Soil is Not a Metaphor

Soil is not a metaphor. Death is not a metaphor.

It has become fashionable in the world of ecotheology to use natural processes as metaphors for spiritual “realities”. The “death” which is an integral part of soil formation processes and decomposition becomes a teaching tool to help process—and justify—the suffering we experience as part of God’s “redemptive plan”. God can take the most infertile and rocky of soils, so the story goes, and transform them into soils full of life and richness, but we must pass through death to get there: as soil fertility owes itself to countless things which have died to become food for the collective good.

I am troubled by this way of narrating soil’s life, for there is great danger in reifying death through it. It strikes me that this death is out of touch with the death of those who mourn and grieve the loss of a loved one, of death which is premature, of death by suicide, of death which is not redemptive and should not be said to be—death by suffocation and state violence which is unjust and terrible all the way down. The so called “death” of ambition, of plans or expectations, of a certain sense of self—I cannot take seriously any comparison which seeks to equate this “suffering” with the suffering of a friend dead to suicide. The second does not lend itself to easy narration. It sticks. It will not be overcome.

Death is a principal foundation of the universe, or at least, so far as I can tell, of this planet and its evolutionary processes. I am careful, however, to yield to a social Darwinism which glorifies the loss of the losers for the sake of the (s)elect. Death is with us, eternally, not as a tally or a head count but as the common fate of sinners and saints whose bodies are thoroughly material. It is our bodies, their fluid and their bile, which will ultimately become soil’s food. There is not much flowery or romantic about this.

The ubiquity of death reaches out to touch us. Death is the immense pain of living, a thick worldless memory of the land and of our blood. Of course, this explanation does not soothe that pain away or render it something different and unrecognizable, but brings it ever closer. A world of death is a world inhabited by ghosts, an animate world that watches and holds its children. A world that demands everything (your life) but also gives everything (its life)—there is no leaving behind this resurrecting reincarnation. We become the place we are.

The problem with metaphorical reductions is the unrecognizing habits of generalization they impose, when the task, I think, is recognition: to particularlize earthy engagements, to see soil biota not as things (assets or ecosystem services to be captured in service to soil carbon sequestration or theological education) but as lives responsible to their own ends. Or, perhaps it is that these soil makers and movers are responsible to ends determined by soil communities,  through cooperation and symbiosis. While these movements are often interpreted as a kind of manipulative competition (we go to great lengths to prop up preexistent ideologies)—they are in reality, a practice of mutual, collective consent.

As we worked in the garden the other day, weeding, some students of divinity wondered about the personhood of plants, and how to reconcile the decisions we make in cultivation to selectively take lives. Do plants resent the hands of the weeder, crying out when individually uprooted? Or, is this way of seeing plant life—as responsible only to their own visibly distinct flourishing and thereby ruled by competition—itself a capitalocentric imposition? Do plants become compost only reluctantly?

It strikes me that the plant wisdom we seek to learn is in large part perspective: a perspective on the workings of many processes in which we are a constitutive part but only very minimally in control. As seasoned gardeners know, our presence influences the way the world moves around us, but our agency is also limited by many other forces with which we’d do best to cooperate. Like in fermentation, our hand contributes to the making and rearranging of environments in which other lives flourish and multiply, but it is the invisible, heterogenous collective that does the always open-ended work.

Is the gardener’s role a kind of chaplaincy, seeking to create conditions for honorable death in good faith? To recognize the particularity of lives and suffering and to seek repair in deep time, through care? Like a chaplain, the care we give is limited by many circumstances we cannot transform. The best we can do is to better live (and die) with them. And not toward some other, spiritual or immaterial end, but as a practice which values, and multiplies the value of the here, the now, the divine life we continue to share.

To begin in this direction requires recognizing the lives we take and on which we depend. For this reason, any responsible theological thinking with soil requires at least a basic familiarity with soil processes—learning to perceive creatures by name and the traces of their lives and labor. Without this attentiveness and care, soil spiritualizations partake in familiar forms of commodification: enlisting soil labors in life support for a dying church. Thinking with soil, caring for soil, being transformed with soil, requires knowing soils in the particular, not merely through metaphor. For love is not a metaphor, but an active verb (like compost, soil, manure) How can we love what we do not know? How can we know what we do not touch?