Change, decay, and latest life

FRESH from my first 12 months of coaching for ordination at Ridley Hall, I used to be on summer placement at Launde Abbey. If you visit this historic retreat centre, hoping for tranquillity, stillness, majesty, and quietude, you won’t be upset. Unfortunately, I used to be in quest of decay and filth, and these less celebrated spiritual modes proved hard to seek out within the bleached land of August.

I had been asked to guide an immersive outdoor meditation, and had suggested the theme of rot and renewal. The trouble was that there didn’t appear to be anything mouldy or decrepit in Launde’s neat vegetable patches and herbaceous borders.

I spied a gardener with promisingly dirty hands. “I’m on the lookout for dead things,” I said, by means of introduction. He blinked on the vivacious dahlias apparently created by a deity with a selected fondness for toddler aesthetics. “Do you’ve anything a bit more viscous?” I asked.

HE LED me to the centre of the walled garden, to a Victorian well containing the primordial soup of creation. I scooped an oozing bucket of pondweed, sloshing stagnant slime down my front. “Wonderful,” I beamed at him, “does Launde have any compost heaps?” He paused. “They’re behind the wall, but it surely’s a little bit of a large number, and guests aren’t speculated to go there.” I told him about my plan to carry the meditation across the compost heap to visualise how God takes the fetid matter of our hearts and composts it into latest life. “You’d higher check with senior management,” he suggested with a touch of a smile.

The obliging management needed only the tiniest homily on John 12.24 to guarantee them that the compost heap was a fitting pulpit, and I dashed off happily to dinner through the silent corridors of this most hospitable retreat house.

OVER pudding, I attempted out the theme on my dining companions — each the meditation, and the more muculent research I used to be pursuing at Ridley. “And what’s the book called?” asked a girl with eyes creased on the corners from years of laughter. “I shall actually read it.”

I hesitated. “It’s a bit rude,” I said apologetically, wishing — not for the primary time — I’d studied something less abject. “It’s called Holy Shit,” I whispered, and the exquisite grandmother snorted into her chocolate roulade.

I had other similar exchanges during my time at Launde, trying (as ever) to push the boundaries of theological propriety, and discovering (as all the time) a spirit of far greater daring within the holy places of the world.

AS THE time drew near, I dragged a wheelbarrow of pondweed and dead plants to the enduring Christ statue, and sat on the grass, waiting. With the wheelbarrow by Jesus’s side, I believed of Mary Magdalene that Easter morning, and wondered whether, when she mistook Christ for a gardener, it was less of an error and more of a revelation.

And they got here: the grandmother and the gardener; an ex-Carmelite nun in dungarees, and a sunglassed businesswoman; chaplains and unsuspecting day-trippers. I started by asking what it means to be human, explaining how the words “humanity”, “humility”, and “humus” all derive from the Latin humi, meaning “within the dirt”.

Aware that it had been advertised as an “immersive experience”, I passed round a reeking tub of pondweed, explaining how, for hundreds of years, Jerome’s pivotal mistranslation of Genesis 2.7 shaped theological meditations on human origins. He selected the startling word limus (“slime”), as an alternative of the familiar “dust”, with the consequence that, for greater than a millennium, “The Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth” was the normative biblical translation across the Western Church.

PROTESTANT Reformers displayed the identical zeal for this earthier genesis. In his German rendition, Luther opted for the equally base Erdenkloß (“earth-clod”). In England, Tyndale and Coverdale selected “moulde” over “slime”, with mankind forged from decaying, toxic matter. That was until the King James Bible returned us to a less viscous origin in “dust”. Yet “dust” — though a more accurate rendering of the Hebrew aphar — seems an oddly inert substance to serve because the genesis of life. Slime, against this, is more fecund, and carries the suggestion that God chooses to work through the fabric we deem unworthy.

“Such is the logic of the compost heap,” I suggested, holding a pile of sweet, musky soil. “The plant that emerges from last 12 months’s decay surpasses the unique in vigour and sweetness precisely since it draws from the nutrients of death.”

I risked pressing the analogy. “Launde Abbey has been a spot of healing for hundreds of years, and true healing often requires us to interact with that which we would like to sublimate. But the incarnation, in its glorious unseemliness, beckons us beyond avoidance. It dares us to ask if the very dirt we seek to expunge might hold the seeds of renewal.”

I LED the group off the prescribed path and across the back of the walled garden to Launde’s majestic compost mountains, within the welcome shade of vast ash and sycamore trees, inviting those gathered to gather something dead as they walked. Plunging our hands into the soft, chocolatey depths, we felt the heat generated by the alchemy of decay.

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it stays alone; but when it dies, it bears much fruit,” I concluded, and symbolically we flung our debris on to the compost heap, knowing it could enter the cycle of death, decomposition, and renewal, feeding next 12 months’s harvest — a part of the divine microbial breakdown that turns rot into compost, and sin into the substrate of grace.

Dr Josephine Gabelman is the creator of A Theology of Nonsense (Wipf & Stock, 2016), and a part of the primary cohort on Ridley Hall’s latest, non-residential pathway, aimed toward making ordination training more accessible to those juggling other responsibilities, akin to employment or childcare.