Catechesis as manure. Manure as death. Catechesis as valuing waste and death to reveal long-term nutrients for living.
I often walk in the cemetery. Today it was cold, crisp, and quiet. Walking up there, I was talking on the phone with my husband about where we wanted to be buried, or laid to rest, as some might say. I don’t know. And we had differing opinions about the deciding factors.
Burial itself is morphing and shifting in meaning and parameters. So much existential change, even in how loved ones say goodbye, final resting places, what it all means, and who or what informs it.
As I reached the cemetery an old, familiar, even comforting smell met me: manure. My grandfather grew up poor with orchards, barns, chickens, and ploughs and he loved growing things. Every spring he had a truckload of manure dumped on his garden in the city. He grew vegetables, and often had a box marked “free” on the side of their busy street filled with the surplus from his garden. What if we framed catechesis as manure, mixed with death, and the possible meaning, connection, and transcendence of it all.
Simply put, manure is animal waste. In its raw form, it can burn plant roots and spread weeds and germs. If composted or left to age (wherein harmful biproducts are released), manure powers the living ecosystem of the soil and provides long-term nutrition to plants. What do we make of the waste in our lives? We’re often told its useless, good for nothing.
That’s not God’s view or plan. It’s built in nature. The regeneration of waste. And death feels like the greatest waste of all. It is, and maybe it’s not.
Why do so many people wear a crucifix? What an odd thing, wearing a symbol of death around your neck. What an odd thing, putting processed animal waste on a place where you want things to grow. I guess God is odd. Or generative, in places where I’m sure it stinks and nothing good or new can grow.
Catechesis as story, as relationship, as person has the power and effect to get into the manure of our life, composting and aging it, creating a structural web where hard clots are broken apart and loose particles are held together, so that we can be nourished and breath into a living ecosystem.
