You haven’t lived until you live next door to two youthful dogs who have not yet figured out the etiquette of doggie-doing. Life is, in its way, enriched when your shoe greets, as it goes with you out the door, the visitation of a neighboring animal, who, no doubt, only meant to say “good morning,” but, in fact, gave you a new challenge and a reason to regulate your language about dogs, stairs and life in general. Nauseating and disgusting, “it” adheres to your shoe until you take quite drastic measures to refresh your sole and, if you are like me, calm down slowly before taking yourself onward.

Well, in fact, you who are reading this column have lived, with or without two youthful dogs. And you have stepped in “it,” even if your locality enforces the pooper-scooper law with Inquisitorial rigor. You have, I submit, dunked yourselves in the detritus of the human race; you have stepped, somehow, into what Scripture calls “sin.” But your soles – make that “souls” – are not without remedy. And the remedy is the, shall we say, “offal” stuff of our stepping.

The splendor of the burning bush story, wherein Moses encounters Yahweh and learns His mysterious name (“I am what I will be”), is countered by its own refusal to give the Revealer more than a generic identification (“I am what I will be” would not qualify as a used-car ad, now, would it?”). Splendid it is, but it leaves us (and Moses) in a bit of a muddle; God speaks, but who is this God whose name is elusive and whose identity is known and yet not known? The point of the story is the ambiguity of it; we know and we do not know. The name is given but the meaning is denied. We are and we are not “illuminated” by the burning bush.
Follow the tale, though, and take it through the earthier terms of Luke’s gardener.

The image of the living thing (the bush) that is compatible with fire (the destructive force, but yet, in antiquity, the energy that ascended to the highest reaches of the cosmos) betokens the union of heaven and earth, the Divine fire and the earthly flower. Luke, with his manure, sends us down to the “it” that neither Exodus nor he wish explicitly to name. We must, however, if we are to be true to this season, and if we are to profit from its uncompromising nature as a light “illuminating” our true selves for the sake of bearing fruit. And we may follow the gardener’s advice, remembering that in at least the tradition behind St. John’s Gospel, God the Father is explicitly called the “gardener” whose care is responsible for the fruit-bearing.

Fertilize the Tree

Simply, the gardener’s advice is to “manure” the fig tree; use the awfulest, foulest stuff we can set foot in to make the garden grow. When we step in what manure is made of we can react in a number of ways – deny it (but it still has that singular odor!); curse it (but it doesn’t disappear from the sole of the shoe); blame the animal (but nature will not bend to our blame!). But there came along at some point in the history of agriculture someone who realized that this junk could do wonders for the garden. The same is true of sin: we can deny we commit it (but it still has that singular odor!); curse it (but it doesn’t disappear from the soul!), or blame someone else for it (but sin, as St. Paul would tell you, is written into our finite nature and will not go away on our say-so). But God is the super-gardener who made of sin the stuff of fruitfulness. God’s great Lenten gift is our self-awareness. Sin is a fact of life – not one to disappear as the result of our Lenten resolutions, but part and parcel of what we are: frail and faulty. Grace, on the other hand, is God’s transmutation of sin, our experience of gratefulness that we are loved and sustained by a Father-gardener who knows full well how full of “it” (sin, I mean) we are and yet embraces us in our honest recognition that sin is the very reason why we turn to him for healing. Why else would we turn to him? But how else could we be true to what He made us to be did we not turn to Him?

‘Necessary Sin’

Is it possible, then, that sin is actually a good thing? Well, to give the devil his due, consider the words of the Easter chant, the “Exsultet.” “O happy fault! O necessary sin of Adam that gained for us so great a Redeemer!” Or the words of a prayer we prayed earlier this year: “Not even the tensions and the tragedies of sin can frustrate your loving plan.” Sin is not something to celebrate in itself. But with the chemistry of God the Father-gardener, sin becomes the manure that makes his field fertile, fruitful and fiery-lively.

We, God’s revelation of Himself to the world today, flourish as a mystery no less than the bush that burned but was not destroyed. We burn in the fires of our own penitent failure, but God sustains us in a miracle of grace. We, precisely as sinners who go forward in the surety that the shame is not blame so much as blessing, are the voices who say, “I am who shall be.” Christ-crossed with the confidence that “what we shall be” is not other than the image of Him transfigured, beyond the stench and stain of time.