Pastor's Corner May 2021: Multitudinous

(I am large, I contain multitudes). - Walt Whitman

Don’t worry; I’m not going to make you go find a copy of Leaves of Grass so you can puzzle your way through “Song of Myself.” If you feel motivated, you are perfectly free to send me a brief essay laying out your case for Whitman’s choice of punctuation here. Why parenthesis? The declaration seems bolder than a parenthetical comment. Do they represent the container of the multitudinous self? Does the ephemeral nature of parenthesis suggest the porousness of the self? Assignments are due on -

No, wait. That’s not what I meant to write about.

I recently learned a factoid that made clear how literally we can take Whitman’s poetic assertion. (It’s different from the cool fact I learned about earthworms from Danusha Laméris’s poem, “Feeding the Worms” - that they’ve got taste buds all over their bodies. The things poetry can teach you!) It’s that less than half of your body is actually...well, you.

At any given moment, roughly 57 percent of the cells in your body are the cells of other species - bacteria, fungi, viruses, archaea. (You can read a little more about that here if you’re so inclined.) You are, in other words, roughly 43 percent human. And that’s not an insult! It’s just plain fact.

I don’t know about you, but one response that awakens in me is wonder. We hold entire worlds within. We and our microbiomes have evolved to need each other; we are co-adapted. It also awakens humility: we do not exist without “the least of these.” (The biblical phrase takes on a whole new shade of meaning now, doesn’t it?) We are more of the earth than we consciously realize.

Maybe that’s worth thinking about in this season of gardening. Your fingers in the soil are a return home. Like calls out to like. You are not just you, but so much less - and so much more. We exist in relationship, and salvation lies in mutuality. We’re not conditioned to think this way in the world of extractive economies and consumer capitalism. But perhaps if we reflect on it deeply we’ll find that this is God’s good news.