composting theologies: an introduction

As I write this tomorrow (Wed 15th May) is the day of our 'composting theologies' gathering at Hazelnut Community Farm, Bristol - with part of the day also online. I'm so excited about this - starting with what could have been a straightforward 'theology seminar', and taking it outside, planting it in the earth, beginning with some soil work on the farm in the morning, and ending the day eating together around the farm's fire pit. We've got a little gang of practitioner-theologians, many in some kind of Christian ministry, many whose daily lives and/or work are thoroughly rooted in the soil where they live. And a couple of brilliant international thinkers offering contributions to the conversation online from different parts of the world. Here's a bit of a personal introduction to what and why we're doing this...

'Soil is not a metaphor' - so writes Emma Lietz Bilecky, who we'll hear from shortly. Nevertheless, our routes to this place are diverse: some of us starting in ensoiled practice and growing into theory, some of us starting with theory and slowly getting immersed in practice; and of course, practice and theory, of one kind or another, are always entangled together, whether we're aware of it or not.

For me, this journey feels like it started with the metaphor of composting, and moved towards the practice of it, via some pretty intense personal and political/structural/ecclesial decomposition. Although saying that, it was always rooted in a particular kind of practice.

'Each person exists inside a different landscape... Our greatest spiritual teacher does not need to be bought or sought. ... It is the specific dirt between our toes.' (Sophie Strand)

The 'specific dirt' for me has been the Firs & Bromford, an outer estate on the edge of Birmingham, where I've been involved in community-building, with friends and neighbours, nurturing a neighbourhood ecology, 'treasure seeking', 'being interrupted', opening up to the gifts and challenges of our neighbours - and especially, those of us who are structurally privileged opening ourselves to be transformed by those who have been 'othered' by the systems and structures in which we live.

Out of that locally-rooted practice, Ruth Harley and I wrote Being Interrupted, which ends with a chapter on resurrection, exploring the possibilities of 'remaining', 'staying with the trouble', grieving and 'sensing life' in the midst of trauma and death, and of 'recycling': of 'being decomposed', broken open, and discovering other, often 'underground', ways of 'making home together'. And in the midst of these emerging possibilities was a story - from Anna Woofenden, a pastor on the edges of Los Angeles - of a church community that formed around gardening, eating and worshipping together, around the compost heap, and of God the Divine Composter in the midst of it all:

'She takes all that has been, all that we've used, our best bits and our slimy bits, the endings in our lives and the pain of loss, the tantalizing crumbs from our joyful moments and the leftovers we've kept for too long. God takes all of that and says, "Okay, great, let's see what we can do with it next!"' (Anna Woofenden)

Ruth and I were writing about 'resurrection in the compost heap' in Spring 2020, in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Little did I know, but the collective trauma of COVID was to be the trigger, for me, of a series of profound, entangled and painful 'undoings': in our neighbourhood community-building work, in our church community, in my family, in my personal, parental and priestly life. And in the midst of those 'undoings', those 'decompositions', I found myself pulled - sometimes alone and often with others - outside: into neighbourhood gardens, onto our local Common, into the woods - into more intimate contact with the 'specific dirt between our toes'.

And entangled with the personal decompositions, came theological decompositions too. I've been drawn deeper into work, with friends and colleagues, on 'dismantling whiteness' - deconstructing those racialised ways of being and seeing the world that imagine a “self-sufficiency” of “possession , mastery and control” and “strangle the possibilities of dense life together” (Willie James Jennings). This has required acknowledging that “the Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house” (Audrey Lorde). But also, if our ‘dismantling’ is by other tools, also acknowledging that “there’s no such thing as ‘away’”: what happens to the pieces of the dismantled structure? Perhaps ‘decomposition’ invites us to something beyond dismantling? “Composting shit” is a cumulative, ‘additive’ process (rather than just taking stuff ‘away’) (Sophie Strand). And a process requiring a collection of unusual capabilities (as Vanessa Machado de Oliveira outlines in her book ‘Hospicing Modernity’).

