Lessons from the Compost Heap

How Boethius helps us see the value in failed attempts at the Good, and how those failed attempts energize future growth

When I started my own compost pile just a couple months ago, I can tell you what I expected:

• Flies

• Stench

• A general sense of not knowing what I’m doing, and

• Hoping against hope, a giant pile of nutrient-rich soil amendment

I’ve encountered the first, avoided the second, simmered in the third, and the jury is still out on the fourth. What I didn’t expect was how much I would enjoy simply standing there watching my chickens scratch out the pile in search of wriggling morsels, nor did I anticipate just how easy it is to map composting onto other domains. Lessons positively abound.

Confession, for instance.

My chickens in the confessional. Erm, the compost.

Not immediately obvious? I’ll explain.

Boethius, Happiness, and the Good

In his The Consolation of Philosophy, Roman senator, consul, historian, and philosopher Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (b. 480, d. 524) wrote a dialogue between Philosophy — represented in the royal form of a resplendent, fire-eyed woman who “seemed to touch with her crown the very heavens” — and himself. Boethius begins by bemoaning the betrayal of Fate who had mercilessly taken from him the wealth, fame, power, and all the benefits of his noble birth after having piled the same on him from the time of his birth until just before his writing. Tensions were high between the Roman and Constantinopolitan Sees, and Boethius was working hard to mend the relationship between East and West. He found himself exiled due to a false accusation of treasonous correspondence with Eastern Roman Emperor Justin I, correspondence that he claimed was seeking “the safety of the Senate.” Whether true or false, his accuser, Cyprianus, earned him an extended stay in an Italian prison where he awaited his eventual execution. Like many saddies before and since, Boethius turned to the Olivia Rodrigo, Lana del Rey, and Billie Eilish of his day: the Muses of Poetry.

Lady Philosophy was none too pleased to find her former student and devotee wallowing in this depressed state and chases the poetic Muses off with a few choice words, saying that they never actually heal but only further “foster the sorrow with poisonous sweets,” ensnaring the wounded “with the barren briars of the passions: they free not the minds of men from disease, but accustom them thereto.” After the Muses mope off, Boethius stares up through bleary eyes at his teacher and she begins, gently, patiently, reminding him who she is, applying her salves to his many and raw wounds, and ultimately restoring him to health. Hence, the consolation of Philosophy.

The pair wend their way through a number of topics: fickle Fortune and her lessons, those things highly prized by men, theodicy, free will, Providence. But the most pertinent topic to this piece is this: that all humans desire the highest good and seek by various means to attain it, and in the attainment thereof lies the ultimate happiness which all humans long for, and the perfect possessor and fountain-head of this happiness-bestowing good is God. I’ll let you read the Consolation yourself to decide whether that is a convincing conclusion or not. To possess God, then, is to possess all good and therefore all happiness, while to possess any of God’s creatures (i.e. created things) is to possess less than all good and all happiness.

Short of agreeing on deity, I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that we have all found certain actions taken, certain items obtained, certain methods employed, to have fetched for us less happiness than we had anticipated. At least, the happiness lasted far shorter a time than we might have liked. We bite into a Tootsie Pop — one, ta-HOO, *crunch* — only to discover we’ve accidentally picked up a tequila sucker and a scorpion awaits us at the center. Charlie Brown, the patron saint of the disappointed, looks into his trick-or-treat sack and calls out to us from his Halloween-bedecked neighborhood street, “I got a rock.” Yeah, Chuck. Us too. Things fail to make us totally happy.

And what about goodness? The mustache-twirling, cauldron-stirring Evil Villains of our cartoons and movies rather spectacularly fail to convince us of the rottenness at their cores. Why are we left feeling this way? Because, Lady Philosophy says, all people are oriented toward and desire the good, or at least what they perceive to be the good. The evil person — except that no-good neighbor that gave Charlie Brown a rock, they knew what they were doing — far from believing their actions to be wicked, truly believe that what they are doing will in some way attain for them the good and, indeed, make them good. Their malice towards the righteous seem to them justified. Their actions, despite their intentions, have failed.

Both of these categories, the circumstantial disappointments and the botched attempts at doing and being good, are ever-present realities for us. The former wear us down and can inspire cynicism; the latter, on the Christian worldview, are sin. What are we to do with our failed attempts at being happy? At being good? Let’s return to composting.

Waste and Composting

In my garden right now are summer squash and zucchini, a couple different tomato cultivars, various beans and cucumbers, carrots, and a couple different flowers. The Southern summer sun gives and gives and gives of its light and heat, the leaves of my plants opening their stomata wide to receive its rays and the carbon dioxide present in the air so it can photosynthesize. Each plant’s roots reach deep throughout the soil to take up the nutrients and the water that will transport them to where they are needed in the plants structure to produce more foliage, more flowers, more fruit. My intention in all of this is to reap a harvest so my family can eat. This is obvious.

