Giving up rubbish

Millet’s ‘The Gleaners’ has been reproduced on jigsaws and biscuit tins. It portrays a different age, culture, pace of life; and it shows our wasteful, extravagant ways when contrasted with people whose daily lives depended on ‘what was left’. The large stacks in the background, the loaded horse and cart, the bundles of harvested straw and grain, contrast with the fingerpicking, back-breaking thrift of the gleaners. I don’t want to wish myself back into an era when so many of our technologically derived life comforts and provisions were uninvented or unavailable.

But a picture like this argues for a way of treating our world less as a machine that produces the goods, more like the place where we find what we need; what we need to live humanly and humanely, not what we need to live at the expense of life itself. Stewardship presupposes an accepted responsibility for looking after and using wisely, that which is entrusted, given and therefore not mine. It shoudln’t take an old story about a woman’s fight for survival to make us aware of the fragile hold we have of this delicately poised, gloriously gifted, and now humanly threatened place where we live.

Millet’s picture, those three gleaners who know the value of grain, and the story of Ruth and the providential accidents of divine happenstance, are enough to reflect on for today. I write this as the dustbin lorry comes up the street to take away our rubbish by the big bucket load – even our rubbish bins are getting bigger. I feel a lenten theme emerging here – suppose we give up producing rubbish for Lent? And suppose we apply the gleaning principle as a way of cutting down what we waste, throw out, use up? So instead of asking how much holier my soul is at the end of Lent, suppose I ask how much emptier the bin is of rubbish? Instead of denying myself luxury, I’ll deny myself the luxury of producing rubbish.

How?

Need to think about that – maybe I need to find a modern equivalent of gleaning, not wasting, valuing grain….

By the way, we have a wee cheap print of Millet’s masterpiece, in a wee cheap frame, which came from the home of one of the most generous, gentle and merciful people I’ve ever known. Married later in life, and a widow much too early, Ruth was her favourite book in the Hebrew Bible – which was only one of the things which she and I had in common, enriching a friendship founded on honest questioning about what God is about, turning lives upside down and yet, as Winnie believed, faithfully working all things together for good.