A Steaming Synod
Compost-making has produced no shortage of recipes, but there’s really only one you need: a balance of nitrogeny “green” stuff (veg scraps, grass, nettles, chicken poop) with carbony “brown” stuff (chipped branches, cartons, egg boxes, straw, ash, dog hair), plus water, in a pile at least three feet square, with as much diversity as possible.
But if you want really great, hot compost that ends up wriggling with life, it is not an extra ingredient that you need but an action that flows from a principle. The action is regular turning of your compost pile: that is, forking it all out and mixing it back in, putting air into it. The principle involved is described in Yves Congar OP’s 1950 classic, True and False Reform in the Church, which Archbishop Angelo Roncalli read while papal nuncio in France – “a reform of the Church; is such a thing possible?” he pondered – and when, as Pope John XXIII, he called Vatican II. Pope Francis cited Congar’s text at the opening of the synod on synodality: “We don’t need to create another Church; what we need … is to create a Church that is other.”
Looking back over church history, Congar saw that all true reform involved the centre (hierarchical leadership) opening up to the periphery (movements, prophets, initiatives, local realities) and integrating it. Both are necessary. If the centre remains closed in on itself, it becomes self-referential, and soon grows cold. “The centre,” wrote Congar, “prefers something defined to something that is searching and striving for expression. Yet a spiritual organism is more likely to grow out of the elements searching and striving for expression.” Equally, if the periphery remains on the outside, it can neither change nor be changed by integration into the centre.
The same is true of compost piles. The real action happens when you bring the dried-out, uncomposted edges of the pile into the centre, which without the influx from the periphery quickly grows cold.
It is a conviction of this column that the created world can tell us about the divine. So it may not be so far-fetched to consider that Creation’s own alchemy of change and new life can show why councils and synods are necessary to Christ’s body. Such assemblies, says Congar, are places of dialogue where “authorities can respond to the living consensus of the whole body”. Could the humble garden heap – where what is rotting and smelly is turned into nutritious, life-giving earth, where the challenging edges strive for expression and integration, where the centre is transformed by the influx of fresh air and diversity – help us to see not just why we need this synod, but how to do it?
Papal biographer Austen Ivereigh moved with his wife and dogs to a small farm near Hereford with old barns and some acres, full of talk of regeneration. He blames Laudato Si’.