It’s the Manure That Makes Things Grow

It’s back again! A Ted Lasso quote. TV is not always my medium, but I am a super fan of Ted Lasso. I’ve watched two of the three seasons twice. In one of the episodes, Keeley, one of the main characters asks this question; I’ve reframed the language a little.”What is it called when you have the opposite of the Midas touch?” As you might remember, Midas is that Greek king who wished that everything that he touched turned to gold, but then he touched his daughters. ugh. The barmaid responds, “It’s the Midas manure.” Keeley responds, “That’s it. That’s what I have. Everything I touch turns to manure.” The barmaid was nonplussed. “Manure helps things grow, love.”

If this doesn’t make you want to watch Ted Lasso, I don’t know what will, but I’ll leave that there. The point is that manure helps things grow. The manure is what I smelled as a child when I’d stay for weeks at my grandparent’s house out south of Zeeland (a few short miles out of Overisel). Turkey poo. Pig poo. Chicken poo. You could smell a lot if the wind was blowing in the right direction. It was impossible for my sensitive nose to miss, but for my grandparents, it wasn’t strange in the least. It was normal; they’d grown up on farms, ankle deep in manure, which makes things grow. 

They knew better than me that deep logic of the world, the way of Jesus, the one that ultimately leads to justice and freedom, joy and beauty, thriving and growing. And that way comes with repentance, leaving the manure to do its work, letting all things into the light of God’s presence. 

Jesus tells us this: Unless we repent, we will all perish, just as those unlucky ones did. Yet even still, the mercy of God is more encompassing, more hopeful and beautiful than anything we could imagine. It’s the one who takes care of the tree that really knows that tree, the gardener. It’s the gardener who knows both the soil and the plant, who sees hope where there the owner sees none. 

We have a fantastic compost heap and every year have volunteer plants all over our garden, sometimes for good, and sometimes not. Two years ago, a cherry tree delighted in our soil, and in two years, that cherry tree grew taller than me. I was ready to get rid of it, but the 2nd born, the true farmer, the one who has grace for plants and compost and detritus promised me that they’d come get it. On Friday, they did and it’s gone out of our garden. But for at least a year of those two years, I wanted to repurpose it; I mean that I wanted to put it in the compost heap and let it go the way of all flesh. I wanted it gone. I wanted it gone immediately. 

We humans, we people have less patience than the gardener. We’re impatient with our neighbor, our sibling, our brother, with our sisters, with our friends, and we’re ready to “repurpose” the fig tree a little too early. We’re ready to get rid of what doesn’t work, to throw the metaphorical baby out with the bathwater, to rush to destroy  instead of letting the manure do its work. 

It’s because judgement is so easy and the other way – opening ourselves up to the other can be so very painful. But judgment is one of those sticky sticky things that gets us into trouble. It keeps people at an arm’s length, forgetting that they too are made in the image of God. Judgment means that I don’t have to look at myself, at my own weak places, at my own sin, instead, pointing out the “wrongness” of the other. Judgment builds a wall of contempt, of hostility, of hatred, of death. 

Instead y’all. It’s the manure that makes things grow. It’s not our clean, beautiful perfection, our strengths, our places where we’re competent. It’s the times where things were hard, impossible even. It’s those places where we couldn’t find a way out, where all we could do was slog and struggle and be stuck. It’s the heartbreak that made me grow. If there is a shortcut to heaven, it happens in adversity, when we take the heartbreak of our lives and open it all up to the light of God. 

It happens when we don’t blame it all on another. It happens when we face that source of our pain and frustration might be ourselves. It happens when we, like Moses, come face to face with God, reminding us that yes, even though we’ve been kicked out of Egypt, even though we no longer belong, there is still a place for us, a bastion of goodness, still a call on our lives on our being, because God doesn’t forget and nothing is lost. God sees us. God sees all of us, even the ones we othered because we were afraid. God isn’t stingy. God gives us all the spiritual food, the spiritual drink of the Eucharist, because God knows that we are human and that this humanity is our greatest gift. 

It wasn’t because Moses was some kind of spiritual guru that made him ready; it was all of the struggle, all of manure, all of moments of incompetence, all of his funny speech — trust me, Moses was no Charleston Heston — and this is what reminds us that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, what points us an even deeper truth. Because it’s not the Midas touch that matters. It’s the willingness to turn it all into something else that then God uses for God’s goodness, unprovoked and unexpected, heartbreaking and altogether lovely. 

Manure brings life, metaphorical or otherwise. 

This week, I swept 10 gallons of pine needles into piles on my driveway. It’s a side-effect of having two beautiful pine trees that shade my house during the hot summer sun, that remind us that death isn’t everywhere in the middle of winter, and that serve as nesting trees for so many birds. But in the spring, they let their needles go and drive me crazy. They get tracked in all over our house. I swept them all up, filled one five gallon bucket and then filled it again and threw them in our compost, where the fungus begins the deterioration and then those worms are ready to eat anything, exposed to the elements.

I want to end with a quote from the wise human, Parker Palmer

I will wax romantic about spring and its splendors in a moment, but first there is a hard truth to be told: before spring becomes beautiful, it is plug ugly, nothing but mud and muck. I have walked in the early spring through fields that will suck your boots off, a world so wet and woeful it makes you yearn for the return of ice. But in that muddy mess, the conditions for rebirth are being created.

I love the fact that the word “humus”–the decayed vegetable matter that feeds the roots of plants–comes from the same word root that gives rise to the word “humility.” It is a blessed etymology. It helps me understand that the humiliating events of life, the events that leave “mud on my face” or that “make my name mud,” may create the fertile soil in which something new can grow.

Though spring begins slowly and tentatively, it grows with a tenacity that never fails to touch me. The smallest harbingers of larger life to come, hard to hope until the outcome is secure. Spring teaches me to look more carefully for the green stems of possibility: for the intuitive hunch that may turn into a larger insight, for the glance or touch that may thaw a frozen relationship, for the stranger’s act of kindness that makes the world seem hospitable again."