This week Julia from REinspired and I have been leading the harvest assemblies for Loddon primary school children in the church. We were exploring the theme of ‘togetherness’.
As an illustration we dressed up two children in bee-wings and antennae and had them ‘fly’ around the church with a spoonful of honey each to feed to their ‘babies’ (actually the teachers, which the children thought hilarious).
‘How many flowers do the bees need to visit to make just one jar of honey?’, I asked. The answer (not 67 as one child thought) is two million.
‘And how far do the bees travel to make six jars of honey?’. Answer: the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
‘How do they do it?!’ Answer: working together. And so developed the theme of ‘making sweet things together’…
Such miracles of nature’s bounty we can take for granted. For most of us, our last memory of food scarcity was probably the pandemic. For some, though, it will be closer: we took (I estimate) about 1 ton of food to Woodley Food bank donated by the church community, and by the children and families of both Loddon and Hawkedon schools.
Naturally, this will be gratefully received by many. Yet, I am minded of the Brazilian liberation theologian Dom Helder Camera’s remark: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.”
Togetherness needs to go deeper than one-off moments of generosity (good as those are). It has to be structural and everyday.
Revd Dr Mark Laynesmith
Vicar of St Nicolas, Earley