Beneath the Canopy: Finding Life in Death This Lenten Season

The temptation when one is walking through a forest is to look up. The beauty of the canopy, the song of birds, and the sunlight peeking through the overstory draw our attention. Recent science has brought our attention to the networks being formed under the surface. Roots and mycelia interplay in this wonderful system of connection that allows trees to communicate and even care for each other. These discoveries have left us as enamored with what we don’t as we are by sights that tower above us. And yet,  when we look down, we see death and decay.  Broken limbs, dead leaves, and layers of rot aided by fungi and insects. The grandeur of the forest is firmly planted in a sea of decomposition. In fact, the forest only exists because this layer of dead stuff supports it. 

The Lenten journey draws us into a portion of the story that we would rather forget: death is an essential part of life. If there is ever to be growth it is the dead things that support the roots and provide the needed nourishment that allows for the future beauty. Death is a part of life, whether we want to see it or not. When we speak of protecting Creation, it is from those forms of death that invade the more than human world because of our own arrogance and greed, not the natural cycles of life of death that move Creation forward. Creation understands death as an inevitability, but not an ending. 

Lent begins with a reminder of our own inevitable endings. In that reminder is a charge to live with purpose, conviction, and courage, to not waste the beautiful fragile lives we’ve been given.  Also embedded in that reminder is an insistence that we in fact let go of those things in our lives that need to die; attitudes, habits, prejudices, and wrongly placed values that impede our experience of the abundant life Christ desires for us. 

We see so much needless death in our world that we often forget that death is a part of God’s plan for us and the other members of Creation. Lent draws us back into the beautiful reminder that death creates the conditions for new life. As we spread the ashes reminding us of our mortality, let us do so with an eye toward letting go of those things that need to be released in hopes that they may the fertile soil of the new world to come. 
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Derrick Weston
Director of Theological Education & Formation
Creation Justice Ministries