spiritual Detritus

detritus n. pl.

1. Loose fragments or grains that have been worn away from rock.
2. a. Disintegrated or eroded matter: the detritus of past civilizations b. Accumulated material; debris: "Poems, engravings, press release she eagerly scrutinizes the detritus of fame" (Carlin Romano).

I'm not sure when or where I picked up this particular vocabulary word, but I' thought of it today as I walked home. Since I'm not driving and today was beautiful, I thought I would actually walk a bit instead of begging a ride of some unsuspecting church member. As I walked down one of those stretches of road where no one is particularly in charge of cleaning up the roadside, I couldn't help but notice--even with only one working eye--the detritus on the side of the road: soda bottles, Taco Bell sauce packets, a whole lot of cheap cigar wrappers (are all smokers of Swisher Sweets litterbugs?), the tiny specks of countless broken glass bottles, etc.

It remained me of a comment by the farmer-poet-mystic Wendall Berry. I don't recall if it was in one of his poems or an interview, but he made the comment about the edges of fields--the corners left unplanted where the tractors rounded off the end. Those places are often the repositories for farm junk--old equipment, leftover ends of barbed-wire bales, old oil cans, etc. Berry made the point that each of us has such places in our spiritual lives where junk piles up.

Walking along the road today looking at the litter, I couldn't help but think that roadsides might be another such metaphor for our spiritual lives. As we hurry on to the next thing, we move at such a clip that we don't realize the accumulation of things along the margins of our lives--things that we fail to deal with--things we discard without consideration--remnants of hectic schedules that allow too little time for reflection.

Roadsides are rarely cleaned up--if they are it's usually by prisoners or people needing community service. The detritus of our lives rarely gets picked up either, usually not until a crisis forces us to clean up our acts--and maybe not even then. How much better would it be if we could just live a little more intentionally discarding the garbage of life in proper receptacles along the way?

Grace and Peace,

Chase