By the Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan

February 17, 2021

There is this thing that gardeners say sometimes—don’t treat your soil like dirt.

At a practical level, it means that we need to recognize the incredible complexity of this most common and fundamental material. Treating soil like dirt means having an extractivist attitude, taking and taking without recognizing its limits, keeping it on artificial life support with chemical treatments and fertilizers, and then abandoning it when it is no longer useful to you and letting it dry up and blow away. On the other hand, if you feed soil with rich organic matter and treat it with respect, it will reward you with abundant harvests and will both live itself and create and sustain new life basically forever.

Theologically, the saying “don’t treat your soil like dirt” is a recognition that even soil is a gift from God, a miracle. Without it, we would not be alive—not a single one of us. Whenever I hear people talking about soil this way, with awe and wonder, with gratitude and respect, I feel like I’m in the presence of the holy.

Thinking this way about soil also makes me rethink the whole idea that we are made up of dust, and to dust we shall return. While it does not take away all the fear or sting of death, it does gently ask me to reconsider my feelings about my own mortality, and my own materiality. Soil and I aren’t so different. Soil needs compost, needs death, in order to create new life. Is that not true for people, as well? I know that there are things in my life that need to die in order for me to embrace new possibilities. But that doesn’t mean that there is any part of me, ever, that needs to be treated like dirt.

There is no way I can say any of this better than the way that the poet Jan Richardson says it. I’d like to read to you her poem, “Blessing the Dust for Ash Wednesday.” It says

“All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners
or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—

did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?

[…]

This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are
but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made
and the stars that blaze
in our bones
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.”*

Let us be marked not for shame. Let us be marked not for false humility. Let us claim what God can do within the dust, within the dirt, within the stuff of which the world is made.

We are dust. We are dirt. We are loved and miraculous and so completely interconnected and interdependent. Let us remember that—all of that—today, tonight, and throughout these forty days of Lent. Whenever you are tempted to be too hard on yourself or too hard on someone else, maybe stop and whisper, “Don’t treat the soil like dirt.”

Don’t treat yourself like dirt. Don’t treat others like dirt. Don’t treat anything in creation like dirt—treat it like stardust, like the most precious thing on earth. Because it is. Because you are. Because we are. Amen.

*This wonderful poem is in the wonderful book Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons by Jan Richardson. I do hope you will read it and be blessed.