It’s been an interesting journey and this advent I wanted to reflect on the words “to all that remains”. The activist in me usually rushes to throw out words into the world and to resist this as a discipline this year I started a poem that I have been slowly adding to and editing for throughout advent so far. The past few years so much of my thinking has been drawn towards the earthed interconnectedness of what people call the Anthropocene. The space that transgresses the separation of culture and nature, it is a language that resonates deeply for. me and for those who have read this blog over the years will know im really not into dualistic ways of thinking. The journey this year has taken me deeper into compost theology, nature connectedness and the interconnectednesss of systems and particularly in recognition that we are all in the system. Bayos phrase “we are not stuck in traffic we are the traffic” has sunk deep into my soul over the last six months. Through all this my language has been in deficit, I can’t find the words to describe what is happening easily at this deeper soul level, I want to find a way to talk about the deep mystery in the deep compost, and usually find myself reaching for CS Lewis’s ideas of “Deep Magic” and Tillich’s “God as the ground of our being” and yet it still feels lacking. I guess it’s the space of art and poetry, so I wanted to write something more poetic to describe where my soul is reaching but even these words are only partial.
At the start of his article Doing Dirty Theology Terry Biddington writes “For a religion whose beginnings are to be found in an underground tomb or cave, the Christian community has made little effort over the centuries to familiarise itself with what lies out of sight beneath its feet, down there, under the dark earth, and in the soil that is, as we now recognise, the life-support of all living things on the planet (Cf. Genesis 2:4–12). Indeed, despite its beginnings in the soily depths, the Christian tradition as a whole has tended to strive only for the “light” of the celestial realms above and thereby eschew the mysterious “darkness” below. It seems historically to be a religion that has aspired ceaselessly for the bright realm of the heavens and has rejected the earthy darkness, the ensoiled and earthy materiality of the here-and-now.”
He goes onto discuss the earthy nature of Tillich’s statement, and that’s what I want to re-familiarise myself with. Its a journey that I thought I started when I moved here and started to relate back to nature through Mountain Pilgrims but actually its something I practiced long before I came to faith, when I would leave the house when my father had been drinking, or things were too much as sit by the stream where the wild orchids grew, or follow the deer and badger paths in the woods on the edge of Exmoor.
Advent is a good time to reflect on this earthed reality, but if we focus only on the light of the halo that so often surrounds our images of the baby Jesus we miss the deeper Christ that this halo is calling us towards. This space where nature and culture collide into the deep mystery in the deep compost where we have to let the soil do its work and let go.
When I started this post I thought the poem “to all that remains” was ready to publish but in writing this Im aware its not so that will have to wait for later in the season.