Harvest Time has Arrived…Are You Ready?

Harvest time comes and goes and in America there is little thought about how food is grown and where it comes from. Its wrapped in cellophane and displayed on handsome store shelves. Nothing else to know except that it is delivered in trucks that apparently nobody wants to drive anymore. We are totally divorced from the old time rhythms of life, because of  suffocating industrial society ( I promise, I won’t go full Ted Krasinski on you). We really have lost touch with the organic, with human context, and basic reality. That we don’t care that our food is genetically modified with round-up inserted into it’s DNA mystifies me.  How could this ever be a good idea even for profit motivated mega-corporations.

     These photos from the late 1800’s show how the production of food used to be a local enterprise. The photographs on the left are of the Kendall Mill which was located on the Windham/Londonderry town line. Farmers selling there apples to be pressed into cider or vinegar. Above, the Campbell family pitches in to harvest potatoes, a staple crop which kept people alive during the winter. In Maine, back in the day, school children were dismissed to help dig potatoes in the fall.

So as the Harvest approaches are you ready.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored
He have loosed the fateful lightening of his terrible swift sword
His truth is marching on

Glory, Glory halleluhja
Glory, Glory halleluhja
Glory, Glory halleluhja
His truth is marching on

I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps
They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps
I have read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps
His truth is marching on

Glory, Glory halleluhja
Glory, Glory halleluhja
Glory, Glory halleluhja
His truth is marching on

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnish’d rows of steel
As ye deal with my condemners so with you my grace shall deal
Let the hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel
His truth is marching on

Glory, Glory halleluhja
Glory, Glory halleluhja
Glory, Glory halleluhja
His truth is marching on

He has sounded form the trumpet that shall never call retreat
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat
Oh, be swift, my soul to answer, oh be jubilant, my feet
His truth is marching on

Glory, Glory halleluhja
Glory, Glory halleluhja

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me
As he died to make men holy let us die to make men free
His truth is marching on

Glory, Glory halleluhja
Glory, Glory halleluhja
Glory, Glory halleluhja
His truth is marching on

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored
He have loosed the fateful lightening of his terrible swift sword
His truth is marching on.

 The “Battle Hymn of the Republic“, also known as “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory” outside of the United States, is a popular American patriotic song by the abolitionist writer Julia Ward Howe.

Howe wrote her lyrics to the music of the song “John Brown’s Body” in November 1861 and first published them in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1862. The song links the judgment of the wicked at the end of the age (through allusions to biblical passages such as Isaiah 63:1–6 and Revelation 14:19) with the American Civil War. Wikipedia

The Battle Hymn of the Republic. William Steffe. I wonder if this song is still being sung in the churches in America?