In parallel, and with Simon Sutcliffe [who's shared in organising this 'composting theologies' gathering], we’ve been exploring what decomposing a particular kind of (White, western, middle-class, non-disabled, heterosexual) masculinity might look like, which has drawn us into deeper engagements: with the entanglements of life, and communities of compost (via Donna Haraway); with 'the dark night of the soil' (via Norman Wirzba); with the journey of descent into the earth ('katabasis') as a journey of 'unlearning mastery' (via Bayo Akomolafe); and with indigenous wisdom and ancient stories of compost gods, that come to us, as Christian theologies, as resonant with, but also challenges and invitations to, the Jesus stories that we know well. Where Simon and I have got to with these explorings, is that people like us need to be re-connecting with the soil - for us to (re) discover the creatureliness that we share.

And of course, in whiteness and masculinity I've named just two strands of the entanglements of mastery, the 'white supremacist capitalist [ableist hetero-]patriarchy' to which bell hooks points us, and which, we are increasingly conscious, is not only strangling and deadly to human life and relationships, but also to the multitude of creature-kin with whom we share this fragile, warming planet. Decomposing mastery, and its theologies, is an essential shared task, right now, for our life together - in the broadest sense - on this earth. 

I am haunted by a short story by Alys Fowler that I read (some time in 2021, I think), called The Woman Who Buried Herself. Something like a fairy tale, the woman of the story falls in love with her garden, and finds herself pulled deeper and deeper into the soil until there is no simple way of discerning the boundaries between her body and the earth. This tells something of the journey I feel myself being drawn on - and one way of telling why I find myself drawn towards the 'composting theologies' gathering tomorrow.

For more details of the two 'keynote' speakers tomorrow, look out for my next blog, coming very soon...

References:

Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine (2022) p.17

Al Barrett & Ruth Harley, Being Interrupted: Reimagining the Church's Mission from the Outside, In (2020), pp.204ff.

Anna Woofenden, This is God's Table: Finding Church Beyond the Walls (2020), pp.129-32

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene (2016)

Norman Wirzba, Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land (2022) 

Bayo Akomolafe, 'Unlearning Mastery' [Humans and Earth podcast, Sept 2020]

Alys Fowler, The Woman Who Buried Herself (2021)

composting theologies: our keynote speakers

 

At tomorrow's (Wed 15th May) 'composting theologies' gathering, we are delighted to be joined online by two fabulous contributors who bring a profound depth and breadth of earthed experience, knowledge, wisdom and playfulness to our conversation.

I first came across Dr Emma Lietz Bilecky when I noticed that SCM Press are this year publishing her book, Decomposing Holy Ground. Everything about the title got my excited and intrigued. She is a fellow at Princeton's Theological Seminary's Farminary Project, who thinks, writes and teaches on the mutual formation processes between soil and human communities, while managing the seminary's small vegetable farm. She is informed by Western landscapes, love of food, and degrees in theological studies and environmental management.

My first encounter with Dr Bayo Akomolafe was reading his beautiful book These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: letters to my daughter on humanity's search for home (2017). It brought together some of the newest scientific understandings of our beautiful, complex, entangled world, with 'new materialist' feminist philosophy, the earthed wisdom of Bayo's Yoruba roots, and his personal reflectios of growing into parenthood - and it made my heart sing. And then, beyond his written words, I heard him speak, in a number of stunning podcast conversations, on science and non-duality, 'unlearning mastery', 'composting Christianity' and more. He has a breathtaking, poetic touch with words that invite us deeper into the mystery of our entanglements with all life in our more-than-human world. He is a celebrated international thinker, writer, teacher, and founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide initiative that seeks to convene communities in new ways in response to the critical, civilizational challenges we face as a species.

We are so fortunate to have them both joining us in conversation. I can't wait for the conversation to begin!

An earthy ascension?

