Dust With Breath In It

The plot at the far end is Joe's and it has been Joe's for six years, and he is on his knees on a folded feed sack at five in the afternoon putting things in.

It is a good hour. The light has gone long and gold across the whole site, and there are four other people down there, and somebody has a radio on very low, and the man on the plot next to his has been telling him about a hospital appointment in installments for about twenty minutes without ever quite getting to the point.

Joe's hands are filthy. Under the nails, in the creases, up the wrist. His knees are wet through the sack. There is soil on his forearm where he wiped his face without thinking.

He is forty-nine and he is happier here than anywhere else in his life, and he has never said that out loud to a single person.

Not because it is a secret. Because it sounds small. Because a man who says the happiest he ever is, is on his knees in the dirt at the end of a Tuesday, sounds like a man who has not got much going on, and Joe would rather nobody knew.

And underneath that there is something else, which is what this is really about.

Joe prays. He does. He is not a stranger to any of it and he has a real thing with God that has held him through two very bad stretches. And the way he thinks about it, without ever having decided to think about it that way, is that the spiritual part of his life happens with his eyes shut.

That is where God is. In the quiet, behind the eyes, in words. And out here, this is just dirt. This is a hobby. This is the good hour that gets him through the week and it does not have anything to do with the other thing.

He puts his hand flat into the bed to make a hole for the next one, right down to the wrist, and it is cold and heavy and alive, and it comes to him, out of nowhere, in the words of a verse he has known since he was a boy:

Dust of the ground. And breath.

And the strange thing, kneeling there with his hand in the soil, is that he has always heard those as two things in opposition. The dust part and the breath part. The low bit and the high bit.

You have that arrangement. Yours might not involve a garden. But you know which part of your life you have filed as the spiritual one, and you know what word you use for the rest of it.

Read the last clause again

Here is the verse, and I want you to read it looking at the very last thing it says, because that is the clause that undoes the arrangement.

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.Genesis 2:7

Man became a living soul.

Not: God put a living soul into a man. Not: a spirit was placed inside a body. Became. The soul is what happened when the dust and the breath were brought together, and the sentence describes one creature arriving, not two things being stacked.

You are a living soul, and that is the name of the whole of you and not the name of one department. That is the written word and not my defense of your hobby, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the second chapter of the Bible and lays it in a raised bed at five in the afternoon.

That single verb has been doing quiet damage by being read the other way round for a very long time. Read it as a spirit installed in a body and you get exactly the arrangement you have been running: a real part and a housing, a high thing and a low thing, and a whole life of trying to get the good bit out from under the other bit.

Read it as it is written and you get a person. One. Made of ground and breath, and neither half of that is the real one, because there are no halves in the sentence.

God's hands were in the dirt

Now the verb at the front, which is just as physical.

Formed. It is the potter's word. It is what a person does at a wheel with their hands and their weight and their whole attention, and it is used of God in the first paragraph anybody ever wrote about the making of a human being.

The first thing recorded of God in relation to a person is that He got His hands into the ground.

So the material you have been quietly apologizing for, in your own case, is the material He chose, worked, and then breathed into. He was not making the best of a bad medium. He picked it.

This is yours, and the ground you are kneeling in is the material He reached for first, and it is already settled. Genesis 2 says formed of the dust of the ground in exactly those words, and the same Spirit who is the breath in that verse is the one making it a present fact in a man with soil up to his wrist.

Now let me guard it, because this could be pushed into something silly.

I am not telling you the soil is holy in itself, and I am not putting anything into that ground that Scripture does not put there. The dirt in that bed is dirt. It is the Creator's handiwork and it is not a power and it does not know your name, and anybody who tells you otherwise has left the Bible behind entirely.

And I am not telling you that kneeling in a garden is the same as prayer, or that you can do one instead of the other. Your time with your eyes shut is real and God is in it and you should not trade it for anything.

What I am telling you is that the split is not in Genesis 2:7. The verse names one creature. And the hour that is the best hour of your week, in which you are on your knees, using the body He formed, in the material He chose, is not a hobby that has nothing to do with the other thing. It is the same person, doing what a living soul does.

And nobody handed you the split deliberately. It is in the air. It has been in the air for about two thousand years and it did not come from Scripture, and half the people you have heard preach are carrying it too.