I am apparently unable to talk about anything other than dirt.

So. I've been out a while. School and all that. But I'm still thinking about dirt, which I'm sure is exciting to a total of one person in this world. Namely me.

Dirt is life and death: death out of life, life out of death. When things die they hit ground. Bunches of little beasts eat them, die, and fall apart into dust. One of Danny Boyle’s movies told me that 80% of dust is human skin. Everything dies into dirt. Dirt is death. Every living thing pulls its life from the ground. Dead dogs are eaten by worms and flies and members of phylum Zygomycota. They die, and crumble into dust. A man comes, and dead pieces of him fall off in invisible flakes of skin while he cuts the dirt in two with an iron sword. The man drops in round balls that look dead. Water drops fall from clouds and shatter on the dirt. Seeds take nutrients from the dirt and live – they pull death from the soil and make it green life. Months later, this plant too will die, its hard labor ripped away and the stalk cut down. And the man’s wife will grind and knead and feed her family with bread, bread grown from death, life out of the dust.

We become dirt. Dirt looks better when we adorn it, like a beautiful woman wearing diamonds. It’s a mutually beneficial existence. Dirt in the wild is great, but not like earth that is cared for, tilled, and cultivated. It’s not the same. At the same time, the soil of overworked, overfarmed land is one of the saddest sights in the world. Drained of all life, it holds no promise, only sorrow. It’s true, though, that the untouched dirt of a national park is good like the Sabbath is good, that the pristine white sand of Pensacola is beautiful, but we need six times more earth to balance it out. Good earth. Dark earth. Black with minerals and nutrients and promise and growth and rot and hard work and death and life. We are becoming to dirt.

Dirt becomes us. A man is at home with his fingers in the dirt. Perhaps it’s my Southern roots, but I think there’s universal respect for a farmer, for a man who plunges his hands in the soil. Those who don’t like getting their hands dirty aren’t people I want to be around, speaking in the most general way possible. We need to be touching dirt. There’s a labor of Hercules in which he tries to defeat Antaeus, the giant who is immortal while touching earth, that should ring true for us (perhaps far truer than the Enlightenment would have us think – are we not just that way?). After all, “cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” Why is it that the most disturbing shot in every Western the toes of the cowboy’s boots dangling three inches off the ground beneath the lynching tree? Why does it always work? Why do people in space begin to deteriorate from the inside out? We need dirt to survive. If we leave it for long it leaks out our bones and muscles and we die. There’s a reason being hanged is the most disgraceful possible death in almost every ancient culture. Go, says the judge, go be pulled away from what makes you human, what you are most like in the universe, and be held there until you can’t breathe anymore while everyone watches you. Dirt is becoming to us.

God became dirt. Infinite beauty and power and love was bound and wrapped and pressed into clay that walked around on the earth and was hungry and hurt and cried and grew angry. Matter has never been created or destroyed, the great lords of science tell us. But the apostles chuckle and say that they’re wrong. A few trillion molecules are missing from this universe. Because Christ rolled away the stone from His resting place in the earth, and stepped forth in a body of dirt made new. And it’s not here any more. And so I must believe that there is dirt missing from this earth. It’s remade, renewed, purified of all remnants and scars of death, and sits at the right hand of the Father.

Dirt becomes us. Dirt was what God took and breathed life into. Dirt is what makes up our skin, our bones, and that little thing next to your small intestine called appendix. Dirt is made up of molecules, and some of those molecules are sucked up by roots into most everything. Grass. Wheat. Grapes. Some of those molecules go into cows after being grass. Wheat molecules become flour, then bread, and the grape similarly becomes wine. All of our food, at some point, came from dirt, and so all that we physically are came, sooner or later, from dirt. Dirt makes us better – Christ healed the blind man with mud. He called Zacchaeus out of sin into life: out of a tree and onto the dirt.

We become dirt. When we are done fighting with air, pulling it down and letting it out of ourselves, we are laid to rest. We sleep in the dirt, surrounded by the dust that we were. There we give up trying to hold the dirt we have. We give it back. And that’s the economy of the Gospel. Give up what you have. Give everything you have to others, and it will come back to you. Give up your pride to Christ and He will give you a real reason to be proud. Give up your strength to the dirt, from whence it came, give your bones back to the ground. And, one day – even so, come quickly Lord Jesus! – dirt will be raised up and pressed into a true body, one without decay or sin or death, and the breath of the Spirit will fill it with flame and purified, clean, unshatterably beautiful, you will stand made new in the World made new. An Earth made without sin, made with no thought of death, on dirt washed pure by the blood of Christ.

I am dirt

Consider this my apology. I've been gone a while. Sorry. This is the fruit of my spare time (and lack thereof), my thoughts these last two terms, my reading over summer break, and several lectures I've heard recently, most importantly a talk on Genesis 1 by Pastor James Jordan.

just so ya know: this post is long, ill-informed, and, like this note itself, startlingly self-important. welcome to blogging.

So I found this quote recently on the IMDB about the upcoming film The Hobbit, directed by Guilermo del Toro, everybody’s favorite Spanish director with a name that means “bull.” In said film, Ian McKellen will be starring as Gandalf the Grey. So, further ado aside, here ‘tis.

Not only will The Hobbit afford McKellen another chance to find his feet with one of literature’s greatest wizards, but the film will also allow him to return to the earlier incarnation of the character, Gandalf the Grey, who only appeared in the first of the trilogy, Fellowship of the Ring.

“Grey Gandalf is my favourite,” he told us. “Peter Jackson’s too, we always preferred Gandalf the Grey. Peter liked him because he got down and dirty. He slept in the hedgerows; he was closer to the earth and not quite so spiritual. He’s also funnier -- he’s got more variety to him. We thought there was more scope in that Gandalf.”

