By Courtney Pinkerton
What does a composter have to do with Advent? This is the season of holy and growing darkness, of darkness that is alive! Advent darkness holds a lot inside, like rich back dirt. The liturgical color, deep blue/black, has a velvety depth and reminds us that dark can be a color of its own. And that God is at work in the dark. And we wait in this season for the Christ Child but also we wait and watch for our own transformation: trusting that nothing in our lives is ever wasted. God can recycle our failures, and hold our sadness, grief, and confusion.
One of my favorite Buddhist meditations instructs the practitioner to meditate on your own corpse. How’s that for a non-cute and sentimental Advent reflection! There are a lot of Zen koans telling students to go and sit in graveyards and hang out in other liminal places. What is this about? I think it relativizes the one who is meditating. It puts our life and our life’s work in perspective. It reminds us that the big Silence is at the beginning and end of our lives and we move and breathe always in this ‘in between’ space.
I am finding myself reflecting this week, in random moments while driving or doing laundry or wherever, on what is happening in our composter which we reinstalled in the little garden by the Kidd Springs rec center on Sunday. What is in there? Dried leaves gathered at CliffFest. Scraps of paper which we collected from the community, the Emerging Christianity Conference and Sunday’s worship: bits of bad theology people want to leave behind, as well as wounds, fears and anything else people wanted to toss in there. We promised to turn it into something good for them.
I find it comforting to think of people’s bad theology getting all soggy and beginning to rot. Of wounds getting wet and fears starting to smell putrid. And of all of it heating up in the winter sun in that black tumbler. On its way to becoming something else.
One of the prayers from the Common Prayer book we discussed last week has a line about how touching humus, the end product of composting, makes us more human. That keeps cycling through my thoughts as well. Let us make some humus together, some life-force for the soil, and let us meditate on holy and warm darkness this week. Darkness that is wet and fully of possibility, like a womb.
The world is full of little mantras: Nothing is Wasted, Humus makes us Human. What are your mantras or centering prayers this week? I think the Spirit is always gifting us with ways to connect to this moment and to our small place in the cosmic picture.
Now, that would be a place to land but maybe it is too simple a stopping point. Because this week I am also reflecting about how we should be careful exhorting each other to self-empty as part of our practice. Or at minimum we should qualify that statement.
She is right; there is good self-emptying and bad self-emptying. Stated differently, there are likely seasons of self-emptying and seasons when we need to be filled anew. Seasons to break down our inner scraps and seasons to apply rich, delicious-smelling compost to the base of our tender shoots. Both practices are knitted together, two halves of a whole.
But it is critical that you know which season you are in. Often I think the people who need to be filled up by the church are the ones who hear the self-emptying message. And those whose egos need to be broken down a bit only meditate on how God can make them feel good.
So my prayer for us this week is that we can be a community of discernment. That we can help each other settle in on our spiritual work this season of preparation-whether it be a time to strip away or a time to build up or likely, a time to do a bit of both.
Courtney Pinkerton is the Pastor at Church in the Cliff in Dallas, TX.
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