Mud People

In his new book Liturgies of the Wild, Martin Shaw writes of growing up with a preacher for a father and of a house that “reverberated with whatever sermon he was currently coaxing into life.” I liked that phrase, “coaxing into life.” Boy, does it resonate with most weeks  for me. Shaw also talks about being fascinated by the opening pages of the big book his dad was always preaching about, in particular this sentence: “The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” “I liked it,” Shaw says. “It was weird.”

It is weird. Human beings are endlessly weird. We alone of all God’s creatures seem capable of both soaring heights and unspeakably terrible depths. We are restlessly creative and creatively restless. We are angels and animals; sources of delight and despair. We are made for love, by love, through love, and we chase it all our days. We settle for so much less than what we were made for. We are relentlessly inventive idolaters. We have depths to our souls yet we can be tediously trivial. We crave beauty in our bones, but create so much that is ugly, false, and destructive. We are prone to wander. We are seduced by that which kills us. We are wondrous, terrifying mysteries. We are not nearly as curious about ourselves as we ought to be.

We are, Shaw says, “mud people with a kind of holy breath.” We are creatures of dirt and divinity. But we do not automatically become what we were made to be:

[W]e require the holy breath to turn lead into gold, and for us to become a “living being,” as Genesis puts it. I think there have been moments in my life when I’ve barely been living at all… Without the breath there is no alchemy, we remain mud and only mud.

Who among us cannot resonate with that second sentence? It’s easy—so terribly easy!—to live a life that is not living at all. Sometimes we are ground down by difficult life circumstances. There is the usual litany of pains that is always affecting someone somewhere (and sometimes the someone is us). Physical suffering, relational decay, precarious finances, un- or under-employment, etc. The crushing weight of duty. The burdens of others. The terrifying state of the world. Then there’s the ease with which we can settle into lives that just feel stuck. Settled. Predictable. Routine. Dull. Fearful. Protective. Years can easily go by in this state. It’s not terrible. It’s just… less. Things like wonder, anticipation, surprise, delight, hope seem like rumours from another life, and other world. Not ours.

Shaw puts it like this:

A mud life is all outcomes and no journey, is endless insurance but never a gamble; a mud life is a statement not a poem. It’s only half the picture. A mud person is nervous of a dance floor, a poker game, a paradox. They are not entirely animate.

For Shaw, it is myths that lead us into “animate” lives, lives that are really living. They provide the ingredients for becoming a “living being,” The best stories tell our stories—they invite us into lives of moral consequence, of dignity, of freedom, of adventure, of enchantment. They pull back the muddy veil and show us that there is always more to the story. They help us to see the ways in which we are made human. The point us, always, Godward.

It’s often around mid-life where many people begin to assess the muddiness of their lives. They’ve spent a few decades pursuing all the things they were told to pursue—the education, the job, the kids, financial security, etc. And they may even have achieved some of these things. And life has perhaps come to feel like too many outcomes and insurance and statements and not enough journeys, gambles, and poems. And they look at the road ahead and think, “Is this it? Is my life just a few more decades (maybe) of… this?

It is precisely at these moments, I think, that we need the reminder that holy breath can always turn lead into gold. We can always be reawakened to wonder, to joy, to the sense that the presence of God is always crackling under the surface of all that seems muddy. Regardless of the stage or state of our lives, we are always being invited deeper into the life of God. God is always whispering (sometimes shouting), “Pay attention, be open, take a chance, don’t close a door, step ahead with me. I am here. I love you. I will make a living being out of you yet.”