The Song of Creation, but Harvest? What Harvest? A large part of me feels that all this is almost a mockery. 'Damning with faint praise', one of our poets called it. To begin with many local people are not even thankful enough to keep their church afloat financially (that's the situation in West Cumbria and in many, many places across the nation). So that many Churches are increasingly lumbering into high debt. I have a friend who travels widely across the Church doing Christian education work. It is his livelihood, he depends on what local Christians will give. Often he will simply be sent, say a £50 book token for a day's work and travel. He says sadly, "I can't eat book tokens".

But that is only the beginning. An 18 year old Christian going to World Youth Day in Germany in August said, "In today's society there are so many pressures to do things and behave in ways the Church disapproves of. I am thinking of sex, alcohol, hedonism, consumerism. I go to church once a week, but society is there all the time and it leads you to think some things aren't so bad because everybody's doing them. All this is imbued from early teenage years".

Though there are many good things about our present world and I enjoy living in it, we are a decadent society. West Cumbria is decadent, I am decadent, because we are destroying Creation, our civilisation is tottering right on the edge. I am not giving up hope in the deep hearted goodness of all peoples, but I am losing optimism in the present phase through which we are all living that we will get out of this safely: We seem to be going headlong. As a friend said, living in East Germany when the Wall was rampantly in force, "All this will pass. The only problem is it's my lifetime". And at this time we might add, our children's and children's children.

The new Pope, Benedict XVI said in his opening homily "The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast. Therefore the earth's treasures no longer serve to build God's garden for all to live in, but they have been made to serve the powers of exploitation and destruction". We are gobbling up our western civilisation. Deep inside we have lost our soul and seek to drag the rest of the world with us. I am not excusing terrorism (there is never an excuse for taking innocent lives), but no wonder the stricter morality of the Muslim faith is angry at the way most of us live some of the time and some live all the time, with the pressures 'out there' to conform. Complaints about ever-rising fuel prices? We've got what's coming to us, it's nobody else's fault. A cartoon I saw has Adam and Eve looking up at the tree where the snake is coiled. The snake is saying, "If I can't tempt you with an apple, what about burning some fossil fuel?"

The impending catastrophe has happened before in earlier civilisations when the ecology and agriculture have collapsed because peoples were living well beyond their means. All sorts of ambitious, elite projects (vast temples, statues, etc) precipitated such collapse. But there is a crucial difference between these historical examples and the present threat to industrial civilisation: these ancient ecological collapses were confined to particular bio-regions whereas the looming calamity represented by modern climate change is truly global. (The Tablet, July 2005). And as ever, the poor are the victims, our victims; we make them our sacrifice, letting them give up what little they have so that we may have more.

Energy and time are running out for the world; we are ruining Creation. So Harvest? What Harvest? Perhaps the pretty-picture harvest decorations are little more than symbols of our unthinking, consumer appetites running out of control. As you sow so shall you reap. It's payback time. Maybe next harvest festival our churches should be draped in black, bare and empty without lights or heating as a sign to the nation of the need to change and the sacrifices we ourselves will have to make; in that way honour the God who gives all things, the gift of Energy and Life itself.

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