A Reflection for Good Friday
by Ashley Goff
In 2012, the world generated 2.6 trillion pounds of garbage with
over half of that amount going into landfills around the planet.
Those landfills are home to 1% of the global population.
Children and their families who are the poorest of the poor live on the
outskirts of landfills. Many use these landfills as a place of work—trading
garbage for cash or consuming salvageable waste in order to survive. What was
food for the dogs and flies becomes food for a family.
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La Chureca is the largest garbage dump in Central America,
located on the edge of Managua. One thousand people live and work on the “City
of Trash” every day. There is even an elementary school located on the dump
with six classrooms.
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More than 2,000 families live on the Bantar Gebang landfill that
lies outside Jakarta, Indonesia.
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Thousands of families call the Tultitlan garbage dump in Mexico
City home while spending 12 hours a day, in scorching hot sun, looking for
recyclable materials to sell and make less than a dollar a day.
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The Veolia landfill 100 miles south of Atlanta, Georgia, known
to locals as “Trash Mountain,” received toxic coal ash from a massive spill
that occurred in December 2008 at a Kingston, TN power plant. Taylor County,
where Veolia landfill is located, is 41% African-American and more than 24% of
its residents live in poverty.
In the time of Jesus, Gehenna was the landfill located just south
of Jerusalem. This was the city dump of Jesus’ time. When Jesus would speak of
hell, it is thought he was speaking of Gehenna which was filled with the
household trash, Empire’s leftovers, and bodies of the dead. With no sanitation
or plumbing systems in Jerusalem, people would toss their urine and feces into
the streets. Imagine this: the streets of Jerusalem steaming with human shit
and pee as Jesus was taken to the Imperial cross of execution. The Roman Empire
closed in on Jesus and his followers, and Jesus’ final footsteps on the planet
were pressing upon the garbage ridden streets of Jerusalem.
As a small child in La Chureca landfill picks through garbage,
as birds and dogs and flies hover over the “what is left,” there, too, is
Jesus’ body, naked, broken resting upon the planet’s garbage. It is with the
poorest of the poor, the poor who make a home and eat dinner in garbage dumps,
where Jesus rests his body each and every day, pushing us to see garbage as
sacred.
It’s all sacred. All of it. The plastic water bottles. The
rotting meat. The Styrofoam. Ripped Clothing. Banana peels. Broken bicycles.
Flies. Rats. Dogs. The poop of the rats and dogs. Seagulls. Children of the
garbage dumps. Their school. Every bit of the “what’s left” is sacred and holy.
There is no division of the sacred and the profane. In fact
there is no profane. On this Good Friday, we sit at the foot of the cross, an
Imperial cross that might have been possibly littered with trash and human
feces from Gehenna and Jerusalem, a cross soaked with blood and dripping flesh.
Without mercy, Jesus was nailed to a cross with those viewed as human garbage
hanging next to him. It is in the nailing that Jesus nails us to each other.
From my garbage in Arlington, VA, to the sanitation workers of
Arlington County who pick it up, to the garbage ridden waters of the Anacostia
River which borders Washington D.C., to the the poor living near the Veolia
landfill to the families of Bantar Gebang; to Gehenna and the human waste of
Jerusalem, the nails on the cross today pierce together what is seen and
treated as the waste of the planet.
Ecofeminism stretches us to embrace it all as sacred, to see how
each and every bit of what’s treated as garbage, the human and the material,
are nailed together.
On this Good Friday, we sit and wait. Together. Nailed together
as the planet continues to be pierced, broken, torn, and rendered. As your
hands and arms stretch out today to toss away a piece of garbage, as your hands
and arms extend to pick-up garbage, we remember the ones who live, eat, live,
learn and are family on a garbage dump. Today we remember Jesus and his
outstretched arms, executed in a city that looked and smelled and was a garbage
dump.
Prayer: Holy One. Holy One of garbage and landfills. We are
nailed together. Garbage and all. May we never, ever forget it.
Contributor: Ashley Goff is Minister for Spiritual
Formation at Church of the Pilgrims (PCUSA) and ordained in the United Church of Christ. Ashley graduated from
Union Theological Seminary in NYC where she fell in love with the art of liturgy. She
lives with deep gratitude for several communities which have formed her along the way: Denison
University, the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, the Open Door Community, and Rikers Island NYC
Jail. Ashley also finds life in Springsteen music, beekeeping, urban farming, vinyasa
yoga, and her three kids, loveable
spouse and their furry black lab. Ashley blogs at godofthesparrow.com.
