationship between effort and reward is one of unending discovery.

In his classic text, Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl wrote that "we need ... to stop asking about the meaning of life and instead to think of ourselves as those who [are] being questioned by life-daily and hourly. ... Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the task which it constantly sets for each individual. These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differs from [person to person] and from moment to moment."

Each life is a shifting pattern of desire and action. The design of the whole is recreated each morning when we rise with purposes to fulfill. Gazing backward down the years I can hear again the voice of my 11th-grade Sunday school teacher asking me: What is your goal in life? And my certain answer: To be happy. The import of that quest revealed itself as my efforts to achieve the aim adjusted to ever-deeper understanding of what was necessary for its attainment. Necessity unveiled its nature as having a remarkable similarity to that of farmers of more traditional harvests.

For happiness I needed home, family, and sustenance. Work at that time in my young life produced a crop of these basic needs. Consider the farmer who must rise with the sun to till the soil, plant the seed, nourish fragile plants, water heat-bleached soil, and bend back to pluck the crop from stalk and vine. Alongside the farmer there is a community joining in the labor and at night a roof overhead and a hearth to warm their weary bodies and spirits.

The work of life that leads to increase and satisfaction asks husbandry of us all. Husbandry is a good old-fashioned word that means we must cultivate the soil before we drop seed into the furrow. We need to turn the earth, removing rocks and roots that might prove themselves obstacles to growth. Before riotous life is freed to burst forth in our fields we must plant, fertilize, water, irrigate, rake, hoe, dig, delve, graft, weed, prune, and plow. Only then may we glean, gather in and store our goods. Each day we may thrill to wake to this often satisfying, always demanding effort.

Yet, if our daily tasks are viewed as life questioning us, what will be our answer? What is the bond between effort and harvest? It would be a mistake to anticipate direct reward in proportion to exertion. Often enough we have experienced the futility of attempting to control the outcome of our labor. People, for one thing, among whom we strive, are totally unpredictable. We cannot expect their favor in reply to our right effort. Rabbi Harold Kuschner, the modern sage, wrote succinctly of this mistake: Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is like expecting the bull not to charge you because you are a vegetarian.

Amid all the injustices and inequities of personal and global society, we may not count on outer influences to insure our bounty as thanks for our devotion. Yet, life still questions us through the tasks it sets before us and we must make a response.

"My friends," Nasrudin said, "when I was a young man I was impatient for God-I wanted to awaken everyone to clear understanding. They were all so blind; I prayed to Allah to help me change the world.

"Then, in the middle of my life, I woke one day and realized the world was exactly the same. The hourglass was half empty and there was so much left to do. So I prayed to Allah to strengthen me to at least change those close around me who were so ignorant of the truth.

"Alas, now I am old and I have changed no one at all. Finally, 'Allah,' I implore, 'please give me enough strength to change my ignorant self.'"

Many religious traditions identify specific tasks with different phases in life. The student. The householder. The spiritual seeker. Perhaps the solution can be found in understanding the seasons of our lives. My teen years were a time of tears and of wild thrusting outward. My twenties were a determined search for my place of belonging. My thirties found me striving for the connection between inner and outer meanings. My forties were a time of living those connections, throwing vision forward like a silver thread and following its path. Now, having achieved my fiftieth decade, I look more deeply at each step along the way, appreciating the particular nature of each moment of life without trying so hard to foretell its outcome, finding satisfaction in the moment itself. "To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven." The harvest of each season will be appropriate to the elements that inform that period of our lives and no two lives will bear the same fruit.

Let it be our daily spiritual practice to seek to discover what questions are being asked of us in this season of our lives. Herein lies the secret to the abundance we would glean. Take a few moments in contemplation right now to ask, "How would I define the current season of my life? What questions is this time asking me to answer? What labors are required of me to fulfill life's purpose in this time?"

PAUSE

There is a saying in the Hindu tradition: Live your life so that when you come to die you will find peace. When my friend Victor D'Lugin lay dying, he felt a great restlessness and impatience. He was a very active man called to seasons of political advocacy and shaping his society. His scope had been wide-reaching, shaping the laws of his home state of Rhode Island, and now he was confined to a narrow bed in a small house in a tiny town on the edge of the continent. He was fortunate in that his life-long generosity was returned through the constancy of friends who understood his anger and discontent. However, we all wished him the blessings of finding peace in his dying season.

One day his friends noticed a change in him. He was still himself, of course, yet he no longer seemed to fear the task of death. He had reached acceptance of the work ahead and a surrender to grace within the effort. We asked how he had arrived at this place and he told us: "My life." He said, "I've been looking back at my life and I am pleased. I have been to beautiful places, mountains and oceans, and I have known wonderful, remarkable people. I am pleased with what I have done. I wouldn't change a thing."

My friends, let us meet each season with a full willingness to answer the questions put before us and to accomplish the tasks those answer require. "God," we are told by the Christian scriptures, "hath made everything beautiful in His time [but] He [has also] set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God makes from the beginning to the end." Creation is infinite and it is not given to us to know the outcome of all our seasons: spring bloom, summer ripeness, autumn gloaming, winter stillness.

What we must do is to fully meet the chores at hand. To cultivate as best we can the soil in which we find ourselves planted. To rise in the early light and follow the watery path through the tall grasses and the water lily pads to dawn's profusion. To respond to the queries of the time and discover the bounty that awaits us.

Friends, may we wake to the mysterious dawn and follow the call of our seasons. May our daily duties be inspired by an understanding of the questions life is putting before us and a willingness to try and answer them. Let us apply our efforts to nurturing the soil of our current landscapes. May we seek both inwardly and outwardly a clearer vision of the world of creation that has been set within our hearts. Finally, may we be blessed in this season of our lives to reap its bounteous harvest. May it be so.