‘Let it lie in the palm of your hand. Close your fingers slowly about it. Put it against your cheek and inhale its fragrance…for it holds the essence of the year and is in itself a thing of exquisite beauty.’
So writes Liberty Hyde Bailey in The Holy Earth: Toward a New Environmental Ethic. Even in 1915 he was worried that humans were losing touch with the earth and its produce, receiving the world, as it were, second-hand.
Today it all sounds a bit nostalgic like his longing to get back to ‘a good munch of real apples under a tree or by the fireside’. But if we extend his appreciation of a ‘good keeper’ to an appreciation of the earth as our ‘good keeper’, we see how ‘we cannot afford to lose this note from our lives’.
Often the best way to love the earth is to begin with an apple or a potato and the miracle of how this marvel was born in your garden soil. Let us have an apple day or an apple sabbath to express our gratitude, Bailey exhorts, for ‘we are an apple-growing people’.
Furthermore, a deeper understanding of the earth becomes possible when we take our faith outdoors and greet the God of creation first hand! Then let the first reading be ‘Let us Stop to Admire an Apple’. And the words crop and harvest, seed and season be a holy communion in our mouths.
Fr Hugh took the photo top right at the Apple Day in the Organic Centre, Rossinver, Co Leitrim.