Humus, Humility, Human

Stuff and how it matters.

First, an announcement. As you may remember, I recently took a break from what I call the Slipstream, the current of events which rushes past me on a daily basis (news, feeds, podcasts, audiobooks, headlines, radio). In the wake of that experience, I will be launching a weekly email digest of good news. Just a short list of laudable things. It is not meant as a replacement for news but a refreshment for those who are exhausted by the onslaught of the Slipstream themselves. I will be in touch shortly with more details but wanted to let my Heart Before the Course readers know first! I will continue this project here separately as always. And thank you (as always) for reading.

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“Let all conceivable rocks be rolled away, let us all see keenly into the nature of things with a Magdalene eye.” -Martin Shaw, “The Cross Speaks”

“We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things.” -Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath

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I greet you from the near side of resurrection! I can attest to a weeklong binge on alleluias and chocolate. And maybe then some.

When I think of all the stuff we encountered just a week ago —bread, wine, stones, rough wood and sharp thorns, incense, spices, ash, the sharp, cold smell of lilies, a sole voice singing, candle wax dripping, the light pushing at the darkness — they were transformed into nothing other than Love itself.

How can these things be?

In Latin, the word for dirt or soil is humus, which we have inherited as meaning “vegetable mould,” the stuff of earth that’s decomposed from plant matter. It’s also related to humilis or "low," whence of course we get humility. The word human is lurking there close by in the history too, from the ground. From dust you came, and to dust you shall return. The last time I heard that line (besides Ash Wednesday) I stood at my grandmother’s grave and my three-year old suddenly ripped out a handful of clover flowers and threw them into the grave. That’s when I lost it. Wet face, muddy hands.

Muddy knees in church

So I had been pondering whether it would be life-giving or burdensome to haul my sons to all of the available services at church. We’ve loved the Great Saturday Vigil where they were both baptized four years ago. They’re so young and have lots to discover later on. But I kept thinking about the weightiness of those other days and maybe it would be good for their small hands to feel just a bit of the heft of them.

So when I finally let on that we’d be going to a few extras, I got some pushback. We love our freedom around here, and it wasn’t at all clear to them yet that it was liberating to say yes to ANOTHER CHURCH SERVICE. In the end, I coaxed the Smaller Son out of the garden and his “mud creations” while flagging down the Taller One from a sweaty game of laser tag in the yard with the neighbors. They were painfully quiet as the family car inched through crosstown traffic in a downpour of tropical proportions. But once we entered the dry, cozy upper room with Yeshua and his friends I detected a slight change as their hearts turned toward the good there for us. When I knelt to pray I felt my patella bones creak and thought of the soil ground into the knees of my son’s pants, transformed into Love itself.

Then the air around us took on a chill. Judas left, the distinctive smell of the angel of death wafting in as he exited.

Bones in the Garden

Our journey continued over the next days, through shadowy and fragrant gardens, from life to death and back again. There’s a poem that kept circulating in my mind as we followed Yeshua from the dinner to the garden to his death and the cave. It’s got a touch of horror and a lot of beauty that’s haunted me for some time. It comes to us from the Quebecoise Anne Hebert, whom I’ve mentioned here before.

Our hands in the garden

We had this idea 
To plant our hands in the garden 

Branches of ten fingers 
Little skeletal trees 
Sweet little flower bed. 

All day 
We waited for the red bird 
And fresh leaves 
On our polished nails. 

Not one bird
Not one hint of springtime 
Was caught in the trap of our amputated hands 

If you want even one flower,
As single minuscule star of color,
One single wingflap
One single line of birdsong
repeated three times --

You must wait for the next season
And our hands melted like water. 

What I love about this confession is that it begins with a kind of blind certainty and cocksure assertiveness that gradually gets worn away by the humiliation of time. We all start out with our own ideas of how to manipulate (Latin man- for hand + root of plere to fill) our surroundings, even down to being able to alter nature itself. This can look like what humans are supposed to do, but it is in fact an ersatz imitation of good stewardship, a dark enterprise that leads to dark places. It is like the bread dipped in wine and handed to Judas, a mandate for evil he’d already said yes to in his heart of hearts, a gross parody of the holy meal.

The short-sighted part of this approach is that in attempting to carry out these manipulative ideals we amputate our own hands. We dress up our disjointed fingers with red nail polish, hoping that we’ll attract birds and trap them in our dead appendages. But all these fail. Like so many tiny towers of babel, they disintegrate over time and the only thing for it is to wait for the season to re-incorporate our sad old bones into the humus and serve as compost for future growth.

Yeshua’s body was buried by a secretive friend, bones in the garden awaiting their own springtime, which came against all odds in three days instead of millennia, speeding up the rebirth of all creation which continues to our day at a good rhythm, despite all of our attempts to control it with our own timeline.

Time in Space

When Rabbi Heschel says that we must not forget that things do not lend significance to a moment, but the moment to things, he is not disparaging the world of things (sips of wine, clover flowers, seeds in mud, Easter lilies for your mom, jelly beans, four-part harmony) but rather offsetting this very human desire to enslave and be enslaved by things. From what I’ve come to understand of the Jewish tradition, time is paramount; space comes second. This is good medicine for all of us who would try to make more of rites and traditions than the moment itself which descends and makes holy.

It also speaks to our innate human drive to make a method of something (“Five Simple Ways to Celebrate Holy Week with Your Family”) rather than submit ourselves to a longer initiation into the Way. So says the cook in an ancient Taoist tale retold beautifully this week by Caroline Ross in her substack. I recommend this whole post to you, but the kicker for me was how Cook Ting articulated his relationship to the ox carcass he was expertly carving: “Now I meet it with spirit rather than look at it with my eyes”.

So yes, let us put our hands in the garden. But please, keep them attached. To the whole body. And may the whole of you rejoice as you watch the springtime bring things from the dust of your hands —

—risen indeed!