57 ~ Holy leftovers
I was born, baptized and confirmed in the One, Holy, Apostolic and Catholic Church - have my ticket punched to heaven. Although I don’t subscribe today to the specifics of the Church’s dogma, I still enjoy returning to Mass on occasion. I’m a monotheist with a polytheistic worldview, and the Holy can be found in many places, under many names. Whatever someone wishes to call the Creator is fine with me. After all, we’re just the blind touching the elephant - God by any name (Allah, Yahweh, the Great Spirit, Krishna, Odin or last night’s sunset) can be experienced, but, imho, not really known, not boxed into human-comprehensible dimensions.
My favorite part of the Catholic Mass comes after Communion, when the priest starts cleaning up. Doing the sacred dishes as it were. As far back as I can remember, it has intrigued me to watch the reverential, even sensual, way a priest gently brushes crumbs off the Communion paten – crumbs from the body of the Son of God – into the chalice. Everything sacred, and thus honored. He then gives the chalice a swirl to catch the crumbs with the wine, and drinks it down, nothing wasted. With a vigorous wipe and dry of the chalice with a cloth – a yeoman’s act that seems to bring us back to earth - the job is done, and everything tucked away until time for the next miracle of transmutation.
I often recall this simple reverential act, and mimic it in a sort of meditation, when I scrape bits of food from a plate into the compost bucket, or brush piecrust crumbs from an emptied pie tin into the pail for the hens. All gets used, because everything is sacred, in that it is capable of feeding something else.
One consequence of my sabbatical from grocery shopping has been increased attention to using everything, putting it all into service. It’s been an approach of necessity, but which came on naturally (and simply harks back to the way our forbearers lived 50 or 100 years ago). Nearly everything organic that passes through my house gets used fully – food scraps go either to the hens (and then return to me as eggs) or to compost for the garden. I empty the dust bunnies from the vacuum cleaner onto the compost pile, and pee on the garden to give it nitrogen (in winter a friend of mine keeps a “pee bale” outside his back door, and pees on it all winter; in the spring, the straw with its accumulation of nitrogen goes onto his garden). Some of the cardboard boxes brought by the UPS man go on vacant areas of the garden as biodegradable kill layers, and when I pinch houseflies off the windows or Japanese beetles from the beanstalks, I let them know it’s OK, that they will feed either the hens or the compost, and so continue in the circle of life. The smallest thing is part of the greater whole, and thus important –including each of us.
I have my own Communion chalice at home, which I call a compost bucket. And therein lies a key to living life well: to find and remember the sacred daily, in seemingly small or ordinary things. As Rumi reminded us, “There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground” - and a thousand ways to honor traces from the Eucharist.