And yet there are sometimes casualties. The beating sun clobbers leaves; rot sets in because it has rained for too many days in a row and the soil has gone anaerobic; crops fail to grow for lack of pollination. Or, due to my own lack of knowledge or attentiveness, I fail to notice pests; I overwater; I plant as neighbors two species that ought not occupy contiguous space; I realize only too late that I should have provided a crop more shade.

As a gardener, I really have no choice but to prune my plants following these occurrences and I am left with a pile of shriveled and rotted and decaying organic matter. A previous version of me would have taken the waste from my garden and trashed it. The attempt, the product, my time, my resources: wasted.

According to this brilliant conversation between Beth & Shawn Dougherty and Marc Barnes of New Polity, this is precisely the wrong way to look at it. For them, ontological waste does not, and in God’s world indeed cannot, exist; things are only waste in relation to goals, but never in and of themselves. Beth in a profound moment says about so-called food waste, “It’s not not there. When I devalue it, I unmake it. I deny its existence.” Even for the non-religious this must have the ring of truth. The first law of thermodynamics tells us that energy, in which all material reality subsists, cannot be created or destroyed, only changed into different forms.

Gardening failures due to circumstances, which are enormously disappointing, and failures due to my weakness, which are even more so, land this now-dying or -dead organic material into the pile next to my house. When failure occurs, a quick snip and a toss later these leaves and plants and fruits find themselves, not in the trash can, but in the compost heap instead. I reflect on what caused this in the first place. As a result, I become a better gardener and my failure becomes earth.

Composting habituates in the gardener a particular disposition toward circumstantial and personal failure, namely, one that shepherds its decomposition so that it becomes gift.

Confession: Compost of the Soul

I said earlier that failures to attain the good due to my actions, on the Christian worldview, are sin. My natural inclination is toward the good, but sometimes I consider the wrong things good and instead enact the bad. Not only does this harm those around me (since the good is not done to them), but I also harm myself (because I have further conformed myself to the bad). In Christian terms, I should have made my thoughts, intentions, and bodily actions “instruments of righteousness unto God” (Rom. 6:13 KJV) but have instead made them the ghastly tools of sin and death.

God is a gardener. THE Gardener, in fact (cf. Genesis 1-3, John 20:15). In God’s wisdom, He has appointed undergardeners and equipped them with the means by which our failures will not be relegated to our category of “waste,” but will be decomposed and made into a gift. The felix culpa — happy fault — of the Easter Exsultet.

In a way, our sin is composted.

Tomáš Halík writes,

There is an old Czech Easter hymn that speaks of the wounds of the resurrected Christ: His wounds are healed and shine like precious stones. And the great medieval German mystic St. Hildegard of Bingen taught that even our wounds will change into pearls.

The mysterious transformation of rotting stalks and burnt leaves and dying produce into nutritious soil has its analog in our souls. The wounds of inflicted sin become precious stones and pearls.

This seems, at best, like misguided saccharine optimism. Sin, after all, is my neighbor’s forced participation in my deformation. They and I both sustain real injury by it. This is not a matter to be lightly shrugged off by prettifying pain. Spiritually, this would be the equivalent of throwing the failed remains from my garden into a plastic bag and then into a larger plastic bin and never wondering why I had anything to throw away at all. By denying its existence, I unmake it, my neighbor, and myself.

Instead, by confessing sin and receiving Christ’s forgiveness, I resist the false category of “waste.” Rather, my soul is offered up for careful pruning that what is pruned might be composted instead. I am reshaped. In botany, a plant’s characteristic shape is called its habit. Appropriately, habit is the characteristic shape of my soul. In Boethius and philosophers before him, evil depends on the good for its existence. In gardening, decay requires the good plant for the same. Confession acknowledges this sin-decay, allows for that pruning which prevents further decay in me, sidesteps passing that decay to my neighbors, and decomposes it: through prayerful reflection and spiritual direction, I come to understand what good I failed to enact that I might learn to do, and thereby become, good in the future.

Layering compost in my garden where I planted carrot seeds earlier this season.

Anselm Grün writes, “Where I am wounded I am more sensitive toward other people. I understand them better.” In St. Paul’s words, “as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also abounds through Christ” such that “we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (2 Cor. 1:5, 1:4 NKJV). Philosophy consoled and healed Boethius; Christ and His undergardeners console and heal us.

Composting our sin through mindful confession might seem like an odd formulation. It probably is. Sin is something we have been taught we want removed from us, and this is absolutely the case. But not so it simply disappears. In confessing our sin, we do the opposite of unmake it: we acknowledge it. And by our acknowledgement of it, we are indeed separated from it while by God’s grace it is simultaneously made useful to us. My soul amended, I can now bear fruit, and when I bear fruit, my neighbor’s belly is filled.

Sin well-confessed is transfigured into spiritual compost that God the Gardener can use to amend our interior soil and help ensure a future harvest, for His glory and my neighbor’s good.

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