Kneeling in Mud
“Earth stood hard as iron,” the Christmas carol sings, “water like a stone.” That was winter. Now the spring rains have saturated the softened earth until it’s all a muddy muck. My boots are nearly sucked off my feet. It’s a clear, beautiful day for planting six new trees, but everything is sludge. I can dig standing up, but eventually I have to get on my knees to plant this stripling, and I feel the ooze seeping through my jeans. My gloves are slick-coated in muck, and I have to wipe them on a nearby tree before I can grip my shovel. Everything’s a mess.
No one likes mud, no one likes working in mire. But this wet slurry is the blood of the earth, surging in to ready the ground, hard as iron, for life. If you want to be about life, you have to get in the mud. Get the blood-mud all over you. You can’t care what you look like; you can’t care about your precious reputation. You have to go where life is teeming, and that is never in antiseptic clean places, but always in mucky messes.
I mean the messes that overwhelm us, the slime pit of work, the shambles of family, the mishmash of cancers and diseases of the mind, the blood wounds of former friends. And worst of all, the messes of our own making. This is where new life springs up, because divine energy emerges exactly at the moment of our surrender.
No one wants to kneel in that mud, but it is a form of prayer, a way of being present to the mystery of muddle—a sudden awareness that the really good and true things happen in the miry jumble. We can’t make green shoots emerge from the mud, but God can. If we’re covered in mud, it’s ok. The God who knelt in the mud and formed us of the earth will meet us there.
Thank you, David. Once again you take a daily task and show the depth and height of it. Reminds me that in the Hebrew tradition, we are formed from the earth, that the name “Adam” is a form of the Hebrew “adamah,” meaning “earth.” God made us from earth and named us for earth. Not a bad place to kneel.
Thanks for that Adam and adamah connection—what I was writing about could be called “just coming down to earth.”
It’s a powerful visual David thinking of myself covered in my self-made mud by my bedroom window in June of 2012, on my knees, only able to mutter “Please Help.” Divine energy is a great way to describe what happened next. Lotta mud still caked on but I’m working on it.
Don’t ever get rid of all that mud, Matt—it’s what keeps you rooted, grounded and human.
As someone who is often working in the “muck and mire”, I appreciate the reminder that I am, most likely, just where God wants me.
Yes—you are, for sure.
I doubt many creative or life-giving things come without mess – cooking, gardening, tending our inner lives all involve a lot of time, effort, and grit. I’m not sure at what age and stage I got the idea that there was something wrong with that truth…Thanks, David!
It seems we spend a lot of our time in the muck, but that can be our best praying, with or without words. What…relief (a multitude of words fit here) – when God’s grace washes us clean!
Thanks, Cathy