The Compost Heap

To be blunt, this last year has been absolutely awful.  I know on a societal and cultural level things have been crazy for everyone, but even in my personal life, it’s just been one devastating blow after another lately.  I won’t lay it all on you, but if I did, a mournful violin tune would start playing in the background, and you’d text me one of those broken heart emojis with the sad little bandage wrapped around it.  (And I would appreciate the sympathy.  I think it’s merited.)

It is difficult, as a person of faith, to appear pious and reverent when all I feel like saying to God is, “my life sucks and I hate everything”.  So I do say it, cause I’m pretty sure God can handle it, and if he can’t then he should’ve made the world a hell of a lot easier to live in. 

But ultimately, I don’t want to land there, in the grumpy place, so after I’ve gotten my complaints off my chest and filled up God’s suggestion box with all my brilliant ideas, I start looking for meaning and purpose within the suffering.  It’s not always easy to find.  But, oddly enough, I think I may have discovered some in our compost heap.   

For those of you who aren’t hippies from the Pacific Northwest, “compost” is an assortment of organic matter—banana peels, eggshells, moldy fruit, hair clippings, coffee grounds, etc.—that is collected and tossed around until it decomposes into soil.  A good compost heap is, frankly, disgusting; it’s really just a mass of stinking, slimy, decaying garbage that worms and maggots love wriggling around in.  And that seems like a pretty apt metaphor for my life at the moment: a steaming pile of loss, pain, and stress that feels like it’s slowly rotting in my insides. 

But yesterday as I was bringing a bowl of food scraps out to the compost bin, I started thinking about what will become of all that decomposing trash in my yard.  It looks hideous and repulsive now, yes, (I believe I mentioned the maggots), but with time, that same compost will create profound beauty.  Natural processes break down the waste until it no longer resembles rotting garbage, but is transformed into fertile, nutrient-rich soil; and that soil will become the same food that feeds my favorite rose bushes, and the tomato plants I use to make pasta sauce, and the strawberries that the kids love to pick and eat in the summer.  So, ultimately, the compost heap is not the end of the story.  The ugly, decaying thing feeds the beautiful, new thing, and death becomes life. 

This, of course, reminds me of what Jesus accomplished through his Crucifixion and Resurrection, when death ceased to be an ending but instead became the bridge into a newer, more real kind of life.  It is because we die that we get to become more alive; resurrected beings are not dead people but fully alive people.  Jesus’ suffering, pain, and death were composted so that they became food for the miracle he was to reveal in the Resurrection. 

We, of course, get to share in that miracle:  in 2 Corinthians 5:17, St. Paul tells us, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.  The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”  He’s talking about that same process, because we are transformed in Christ, all the wounds of our past can be composted into something new and meaningful. 

But maybe we tend to skim over how difficult that transformation is, how painful it is for “the old to pass away”.  We can get very excited for the happy ending without pausing to acknowledge that the dying part, the “composting” part, is brutal.  I think it’s essential that we don’t minimize how real Jesus’ pain was, or how real ours is. The compost is dirty and ugly and we can’t pretend that it’s not.  So somehow, the Christian path is about living fully within the tension of those two realities:  authentically experiencing the misery of the compost heap, while maintaining hope and faith that someday, it will be transformed, and a beautiful rose will be able to grow because of it. 

Right now my compost heap of a life is still pretty rotten and stinky.  I am not enjoying it.  But every once in a while, when my husband gives me an unexpected warm hug, or I watch my kids getting dirty in the forest, I can sense the Spirit at work within me, laboring to turn that compost into new soil.  And sometimes, sometimes, I can even catch a glimpse of the rose that will come.