Introduction to Vaux's 'season of dirt'

By Kester Brewin, read out at Vaux February 2002

Welcome to Vaux 4.0. As the flyer states, Vaux is about journey. Staying still can reflect satiation, satisfaction with where you are, an inertia to change and desire to keep things as they are.

Vaux continues to persevere unsatisfied. We have not arrived. What we do is not it. And so this year, as in the last three, at the heart of what we are doing is a desire to pursue God further. To not accept pat answers. To allow our doubts to surface and charge the real questions of how to forge a spirituality that works in the situation we find ourselves. One that 'embraces a world under pressure by mining the traditions of the past, and fusing them with the culture of the present.'

Our pursuit of God is taking us simultaneously into the depths of ourselves, and into the heart of the city. And this dual journey seems vital. That we begin to strip away the fiction, the images, the bandages that we wrap round ourselves - as if we were, as Merton says, invisible, and needed to wrap these things round us to make us seem real. To become more real to ourselves, and yet to become more integrated into a city that seems to be facing an increasing vacuum of principles, grace and community feeling. The paradox struck me the other day in the tube: a carriage stuffed full of maybe 100 people; no one able to move for armpits. And yet the place was empty. Nobody was actually there. Some were elsewhere in music, some in headlines and magazines; some just closed their eyes. But not one person was actually there. Everyone in apnoea - holding their breath, refusing to interact.

We have to stop holding our breath in the city. We have to start breathing the air around, and interacting. And we have to begin to know ourselves, and admit who we are. Here lies the irony: in a world too restless to find time to change, we have to embark on a journey of stillness: finding 'Sabbath space' outside of economics and consumption and advertisements. Space to open the well of our inner life, whatever dark water that may uncover.

So to this season of dirt.

The story is told that Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst, had a vision. He recounts in his autobiography:

'The sky was gloriously blue, the day one of radiant sunshine. The roof of a cathedral glittered, the sun sparkling from the new, brightly glazed tiles. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the sight, and thought: "The world is beautiful, and the church is beautiful, and God made all this and sits above it all far away in the blue sky on a golden throne and..." Here came a great hole in my thoughts, and a choking sensation. I felt numbed, and knew only: "Don't go on thinking now! Something terrible is coming..." I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forthwith into hell-fire, and let the thought come. I saw before me the cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on his golden throne, high above the world - and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral.

I felt an enormous, indescribable relief. Instead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon me, and I wept for happiness and gratitude.'

Jung goes on to talk about how he experienced the Church - where his father was minister - as lifeless. He saw his father as reliable, but powerless, presiding over a church purified to the point of sterility. And he saw Victorian Christianity as dead religion - finally blocked of any life by its own purity.

The problem of what to do with our dirt is one that still faces us. The church Jung experienced seemed to advocate hiding it, denying it, submerging it into our subconscious. And perhaps still does. "How are you?" "I'm fine". Hold your breath, and deny you are even here.

Dirt, of course, comes in many forms. It has been defined by one as 'matter out of place'. Soil on our shoes is dirt. But a discarded crisp packet in newly ploughed soil is dirt. And food that two seconds ago was delicious, becomes repugnant as it is scraped onto another plate. If you feel out of place, you can feel excluded, dirty.

But dirt has also been described as that which has no place. When we have finished making sense of our world, dirt is the stuff that doesn't fit. Other races, women priests, homosexuals, the infected, the disabled, the asylum seeker. Dirt is always a product of creating order. And where there is dirt, there is always a system of some kind, and rules about dirt are meant to preserve that system. Honouring the distinction between the dirty and the clean helps make the world an orderly place, while dishonouring that distinction - defecating in the wrong place, or mixing with the infected - threatens the design, the cosmos.

The book from which we read about Jung is 'Trickster makes this world' by Lewis Hyde. In it he analyses the trickster figures from various mythologies around the world, and uses their stories to argue that it is these dodgy characters that invigorate life, and bridge the gap between heaven and earth.

'What tricksters in general like to do', he says, 'is to erase or violate that line between the dirty and the clean. As a rule, trickster takes a god who lives on high and debases him or her with earthly dirt, or at least appears to debase - for in fact the usual consequence of this dirtying is the god's eventual renewal.'

So we come to Christ, who stamped over the line of clean and dirty, ate with the prostitutes, touched the lepers, raised the dead, drank with extortionists, walked with foreigners.

And as we see dirt as 'matter out of place', we see Christ on the cross as the final picture of this: become dirt for us. For what could be more out of place, more wrong than God dying, cursed as a criminal.

And as we see tricksters as the figures who debase gods to renew them, we see Christ as the ultimate trickster: debasing himself, descending into the filth of hell and death, in order to bring renewal.

So we must ask ourselves, as Jung's vision forces us to: have we overpurified Christ, left no place for him to interact with the dirt that was his everyday life? Have we made the Church too like the Pharisees that he denounced as 'whitewashed tombs' - quick to judge people as dirty, and quicker to alienate them from the place of cleansing?

Have we closed the spiritual doors too tightly on those parts of our journey that didn't fit with the nice, cosy order? The dark nights that caused us pain, that made us suffer?

If we are to reinvigorate the church, to make it again the body of Christ, we must allow it to become filthy. To accept all who come into the doors without judging. And as we will come to communion later and proclaim that we, individually as well as corporately, are the body of Christ, we must begin to accept that most difficult and dirty of people: ourselves.

So welcome to the dirt season. Part of this continuing journey into ourselves, and into the city. We hope you will travel with us over the year.

Let's pray.

.....

Before electric lights, we would have seen the night sky much brighter. You have to get into the desert to see the stars... the place we have come from.