Thursday 9^th May, Ascension Day
(Contribution for 'Chapter & Verse' in Reform magazine, May edition)

The ancient Egyptian myth of Osiris tells of a ‘green’ god, born of earth and sky, a river god in a dangerously overheating world, who offers his cooling waters to the parched earth. After being brutally dismembered by his jealous brother, his widow Isis gathers the pieces of his corpse and plants them across the land of Egypt. Once a king, he has become the soil of the kingdom itself.[1]

However ‘earthy’ our understandings of the incarnation of God in Jesus, the story of his ‘ascension’ can all too easily undo that earthiness. Having been buried in the earth, Jesus is not just resurrected (literally, ‘stood up again’), but his body is ‘taken up’ and away from his disciples. It is easy to find ourselves, with them, left standing ‘looking up towards heaven’ (Acts 1:11), swept up in a return to the kind of ‘sky god’ theology that devalues the ‘down here’ in ways that, as we are now all too aware, have been profoundly damaging in our relationship with the earth (and by ‘our’, I mean particularly we who are children of Western modernity).

There are two pointers in the text to suggest that this should absolutely not be the case. First, there is the angelic couple who ask the disciples why they are still standing there and tell them that Jesus ‘will come in the same way as you saw him go’ (v.11). Second is the promise from Jesus himself of the power of the coming Holy Spirit (v. 8). There is a continuity between the Jesus they have seemingly ‘lost’ and the Spirit who is coming, that redirects their attention somewhere other than ‘up and away’. We cannot think (or preach) Ascension without Pentecost. The two are one ‘moment’ in the story, just as Good Friday and Easter Day are one inextricable ‘moment’, even if both such ‘moments’ also contain a hiatus, an uncomfortable ‘in-between time’, that demands a thoroughly grounded patience, an insistent waiting, a stubborn ‘sticking together’ (that often women, in these stories, seem to be better at than men).

Contemporary science and ancient indigenous wisdom both remind us of an ecological complexity to the world that we modern Westerners have tended to forget. They also complexify the ‘up-down’ cosmology of the ascension story and its theological legacy. It might have made sense of the writer to the Ephesians to declare Christ as ‘far above all rule and authority and power and dominion’ (Ephesians 1:21), ‘far above’ the oppressive politics of Empire and domination that the Christians of Ephesus would have known well. But what if the immeasurably different power of God (v. 19) is more akin to the complex, underground, connective systems of roots and mycelial fungi that enable the sharing (between trees, for example) of nourishment, communication, care and wisdom?[2] An elusive yet powerful ‘undercommons’ that the powers of Empire will never comprehend?[3]

What we humans notice as mushrooms are merely the above-ground ‘blooming’ of such vast, subterranean fungal networks. The mushroom’s caps shelter a whole host of tiny spores which, eventually, are ejected with huge force (10,000 times the G-force experienced by astronauts leaving Earth), high up into the air. Fifty million tons of spores enter the atmosphere every year, following the wind, riding the currents, attracting water molecules, accumulating into rain clouds, and finally falling down to earth again in the rain, creating the perfect, damp conditions for mushrooms to grow…[4]

“be glad, and rejoice in the Lord your God, for … he has poured down for you abundant rain… I will pour out my spirit on all flesh…” (Joel 2:23, 28)

Are we perhaps offered here an ecological parable of a more embodied, more ‘earthed’, Ascension-and-Pentecost? Instead of searching for some distant heaven, why don’t we learn to sing and dance in the rain, in the outpouring of the Spirit on all flesh? Instead of standing looking up for the Jesus we think we’ve lost, why don’t we look downwards, following the loving gaze of the one who ‘has put all things under his feet’ (Ephesians 1:22), and who reminds us that the place on which we are standing is holy ground (Exodus 3:5).

 

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[1] For more, see Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2022), pp.120-4.

[2] See. e.g. Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, And Shape Our Futures (Dublin: Vintage, 2020).

[3] See Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, The Undercommons [FINISH REF.]

[4] See Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand, pp.11-12.