Guilding my garden

Sunday, 16 Nov 08 (posted about 1 months ago) Overcast 9°C / 48°F

I am on the altar guild at my church, which means I help care for the communion silver, set up for communion, and clean up after the service. One of the things I have to do is dispose of any unused consecrated wine and bread after the service. You are supposed to reverently return them to earth, which means eating or drinking them (reverently!), or if you don’t want to do that, you can pour the wine on the earth and bury the bread. I usually choose to pour and bury. We have a beautiful piscina that we use to “pour” the wine (it drains outside in a flowerbed), but I usually bring the bread home and bury it in my garden.

I serve on the guild about once every three months or so. December is my month, so I will have more bread to bury. I don’t like to bury the bread in my veggie garden because I don’t want it to be disturbed until the worms have done their work completely. So I’m trying to find good spots for it in my front yard, but it’s hard because I plan to do a lot of work out there in the spring. It will also be cold and rainy, and I assume I won’t want to be out there digging a lot of holes, so I dug a couple this afternoon. I dug two under the bush that we are not going to remove in the spring, and another one in the middle of the lawn. That probably won’t be enough, but it is a start.

I get weak when I think about this bread in my garden. It highlights for me how precious the everyday processes of decay, rotting and rebirth are.

Want to comment?

Nax wrote:
A garden is such a holy place, and gardens figure in the mythology and texts of every religion. What a beautiful thing to do!

Posted on 17 Nov 08 (about 1 months ago)
Katxena wrote:
Thanks Nax. I love mixing sacred spaces this way.

Posted on 17 Nov 08 (about 1 months ago)
Jolantru wrote:
This is very beautiful and the words touch a chord inside me.

Posted on 19 Nov 08 (about 1 months ago)
Rainymountain wrote:
I would actually find it hard to bury bread knowing how many people are going hungry. I guess my take on edible plants, ie. gifts from the earth, is that they should be used and eaten with thanks. Too many people around the world are not in a situation to grow food to eat and go hungry or worse.

Posted on 19 Nov 08 (about 1 months ago)
Katxena wrote:
Luckily the priest at my church is very good at estimating how much bread she needs for the people that are there. The amount that’s left over is usually fist-sized or less. We’ve had fill-in priests from time to time who don’t have that knack, but even then the left over amount is maybe the size of two fists.

I know if you add up all the churches all over the world, that ends up being a lot of bread, but even if it were collected, you’d have a distribution problem and then you’d have to make sure it was consumed reverently (since it is consecrated). The resources are probably more efficiently spent on procuring different food for the hungry.

I feel comforted because it is returned to the earth in a useful way rather than being tossed in a landfill.

Posted on 19 Nov 08 (about 1 months ago)
Matangie wrote:
Katxena — At our church bread and wine usually gets finished but we find lots of other things that need reverent disposal — palms from Palm Sunday, roses and basil from holy week, etc. Our priest usually tucks these in between and behind shrubs in the church’s landscaping. Usually it’s only one or two things but I’ll never forget the day I walked past and did a double-take on the huge pile of rose petals. :-)

Posted on 19 Nov 08 (about 1 months ago)
Katxena wrote:
Matangie, that’s really funny. I sometimes bury the bread somewhere on the church grounds instead of taking it home, and I can’t tell you how many people have stopped to ask about my “gardening”, especially if it’s cold or raining or otherwise unpleasant.

Posted on 20 Nov 08 (about 1 months ago)
Istara wrote:
Would it be appropriate to put the bread in a bokashi composting bin? That way it gets returned to your garden eventually (after six weeks or so) but it would also be part broken down so go into the soil much better.

Posted on 22 Nov 08 (about 1 months ago)