Deb Arrowsmith
There’s a lovely Quaker phrase used when we are about to contemplate and discern something: “the matter is before you Friends”. Well, here we are sitting around a pile of compost – and this dark matter before us is, for me, the ultimate in where the human and divine meet.
This is after all literally where we will end up – in earth or as ash – when we die. Is this where we ‘meet our maker’? I think so, and I
want to suggest why and what our ‘maker’ may be up to.
In meeting for worship, we usually gather round a bunch of flowers. Here we have taken it to the nth degree: the flowers are gone,
‘gone to compost everyone’. When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?
First, let’s learn a bit about making compost. This is my compost – how do I make it? First, by chopping up everything very small. That creates greater surface area for bacteria to enter and the
detritivores to do their stuff.
That’s not a rock band, but it could be. Detritivores are bugs and beetles, worms, and insects taking centre stage to feast away on the decay all around them, breaking it down. Then, by adding warmth, water, air, and patient waiting it turns into … well … the richest, most life-giving, nourishing, sustaining product you could imagine.
Now that’s what we do in meeting: patient waiting. I wonder if what we are doing in meeting is making our own collective spiritual compost – letting everything distill, die down, break up, fall apart? We provide water, warmth, and waiting. And we see what emerges –- collectively, being led by the spirit and the insights of others, we experience things shifting. We have occasionally even felt this in a business meeting! Arriving with fixed positions and being gradually moved to change. This moving fertile soil is where new shoots will emerge. In meeting we need to get down deep into the richness of what grounds us and gives us our being. To sweep away all the surface material: our political opinions, personal anxieties, all the thinking we did on the way to meeting or the rehearsed ministry that sounded so right to us at 3am.
I’m not sure it’s easy for any of us at any age to become compost – to fall apart. Many people find letting go, giving up, laying things down hard. We cling on so hard to life, often only realising how precious it is when under threat. A grim diagnosis can send us into panic or despair, but we knew we were going to die, didn’t we? It’s hard to imagine being dead. Not being at all.
Then there are all our un-compostable bits to deal with: those parts of our character or practice that we simply can’t seem to change – the equivalent of the plastic plant labels you find in all compost. They simply won’t go away. What are yours? Your most stubborn bits? Impatience, prejudice, fixed opinions? They won’t grow new shoots, however hard you try. It’s not where the energy comes from. It’s not where it is at all.
It’s important to know that you haven’t made this compost; you haven’t really done a thing! We can’t make a seed sprout, a leaf grow, a bud form, a flower blossom, a fruit ripen. All we do is let it happen. Every good gardener knows all we do is tend to the material. So the instruction to ‘come with heart and mind prepared’ is tending to our material – making it available, allowing the spirit to move, change, and alter us, and giving us growth.
And it’s this black gold of compost that lights the fire of each seed, protects, and nourishes each new shoot, gives it a start in life. Look. Can you see yourself there? Can you see where I end and you begin? No! It’s all become one.
Amazing all this death and decay – the rubbish, the chuckings out, prunings, waste paper, waste food, grass cuttings – all mingling, merging, and becoming one rocket fuel for new life. By the way, prunings are technically called ‘uprisings’. I like it!
Now, you could reflect on what I’m saying. Read it, insert as many biblical references as you wish to illustrate this, as many verses from the Koran, as many Buddhist chants. There are many ways of making compost but only one God – if, as I believe now, God IS the energy, the spirit, the spark behind, beneath, beyond all things.
You could load this down with theology, doctrine, with ritual practice – but all you really need to do is tend to letting go. Give yourself air, warmth, and time. In our simple way you could look at the compost, sit with it, appreciate the beauty of all life in it (as Anthea has encouraged us to do), and say – or better still feel, feel in your bones, in your flesh – that this is where it IS. God IS. (Remember
‘I AM’?) And here IS where someone sets a seed – maybe the seed is already there patiently waiting for the moment – that new life begins.
Now we have to grasp that one day we will become a waste product. We will die. And decay. Not necessarily in that order. But die we must. It’s hard to imagine giving up, letting go. So for me this IS the divine inspiration. In our death some energy or force or whatever you call God can take everything that we have given up, thrown away, wasted – everything that has broken apart – and make of it new life. The Divine picks up all our brokenness and weaves it into some new life.
Where the human and divine meet IS then where we let go, give way, some say surrender. Allowing others, equally inspired, to join us. Allow those detritivores to do their thing. One of the few things I know is that where we work together for the good of all, God IS.
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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 512 • December 2021
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW