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Reaping from our harvest culture – Jun 10

Reaping from our harvest culture – Jun 10 PDF Print E-mail

Revitalising Catholic Culture and IdentityBy Vernon Khelawan

Have you noticed? The pages of the Catholic News are once again inundated with advertisements, all beckoning us to attend one or other of the many parish harvest festivals.

Parishes all over the Archdiocese are jockeying for crowd support for their annual harvest celebrations and Family Day functions. From here on, the Archdiocesan parish calendar will be filled with multiple such events every weekend, making the possibility of quality time with family simply a matter of choosing a harvest at which to have lunch.

As far as I can remember, and that is since an “axe was a hatchet” or since Holy Mass was said in Latin, the annual parish harvest has been one of the most important events in the life of a parish. It has also become one of the largest displays of Catholic culture and identity in this country.

The parish harvest creates lots of opportunities for unveiling latent talent in the parish (singing, acting, music, public speaking, the arts etc.), exposing a multitude of indigenous gastronomic delights and providing a fantastic opportunity for socialising.

The harvest event provides the opportunity for jollity and renewal of old friendships. For the older folks, it is tailor made for their type of twittering as they meet face to face without their prayer books.

All in all, there is no better forum for solid displays of the revitalisation of our Catholic culture and identity than a good ole parish harvest celebration. It is rich in every aspect of human life as it allows people to identify with tradition, trends – old and new – and pure human harmonisation.

In recent times, some parishes have converted their annual harvest to a more family-oriented celebration, where the parishioners are invited and encouraged to gather together as one big family, sharing and engaging in banter, stories, history and food – a combination that ensures the living out of the Synod mandate and the Second Pastoral Priority – Revitalising Catholic Culture and Identity.