What Makes Soil "Good"? A Lenten Reflection

Friend of Episcopal Charities, Whitney Bauck, shares with us some reflections for Lent:

Then he told them many things in parables, saying: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still, other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.” Matthew 13:3-8

What makes soil “good”?

A non-agriculturalist reading the Parable of the Sower could be forgiven for thinking it’s simply a matter of being thorn- or rock-free and out of the way of ravenous birds. But there’s a whole movement of regenerative farmers rising up whose primary focus is soil health, and they’d probably tell you there’s more to the kind of fertile ground Jesus talks about than that.

Soil is not an inanimate object like a rock. When it’s healthy, soil is alive, teeming with microorganisms like fungi, bacteria, and protozoa. This microverse of tiny creatures we can’t see has a huge impact on the things we can. 

When they are present and thriving, the food grown in the ground these microorganisms inhabit is more nutrient-dense, the land retains water more effectively and more carbon dioxide is pulled down out of the atmosphere. In other words, good soil makes our food healthier and our land more drought- and flood-resistant. It even has the capacity to fight climate change by sequestering greenhouse gases that contribute to a dangerously warming planet.

But here’s the secret to all that life-giving goodness: it is largely made possible through death and rot.

Farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry describes the process of watching a few inches of soil build over the span of 50 years in a galvanized bucket hanging on a fence near his family farm. Over the years leaves have fallen into the bucket, insects have crawled into it and died, birds have left their droppings and squirrels have left the shells of the nuts they eat. As these various elements have disintegrated and been metabolized by invisible microorganisms, they have become, over time, a few inches of rich black humus.

This is a mixture made of the rotting bodies of creatures that once lived, plants that once bloomed, and literal shit.

This is the recipe for good soil that brings forth life.

Lent comes to us as a time to look death squarely in the eye and acknowledge its inevitability in the face of a culture that tries to ignore it. “From dust we are and to dust we shall return,” we say, remembering that in spite of our wrinkle creams and green juices and shiny screen-mediated lives, our bodies will ultimately rot into the ground.

But Lent is more than just a time to remember that death is inescapable. It is also an invitation to see that death is a prerequisite to the kind of fertile, abundant life most worth having.

If Berry had insisted on fishing the dead bugs and rodent poop and crusty leaves out of that bucket every time he passed it, he would have missed witnessing the miracle that is the creation of healthy soil. And if we run from the hundreds of deaths and heartbreaks our lives bring us, trying to avoid the pain rather than absorbing and metabolizing it, we too will miss our miracle: the opportunity to be transformed from sterile dust into living soil.

“The topsoil… is enriched by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility,” writes Berry. “Its fertility is always building up out of death into promise.”

This Lent, let us remember that the seasons of grief, death, and barrenness are no less necessary than the seasons of planting and harvest — and indeed, that the former lays the groundwork for the latter. Holding space for both is the only way we will become the kind of living soil that can produce enough sustenance to feed a hungry world.

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Whitney Bauck is an associate editor at Fashionista. com. She got her start writing about the intersection of fashion, faith, and ethics on her blog Unwrinkling while an art student at Wheaton College. Prior to working at Fashionista, Whitney contributed to the New York Times and the Washington Post in addition to working at Vogue.com and Billboard.