“The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has roots in earth and manure.”
– D. H. Lawrence
Being Christ hand’s and feet here earth means that we must be of earth and not just of ideals.
We must choose, over and over, to put our roots down in the dirtiest and stinkiest places of all. The places no one else wants to go because they are filled with waste and mess. Places that smell funny and look different and are completely repulsive to our American ideals of tidiness and order. We must dig deep, and loosen our bound-up standards of what are the right choices and what are the wrong ones. We must abandon any ideas we have of what a successful life looks like, what a human worth investing in looks like. We have to throw away the nice, safe containers of qualifications and merit.
Instead we must allow ourselves to be planted with the dusty and struggling row crops, in the little strip of earth that breaks through the cracks in the abandoned sidewalk, and on top of the compost pile behind the overflowing house. Only then will our hearts be undone, only then can we see that we receive and give back through the same process of photosynthesis as every other living thing. We all must look to the same sun and the same rain for our nourishment. We are all, even the fairest of the flowers, meant to be rooted in, and grow out of, earth and manure.
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