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A Harvest Festival
The Sacraments of Hospitality ˜ 243
what is the festival of shelters
The Festival of Shelters is a harvest festival like our own Thanksgiving, and
it is a festival of redemption. It combines earth care and human liberation. The
festival is a time of eating delicious foods and enjoying the sensual depths of our
good bodies, and it is a time to remember God and the poor, and to step forward
on the jagged journey for justice.
As a harvest jubilation, creation, food, and rest are signalized. Creation: In
the beginning . . . God . . . created the heaven and the earth! And God saw that
it was good! And God was very pleased. And God rested. The very intention of
creation is goodness. Look at it. Creation is a call to celebration. Creation is doxology.
Thank you for my wonderful tingling, jingle-jangle flesh and this good,
good earth.
Food: there is enough! There are no food shortages! The harvest is gathered
and there is enough for everyone. There is no flaw in creation; there is no surplus
population. Even in days of famine the people of God found food and confessed
their loyalty to the Giver of Harvest. The Festival of Shelters is a liturgical
witness to the political analysis that hunger has nothing to do with food
shortage. Hunger is a result of public policy and personal fear and greed. Neither
God nor the earth is responsible for hunger. Both share the glory of this
Thanksgiving merrymaking.
But then, as now, hunger and poverty stalked the land. Hunger is a perennial
Harpy. Thus the social policy of the Bible demands that the right of gleaning
the fields be instituted and protected (Lev. 19:9–10). Harvest festivals are
spirit-filled precisely as they are inclusive of hungry people and protectors of
barren lands. The gleaning laws are of special importance to us in the United
States, for implicit in them is the wastefulness and generosity of our loving Creator.
Gleaning prohibits maximizing profits—a business principle always at
odds with the health of the human family. Efficiency is sacrificed for love of
neighbor and stranger. Harvesters must slow down their work to make certain
the gatherers at the edge have time to pick up the crumbs. Today that might
mean the drivers of garbage trucks would wait until hungry people finished
going through the dumpster before upending the steel coffins holding the
corpses of our corpulence.
The Festival of Shelters, rooted in memory, and inclusive of everyone in the
community, is a fete with poor and hungry humans whose very existence indicts
us because creation is good and there is enough for everyone.
Rest: woefully needed in our land is rest. We drive, push, produce, achieve,
make it, come, survive, win, but we cannot rest. Why Workaholism is idolatry.
Rest, that Sabbath which is the completion of the harvest and even creation itself,
is the mark of trust and fidelity rooted in a biblical way of life. Neither