By Canon Cate Edmonds, Canon Steward
Sometimes during different seasons of the year, I go foraging. Autumn is, of course, a particularly good time for foraging with rich pickings of crab apples and rowan berries, which make a delicious savoury jelly, elder berries for a variety of uses and of course blackberries for yummy bramble jelly or scrumptious puddings. This year, however, the blackberries have been much earlier than usual and probably due to lack of water not so tasty. In the spring, I occasionally gather new nettle tips to make vinaigrette, then wild garlic for pesto and sometimes in the summer dandelion leaves for salad, not forgetting elder flowers for cordial. I haven’t yet become confident enough for fungi foraging.
When foraging for these things I can’t help but remember the lines; “all good gifts around us are sent from heaven above, then thank the Lord, O thank the Lord, for all His love.” It is the refrain from the traditional eighteenth-century harvest hymn, We plough the field and scatter, which, no doubt, will be sung in our churches many times over the season.
We have been in the season of Creation-tide and this year there has been a very special focus on “Hope for all Creation.” Plenty of hope is needed if we are to really care for creation, to halt damage that has already been done and to have regard for the good gifts from God that we see all around us. “God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruits; you shall have them for food.” Genesis 1:29
God commands us to have care of them, for them to continue to be fruitful and provide us with food. We have seen the effects of climate change this harvest, many crops are less fruitful, yields are down and many in the farming communities are struggling, others are looking at ways to develop different more sustainable crops. We hold them all in our prayers and thank God for their hard work.
Returning to the refrain of plough the fields and scatter, “O thank the Lord, O thank the Lord for all His love.” We can, in our worries about climate change, forget that we must be thankful to God for all that we have. As I go about my foraging, my prayer is of thanks for what I am foraging but also a prayer of thanks for the love we receive from God through his Son Jesus Christ. That gives me hope for creation.