THE HARVEST AND THE HUNT
Growing up in Michigan, I always enjoyed when the harvest started to reach its crescendo around September. Plates are full of fresh sweet corn and farm-fresh tomatoes; on a recent trip back to my small hometown in southern Michigan, my family enjoyed these with smoked pork chops slightly charred from the grill, all purchased from the farm stand owned by a family whose son and daughter I went to school with. In the old English calendar, the harvest season begins on Lammas Day in August. Lammas Day marks the “first fruits” of the fields at which loaves of bread baked from the new grain are offered up for blessing in the church. In Exodus 23:16 God commands the Israelites to observe a similar festival: “You shall observe the festival of harvest, of the first fruits of your labor, of what you sow in the field. You shall observe the festival of ingathering at the end of the year, when you gather in from the field the fruit of your labour” (NRSV). Lammas Day, the firstfruit of the harvest, is mirrored in Plough Sunday, when the English church would bless the plows and the fields to mark the start of the farming year. The Canadian Prayer Book and the Church of England’s Common Worship liturgies include collects for the “blessing of the harvest,” and the American 1979 BCP has a prayer for Thanksgiving Day, and offers prayer 29 “For Agriculture” and 42 “For the Harvest of Lands and Waters.” The Church of Ireland’s 1926 Prayer Book had a fuller service of thanksgiving for the “Blessings of Harvest” complete with Psalm and Scripture readings, the second Collect for which reads in part “We yield thee humble and hearty thanks for this thy bounty; beseeching thee to give us grace rightly to use the same to thy glory, and the relief of those that need.” All of these prayers emphasize the agriculture nature of the harvest – of farmers growing food and bringing it in at the end of the season, inviting God’s blessing and offering Him thanks.
For me, the true end of the harvest was always November 15, the opening of the regular deer hunting season. The woods are filled with men and women aiming to shoot a deer (or more) and fill a freezer with fresh venison for the winter. I have a certain degree of nostalgia about this, growing up in a hunting family: sitting out in a deer blind with my dad and grandpa in the early morning before I was old enough to carry a gun myself; hearing the chatter from the old-timers about great bucks of the past; and watching my dad, or uncle, or their friends who hunted with us gut a freshly-killed deer and hang it in barn before it would be taken to the butcher. My grandpa gave me my first shotgun, for hunting pheasant and other wild game, when I was about twelve. Hunting is a way of life for many in Michigan and around the US and Canada; the cultural influence of the deer season is so much that many students are still excused from school on opening day.
But, as I think about it, God and the church didn’t really have much to do with the hunting season. Even growing up Roman Catholic, where the church year is filled with all kinds of traditional blessing rituals of people and things (my mother always made up a basket of Easter goods to take on Holy Saturday for the priest to bless) I can’t remember anything revolving around hunting, a part of the year as integral to our culture as the harvest.
What is there to bless in hunting, where men and women carry guns into the woods and fields to kill animals, to fill up freezers for the winter? Now, when guns are used with wearying, deadening frequency to kill children in schools, or when priests in Russia are seen blessing bombs and guns to be used in Ukraine, is there much to celebrate about a cultural custom like hunting – can the sportsman’s guns be separated from the soldiers’, or the mass shooters’? This is without doubt a provocative question, one that almost every hunter will reject – and one that I admit I have to reject too. I was taught gun safety, and my teachers inculcated the highest respect for the deadly tool in me. We cared about the animals we hunted too; I remember being carefully instructed on where to aim to cleanly and quickly kill a deer to prevent its suffering – and I will always remember my very first buck as a young teen hunter, which I failed to kill with the first shot and needed to shoot again to shorten its pain. I hated that I needed to, that I hadn’t aimed carefully enough for the first shot. Yet no matter how many precautions we take, hunting is about killing in the end.
In Scripture, the first hunter is possibly Nimrod, in Genesis 10:9 a “mighty hunter before the Lord.” Genesis 25:27-28 calls Esau “a skillful hunter, a man of the field” and the favorite of his father Isaac, who was “fond of game.” Esau’s hunting and Isaac’s love of eating his quarry is what brings about Jacob’s elevation, though, as while Esau is in the fields hunting at his father’s command, Jacob disguises himself and takes the blessings meant for his brother from his father’s hands. Extrabiblical traditions make Nimrod the anonymous king who in his folly builds the Tower of Babel. In Genesis, Esau’s folly is clearer, selling his birthright to his brother for a bowl of stew.
It would be trite to ask, “does God want us to kill animals?” Deuteronomy and Leviticus give detailed instructions on the slaughtering of animals for food and sacrifice; the Passover Meal established in Exodus requires the flesh of a lamb; Peter’s vision in Acts 10, where a voice from heaven encourages him to “kill and eat,” includes all sorts of animals. But the second chapter of Isaiah envisions a time in the Kingdom of God when swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks – things made for killing turned into peaceful implements of farming and forestry. “Will we all be vegetarians in the New Jerusalem?” is perhaps just as trite a question to ask when our Eucharist is a mystical meal of Christ’s flesh and blood – but one that we received not as physical flesh, but in bread, the “fruit of the earth and the work of human hands” as the offertory prayer of the Roman Rite puts it. But, in the Kingdom of God, what need will we have for swords, or spears, or bows and arrows and guns with which to hunt and kill? Had Isaiah seen a gun, would he exclude them from vision of a future where “Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore” as we sit at the feet of the God of Jacob as his word goes out from Zion?
After I became an Episcopalian, I learned about the Order of Naucratius, an Episcopal society of hunters and fishers who “share their harvest with the hungry,” named for the saint and member of that august family of saints including Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Macrina the Younger, and Peter of Sebaste. Naucratius became a hunter as a hermit and shared his quarry with his neighbors. The eponymous order believes that “hunting and fishing are sacred activities. We are grateful for God’s gifts and we hope to use our skills, and endeavors to help spread God’s Kingdom. Our main activity is to share portions of our harvests with those who are hungry.” Their rule of life is one of prayer, of conservation, and of charity – but it is still one that is founded on the killing of animals. The goal of charity and prayer is laudable, seeking to emulate Christ’s directive to feed the needy, reframing Jesus’s commands to take, bless, break, and give to those who hunger. This is, I have to admit, an attractive refashioning of the realities, rhythms, and requirements of North American rural life and seeing in them an application of the Gospel. It seeks God’s blessing in the killing of animals for food – and to share that blessing with the hungry. The guns and hunting and killing are a way of life today as their hunting tools were to Isaac and Esau.
Leaving Michigan from that visit home, I drove back the long way to New Jersey, ten hours in a car through the fields of Ohio and the hills and mountains of Pennsylvania, where the color of autumn was already sitting on the leaves. In late October, orange signs begin to go up in bars and restaurants in Michigan saying, “Welcome Hunters.” There will probably be a few members of the Order of Naucratius among them, hoping for success and saying a prayer for safety on the morning of Opening Day. They may ask God to help them shoot straight and true, or to send them a buck big enough to share out with a neighbor who struggles a little to keep food on the table, or is just glad for the kindness. I am already thinking about venison chops and slow-cooked wild pheasant over the Christmas holiday, hoping that dad has some meat to spare from the freezer to share and send home with me.
