The Slow Way: Easter, Worms and Soil
What a thing: to choose to believe that God came to us and suffered, then slammed God’s own heart back into a dead body, waking it up, announcing that death and suffering is never the entire story.
Happy Easter, friends!
Just a reminder this morning that there’s a reason Lent is 40 days and Eastertide is 50 days. (We get more time with the joy than with the sorrow! We get more light than dark, more warmth and flowering than ice and wintering! Praise God.)
I wrote this reflection three years ago, the first spring we lived on the east coast after our move. And I am bringing us back to it today and this week on the podcast, because, according to Jeff Chu, sometimes resurrection looks like a compost bin. Sometimes to get to the new life, we have to let the worms eat our scraps for a while. For all of you who are bravely showing up this Easter morning committed to hope, despite all evidence to the contrary, I see you.
May we all find the holy work of redemption in the compost bin. Here’s to new life!
Easter, Worms, and Soil *
Today I’m considering what it means to live in the relentless goodness of Easter, not only on this first Sunday, but through all the days that follow. It’s still cold here in New Jersey, but each day the cold mornings inch closer toward warmth. The flowers are almost in bloom. Gardening always brings me back to a book I read several years ago called Braiding Sweetgrass.
Braiding Sweetgrass is written by an Indigenous botanist, a Potawatomi woman in America who has not only studied plants as a scientist, but who also carries the stories of her ancestors, who saw plants as living beings, worthy of honor.
When I read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s words, I’m brought back to the tulips that I planted as bulbs my second week in the home where we’ve lived these past three years. Each year the tulips sit under the frozen ground for months, and I literally do nothing else to them but wait. And here they emerge, bright and smiling, reaching to the warm sky.
My nearly nine-year-old son, Ace, is my farmer-in-training over here. He has helped me set up our two compost bins, one of which is full of slimy, wiggly worms doing the hard work of breaking down the remnants of our smoothies and salads into rich, dark soil. When we bring the scraps to the compost bins, I say, “Ace, time to feed the worms!” We both open the lid and squat down, moving the covering where hundreds of worms have gathered.
Ace is autistic and he has Down syndrome. He is non-speaking, though he tells himself long, wonderful stories that we all wish we could understand for ourselves. For Ace the world is often an overwhelming experience of sensory overload; but in the sun, in the garden, squatting beside our compost full of worms, it’s quiet and squishy. Down below the ground we get a glimpse of a secret, dark worm factory, where all the old and used up and unwanted parts of our food become something new, something that feeds the tulips and nourishes the trees. Ace leans over the bin and turns the corkscrew aerator, and the moment feels holy.
Jeff Chu writes and speaks often of the “theology of the compost bin,” how compost “preaches a hundred Sundays of sermons about death becoming new life, about God's abundance, about how these things that seem useless—moldy fruit, onion skins, eggshells, coffee grounds—these become rich soil.” Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about the power of ceremony, how it “marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer.”
As I kneel beside Ace, tearing the old pizza box into strips that he carefully dangles and then drops into the bin, one after another, I think about what Jesus did that Easter morning. What a wild notion to believe that God joined humanity to show us that we are loved. That God chose suffering as the way to do so. What a thing to believe that a heart can thump back into rhythm after lying still and dead.
Ace and I grab a stray worm and drop it into the ground beside the old cardboard and the stem from the yellow pepper he gobbled up last night. What a thing: to choose to believe that God came to us and suffered, then slammed God’s own heart back into a dead body, waking it up, announcing that death and suffering is never the entire story.
Maybe that’s what we’re stirring in the compost bin. As Jeff says, “A robust theology of the compost reminds us that death and the things of death, our sin, our suffering, the ways we hurt each other, the ways we harm ourselves— These things are never the end of God's story.”
When we celebrate Eastertide in the days and week after the Easter egg hunts and pretty dresses in the sunshine. When we remember that Christ’s life is sustaining us today, as we lean over the pile of compost, or chat with our neighbors across the street, or sit down at our desks to complete the mundane, ordinary work of this day, we remember that our gratitude, our prayer, turns the mundane of this moment into something holy. The old scraps of food into rich, vibrant soil.
Easter is the season for life, for growing, for composting. May we marry the mundane to the sacred every day, every ordinary, beautiful day.
A Slow Practice
Today is not a quiet day! And I confess it’s a little more difficult for me to offer you a spiritual practice that is not quiet or internal.
But today is a day to be big and loud, to shout “The Lord is Risen! He is risen indeed!” with all your heart. It’s a day to pop open the bubbly and carve the roasted piece of meat, to give the kids way too much candy, and stand in the sunshine.
So here’s my slow practice for you. Today, wherever you are, find some dirt. (Don’t get your nice clothes all dirty, okay?) Just kneel down and touch it. And as you do, imagine this soil has been through: generations of life, food, weather that has moved the soil from place to place. So much that was once alive in this place and has returned to the ground.
Can you imagine the parts of yourself: your weaknesses, your failures, your hurt and rage and fears, being transformed into something completely new?
Give yourself a moment to receive the promise of new life in your own heart.
Pray this with me: Spirit, you who fought for life when all signs pointed to death, remind me that my life is in your living, capable hands. You will not forget me in the compost bin. Amen.
A Note:
We’re one week away from the release of my new book Blessed Are the Rest of Us: How Limits and Longing Make Us Whole. You can preorder the book right now at Baker Book House, where it’s 40% off the price of other booksellers. The first 200 preorders over there will receive a signed copy and a super fun temporary “The Lucky Few” tattoo!
If you are a paid subscriber or are thinking about becoming a paid subscriber, this might be the moment to do so! This week I announced our weekly, free virtual book club for paid subscribers. We’ll be walking through the book together! It’ll be super fun. Sign up to be a paid subscriber here at Slow Waysters.
*”Easter, Worms, and Soil” was first published at Grow Christians, May 10, 2021. I’ve made several changes since.
I’m so excited for your book release in a week! I’ve been looking forward to it for months