The Order of the Dung Beetle
Engraving by Jack Baumgartner.
Most of us begin with pity toward the dung beetle. Here's a creature whose life revolves around feces -- it's the beetle's work, food, craft, and home. We're so fixated with the beetle's occupation we named it so. But I wonder what the dung beetle would name us? Maybe: poor human.
The first vow of the Order of the Dung Beetle is stability. Stability is a connection to our place. The word waste is a way of saying we are disconnected from our place. What we don't know, we discard. When there is no relationship, we neglect. All this makes us poor.
The dung beetle's relationship to place is complete, whole (holy), precisely because the beetle's greatest treasure is what the rest of us call waste. And so the first vow has to do with staying put long enough to see that there is no "away" in which to "throw" something, nothing needs to be waste.
The second vow is an old word, oblation.
The dung beetle knows sh*t. It knows the binding properties of animal feces, the nutritional value of manure. It deftly constructs a large sphere able to be rolled great distances. Its young are nested in manure and feast on undigested grain.
At its heart, craft is not about a kind of tool. It's about an intimacy with matter that leads to honoring it. Craft elevates material, lifts it up. (Oblation means to raise up; it also means prayer.) Wendell Berry (leading candidate for patron saint of the Order) says, nothing is mere stuff, it's either sacred or desecrated.
The third vow is praise, gratuitous merrymaking, unquantifiable action (sorry -- can't settle on a single word here, maybe German has one, or maybe just "boogie").
If you watch a dung beetle long enough, at some point it will scuttle to the top of its mini globe and dance. Scientists don’t know why. The theory is that it has something to do with direction and the stars.
Say it does. Say we can prove that’s why. Does that explanation satisfy? Is it even possible to prove what is essentially unprovable in all of us, that the dung beetle dances because the dung beetle enjoys dancing?
If you were made with such slender, articulate limbs (six!), wouldn’t you long to move them? If you lived in a world without waste, surrounded by treasure, connected in so many ways, wouldn’t you want to climb atop something well made and raise all your arms in full-bodied gratitude? Wouldn’t you dance too?
In the Order of the Dung Beetle, we behave in ways that do not compute. We build beautiful things that melt tomorrow. We move in ways that no one can algorithmize. And we will throw in with people who do not "fit in." All for the sheer joy of it.
That's a stab at what I see the dung beetle revealing. There's a lot more to say, and I'd love to hear from others.
As for joining the Order ... get a sticker from Jack Baumgartner! A print! And this: determine to live a life of stability, where nothing is waste. Determine to lift up work as a gift, oblation. And last ... oh, for now, let's just go with boogie.
- Pastor Eddy
