s!#@ on the roots

“let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put on manure.”  Luke 13:8  ESV

During summer’s scorch the birch tree withered,
so many dead branches, leaves shriveled and brown.
“Cut it down,” he said, but that sounded so cruel.
“Prune it back,” I said, “and put s!#@ on the roots.
If it comes back, good; the tree might flourish.
If not, then dispatch it.”
                                          The tree’s still there.

 On Good Friday, our dog, long and lean, went lame, 
its dachshund body prone to spinal collapse.
“Put her down,” said the vet. “But wait.  Tell your kids 
while I’m gone; I’ll do it when I get back.”
By now, sick of tending the invalid dog,
I banished her to the garage… heard her yowl
as she groveled and chafed down to the bone.
When the vet returned, saw her will to live,
she said, “Back to the garage.  Moleskin the wounds.”
S!#@ on the roots— it sounded so callous,
But on Easter she stood, healing in her wings.

S!#@ on the roots.  Farmers know its value. 
Know how its vulgarity burns and stinks,
a tender but fruitful and frightful suffering.
Fertilize me; I’ll bear the stench of You;
With s!#@ on my roots, let me burst forth green.

Liz McFadzean

Advent is the church season when we look forward to the time of Jesus arrival.  It’s a season of waiting, and we all have learned from 2020 that waiting is hard. The scriptural epigraph at the beginning of this poem was the genesis of the what follows.  Jesus tells a parable about a withering fig tree.  In his story the man who cares for the vineyard wants his employer to give the tree one more season before cutting it down.  The employer has already been waiting and waiting for this fig tree to produce.  Here he’s being asked to wait one more year…our worship minister this week described Advent as “sitting in the pain of waiting.”  

And then, Jesus adds a little detail to his parable of the fig tree:  fertilize it.  “Fertilize” is such a nurturing word.  In the ESV, it says put manure on the roots.  That’s a little more graphic.  However, what flashed through my mind was something a pastor friend, born and raised in Nebraska, said to me long ago: “The farmers where I grew up would never use the word manure to describe the excrement that they put on their fields.  They would say ‘shit.’”  This is a farming term, only turning vulgar in our mouths when we use it to describe something or someone that we disdain.  

The vineyard worker is asking for mercy and forbearance, but he’s not saying it will be pretty. It will be costly and painful.  Fertilizer burns as well as nourishes, and manure stinks to high heaven.  The word “shit” is offensive, but no uglier than sin and pain and disease and dissension, and not even as offensive as the death on a cross that Jesus endured to purchase our freedom from all of the above.  We can make it sound nicer, but as acclaimed writer Flannery O’Connor said, “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”   

Making the crucifixion more palatable may even cost it some of its shocking power.  So why not just say it?  Call it what it is.  I know that we don’t like the sound of such words.  But I don’t want to be too subtle about what it cost God to save us from ourselves.  I want to remind us now, while we wait for his birth, that Jesus’ death was vulgar and offensive, yet so fruitful!   I wonder if you would rather that I just use the word, or do you prefer that I expurgate?