Harvest Festival and Stardust

I was thinking about harvests this morning (as you do).

I actually had every reason to be thinking about harvests, as I was helped the kids in church celebrate a harvest festival, a very jolly occasion that involved putting lots of little kids under a brown sheet to be Seeds.  Seeds giggle a lot.  Then there’s the pretend rain that waters them and the pretend sun that warms them and – lo and behold! – the Seeds all grew, giggling madly, were harvested and got gathered into the (pretend) barn.

It’s great how much pretending little kids are prepared to do.  It looks great too, as the kids’ Mums and Dads brought in food, such as fresh fruit and veg, chocolate treats and lots of useful tins which were then taken up to the altar in nice wicker baskets and then to a home for homeless young people (if you see what I mean) where teenagers who are too old for care homes have a halfway-house before living independently.  Cooking is one of the skills volunteers teach in the home and that’s where the fresh veg and all the other gifts will be used.

Living in Manchester (not your most pastoral of areas) it’s sometimes difficult to see the connection between things that grow and what we eat and celebrating the harvest helps not only the kids but all the adults involved take some time out to appreciate that our tin of tomatoes or corned beef or chicken ding microwave dinner actually did start off growing.

Being a church service, of course, there’s some very old prayers and hymns about God who created everything and everyone, and the stunning thing is that despite being a very old idea, its absolutely true that all the universe and everything in it (including the giggling kids and the tin of tomatoes) have a common source.

For instance, the cabbage that was on the altar has about 40-50% of its DNA in common with the kind soul who gave it, and the same can be said for the tomatoes and the carrots.  And we can trace the origins of absolutely everything back to that moment of the Big Bang when the universe started and the first hydrogen and helium atoms came into being.

The stars are chemical powerhouses and within them formed heavy elements and the complex molecules necessary for that tin of corned beef, the can-opener and the human being to enjoy the sandwich.  It takes a star to explode as a Supernova to get the right sort of enriched interstellar gases to form a solid rock and metal planet such as the Earth and about three generations of stars to get the right material to form our sun, its planets and the right chemical mix for life to get going. All the molecules within you have been in two previous stars.  Wow.  We are, as the astronomer Carl Sagan said, made of stardust.  As I said, it’s a very old idea…