It struck me. I looked at it harder, and got struck a second time. Something didn’t seem right. Gandalf the White is without a doubt the greater, more powerful, and all in all stranger character in the Trilogy than Gandalf the Grey. Why is that?

I can’t accept the idea that it’s because he’s more other-worldly. That’s what McKellen is getting at here. Mostly we read Tolkien like the good gnostics the Enlightenment wanted us to be. We see Gandalf the Grey with stains in his beard and Gandalf the White as floating on a cloud. What we don’t realize is that Gandalf the White laughs more often, rides a better horse, and actually seems to use less magic than the old one. What gives?

I wonder if we can’t look at The Lord of the Rings as a struggle of elements. I mean, we can look at it as many, many things but I feel this is crucial. If we listen to Aristotle, the first are earth, air, fire, and water. The Nazgul ride dragons; they control the air. They themselves are vaporous spirits, and the evils of Mordor are described as “stenches” and “foul winds” coming from the place. What defeats the Nazgul? Water at the Ford of Bruinen, summoned by Elrond; fire, wielded by Aragorn at Weathertop and later at Bruinen by Glorfindel; and dirt. Aren’t the hobbits the people of the earth? And a hobbit (Merry) is the only creature who can break the spells holding the spirit of the Witch-King together.

Gandalf the White is no air-rider. He rides a horse, and the king of horses at that. He needs no spells to hold himself together (unlike his rival the Witch King); he is an actual living person with an actual body. He doesn’t really have epiphanies on the battlefield in which he hears angelic choirs going at it whilst he cavalierly looks at a moth (really, Jackson, really?). He fights and gets bloody and becomes tired and eventually gets in a boat to go off to the Western Lands, rather than floating out on a broomstick or some other such nonsense. In short, he is a very real, very earth-bound being.

What is it about dirt? I mean, what gives? We’re made out of dirt, right? And that has to have some significance. Wendell Berry discusses this a bit throughout the vast body of his writings, and in some poems especially. He talks about how it means that we are forever linked to this world, to the dirt under our feet; that it is like us because we are made out of it. This is good.

But as I read N.D. Wilson’s Dandelion Fire this summer, I started wondering if there was something more. In the world Wilson creates in the trilogy, those born with the second-sight, the seventh sons, all hold the power of some living thing (plants, as far as the series has gone). The protagonist Henry, for instance, has the power of the dandelion in his veins. And with that power comes the weaknesses and strengths of the plant. Just as the dandelion is easily broken, Henry gets knocked over again and again. But, like the weed, he gets right back up every time.

If you drop something onto dirt, granules of it go hither and yon. But it holds. Nothing goes right through dirt. It holds a 10 ton truck as well as it holds a feather. Even better, actually, cause most of the time you can’t get trucks out of pure dirt as easily as a feather. Dirt isn’t American. It doesn’t understand rugged individualism. A single grain of sand gets you nowhere. I can split it with a long fingernail. But get a few trillion or so of the whitest grains will hold half of Florida (and most of New York) on a hot summer day without breaking a sweat.

What happens when you burn dirt? Silicon, first. A weirdly silver sort of hard tinfoil that happens to conduct lightning really really well. We’re not too bad at attracting lightning ourselves. Except we don’t turn silver (what could have been, eh?). Keep heating that puddle of silvery goo in your crucible. Get it hot. Really hot. 2000 degrees is a good start. 4000 would be even better. Pour it on the end of a hollow stick. Breathe into it. You’ve made glass.

God calls us to remember that we are sons of Adam. Or, as we would say in English, Dirt-bag. God took the ground and shaped something in His image. He breathed into it. We are dirt. We have dirt’s weaknesses. Dirt gives way to everything. We have dirt’s strength. Dirt gives way to nothing. We have dirt’s ugliness. Regular old dirt ain’t much to look at. We have dirt’s beauty. Burn dirt and you get glass.

The world thinks dualistically. But be of good cheer. He has overcome the world.

“Did you mark how naturally – as if he’d been born for it – the earth-born vermin entered the new life? How all his doubts became, in the twinkling of an eye, ridiculous? … As he saw you, he also saw Them. I know how it was. You reeled back dizzy and blinded, more hurt by them than he had ever been by bombs. The degredation of it! – that this thing of earth and slime could stand upright and converse with spirits before whom you, a spirit, could only cower. Perhaps you had hoped that the awe and strangeness of it would dash his joy. But that is the cursed thing; the gods are strange to mortal eyes, and yet they are not strange.… He saw not only Them; he saw Him. This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you, is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a Man.” C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

The princes of the power of the air look at us and sneer: “dirt-bag.” We laugh and say “sure.” We know the end of the story. Jesus already showed us. Life is full of torment and pain, but it ends with an emptied tomb. The water from His side keeps us from burning up in the crucible of life. He rose with a body that walked through walls but still knew good fish and good wine, and still wanted a good fire to keep warm by.

Out in the desert of the world, outside the gardens of Eden and Gethsemane, we get fires and knives. Trials and tribulations are as common as cole slaw at a Baptist church picnic. We’re burned by the fire, and shaped by the knife. We’re born dirt and sprinkled with water to keep us from becoming charcoal in the middle of it all. Then, like the apostles before us, we are showered in fire. Cover us in the Spirit. Call on God to wrap wet earth in tongues of flame like Elijah did on Carmel. Take even a child, cover it in water, and let the Spirit do His work, God says. And watch that child take on the world. Watch it all go topsy turvy.