LATE summer into autumn is the season of village fairs and harvest festivals. Bunting goes up, produce is polished and displayed.

These gatherings are a joyful echo of something much older: the way harvest was once the work and celebration of the whole community. For centuries, it took a village to bring in the crop. Families, neighbours, and farm labourers worked side by side, sharing work and food, because no one could manage it alone.

Today, harvest looks different. A single farmer might sit for long hours in the cab of a combine harvester, covering in one day what once took dozens of people many weeks.

Machinery has replaced muscle, and with it perhaps some of the visible sense of community. But even now, no harvest is a solitary act. The newest technology still depends on the turning of the seasons, the balance of sun and rain, the health of the soil, the unseen work of worms, fungi, and pollinators. Beneath every loaf of bread and every pint of cider lies a web of dependence, stretching wider than we imagine.

Harvest reminds me of something essential: we cannot do anything entirely on our own. It takes a village — human and non-human — to raise a child, to grow our food, to sustain our lives from one season to the next. Our efforts are always met by gifts we did not create and cannot control.

This is not a new truth. Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors who settled here long ago, named their months in recognition of efforts and gifts: Hærfestmōnaþ (harvest month) in September, or Hāligmōnaþ (holy month), when they gave thanks for the fruits of the land.

They knew that abundance and survival were shared matters, dependent not just on human labour but on weather, land, and unseen forces beyond their command. To celebrate harvest was to acknowledge dependence, and to give thanks.

For Christians, this giving of thanks finds its home ultimately in God. Harvest Festival is more than tradition — it is an ancient act of recognition that all things come from God, and a chance to offer gratitude and the first fruits of labour in return. And it is a reminder of Jesus’ words that we do not live by bread alone.

In our own age, when independence is often prized above all, harvest offers a gentle corrective. The food in our kitchens, the roofs over our heads, the schools that teach our children, the roads we travel — all are the work of many hands. And beyond human effort, we live daily by grace: by air we did not invent, by sunlight we cannot summon, by rain we cannot schedule.

Perhaps a good way to approach harvest then is with gratitude. Gratitude for the ways that our villages and communities still gather. Gratitude for the web of gifts, human and more-than-human, that sustain us. Gratitude that in a fragmented age, an old truth endures even when we feel alone — that we belong to one another, and to the Earth and God that holds it all.

Elizabeth Lloyd

Crediton Congregational Church