Some Sentences on Darkness and Dirt (Rev. Ragan Sutterfield)
Cover image: Night at Rainbow Trail Lutheran Camp, Colorado, by Harold Vanicek, a Lutheran pastor in the Texas Hill Country.
It is the dark that turns the leaves gold and red, orange and hues of purple. It is the dark that signals the branches to sever the leaves, each twisting downward in a kenotic gesture. Empty the tree bark thickens. Empty it waits.
Beneath the earth, at home in the dark, longing for the winter and its banquet, sinews begin to spread in white filaments—dark webs that run beneath the leaves. Neither animal nor plant, they are an other that lives between and yet they abound around us and inside of us and on us. Do they know and think? It is hard to understand their understanding and yet it seems so. Beneath the ground they translate between trees, they signal, they organize, they turn the lifeless dirt into the soil. So it is with unseen things — we never notice and yet without them—nothing.
There are stories of whole towns in the Middle Ages breaking into days of dancing, spontaneous and inexhaustible. A coming of the Spirit? Perhaps, but in the form of ergot fungi.
I once bought some mushroom spawn, bags of sawdust covered in the white mycelium of Oyster mushrooms. On my receipt the company had printed its slogan: “Proud to Be Part of this Rotting World.” The world is rotting and so it is living again. When a field is covered with leaves and the leaves do not rot, when they do not quickly turn back into the soil, then that field is unhealthy—its soil devoid of the life that turns death toward life, toward resurrection.
On the counter in my laundry room I have a bucket full of paper bags and hay, sweet potato peels and salad gone bad. In the bucket there are thousands of worms, voracious in their appetites. They eat all of this and turn it to a black soil that I spread across my garden, inoculating it with the aerobic microbes that live within the worms. Like fungi, worms flee the light. When I want to gather them, I expose the surface to sunlight and find all my worms huddled at the bottom, hiding beneath their bedding.
Working with the soil, seeing the beauty of its rhythms, I cannot help but think of the day of my own darkness. One day my breath will go and my body will be laid to rest. Rest is what darkness gives and in rest my body will become a banquet, a prelude to the eschaton—the heavenly meal already starting beneath the ground. I believe in resurrection, but that theological hope is only one among a continuum of transformations from death to life and most come in the dark.
Dirt is what soil scientists call the dead earth. It is a mix of minerals, but it is unlikely to lend new life, new growth. Soil is the earth made alive, an ecosystem, a household of billions all living and eating and replicating beneath the surface. This soil is called humus and we are human beings, drawn from it, fed by it. To be a human fully alive is to be humble, close to our source. To be humble means that we must learn to live in darkness, in unknowing, the silence in which we learn to hear the whole.
I go into the woods, the leaves damp, finches calling overhead in the twilight. It is evening, but already the darkness is coming. I sit against an oak, breathing in the smell of humus, I close my eyes and I wait without hope, without fear, without desire. In the dark of this winter I simply wait, knowing that Love will tell me when this death is over. One day the roots nourished by the leaves, fed by the fungi, will draw from the black ground and push up through the trunk, branching against the sky where bud and leaf will emerge, and once more, light will turn into food for the dark.
###
Ragan Sutterfield is an Episcopal Priest in his native Arkansas. He is at work on a book on humus and humility. You can find his previous books, subscribe to his newsletter, and learn more about his work at ragansutterfield.com.
