NEW HYMN TEXT - Nothing Is Wasted
When I was in college, there were a few key books that served as my gateway texts out of conservative Evangelicalism. One was Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz (all the elder millennial former Evangelicals are nodding in agreement) and the other was Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis. The former seemed to be one of the first I read that took doubt and uncertainty seriously in a movement too often predicated on self-assurance and dogmatic certainty, and the latter gave me a lasting image to describe it. Bell proposed that many strands of Evangelicalism were in essence “Brickianity,” a faith like a wall of bricks in which every brick is essential to the whole structure. If you question any doctrine or remove any one piece, like a Jenga tower the whole structure collapses. Instead, he proposed a trampoline faith, where springs could be removed and studied and questioned while still maintaining a flexible yet enduring faith. I decided to forego the brick wall for the trampoline.
Honestly, I’ve grown to be a little embarrassed about the influence of people like Donald Miller and Rob Bell, partly because I’ve continued to grow and some of the once earth-shattering insights now seem pretty prosaic. It seems akin to reading my old journals: sometimes sweet (“Oh little baby Dave!”), sometimes horrifying (“Dear God, Dave!), always cringe. But even though his influence has waned, I’ve always been interested to hear what Rob Bell was doing because it always seemed to be something creatively different. So, when he started his podcast (eye-rollingly called “Rob Cast”) in 2015, I tuned in to see how this undeniably gifted and creative communicator would navigate a podcast. It was hit or miss, but one of the episodes stuck with me—“What to Do with the Waste.”
The premise is fairly simple: what do we do when it seems like we’ve wasted so much of our life on something that failed? You were married for 15 years, and it ended in divorce; you invested all your money in a new business, and after three years it went belly-up; you poured your whole life into a church or denomination, and after twenty-five years of self-sacrifice you realized that it is and was a damaging and spiritually abusive place. How do you not give into despair when you think of the time and energy that was spent so futilely? What do you do with the waste?
Bell used two biblical passages to suggest an answer. In 1 Chronicles 11:16-19, David is hiding from Saul in the wilderness and cries out, “Oh that someone would give me water to drink from the well of Bethlehem that is by the gate!” When his men decide to break through the enemy encampment and bring him water, David is horrified and pours out the water. These men who risked their lives to procure this water have to watch their leader just pour it out! But he didn’t just pour it out, he “poured it out to the LORD.”
“David turns their act,” Bell suggests, “into a sacred offering…the cost is so high that David says there’s no way I deserve that kind of cost, only the divine deserves that kind of cost…the sacrifice makes it sacred.”
The second, Matthew 26:6-13, is the more familiar story: a woman comes into where Jesus is eating with his disciples and pours out costly ointment onto his feet, and the disciples react indignantly: “Why this waste? For the ointment could have been sold for a large sum and the money given to the poor.” Jesus rebukes them, and reframes their story of waste into a story of beauty: “She has done a beautiful thing to me.”
“It’s the loss and cost,” Bell sums up, “that’s what makes it sacred and holy.” Nothing must be finally wasted, then, because what seems to be waste—all the cost and sacrifice and energy and time and loss and heartache—can be offered up into the hands of God. “The sacrifice makes it sacred; the cost makes it a holy act.”
But I might take a tentative step beyond Bell and suggest that the point where all seems wasted, when we hit rock bottom, might be our best hope for salvation (there’s a hymn coming on that theme, so I won’t elaborate). At the very least, the waste-lands are places of opportunity for resurrection people, the staging grounds for deserts blossoming and dry bones putting on flesh and a freed and flawed people wandering toward the land of promise. “Keep yourself open,” Paul Tillich advises, “for the creative moment which may appear in the midst of what seemed to be wasted” (had to throw in a bona fide theologian so I wouldn’t lose academic credibility—the cred with the least cachet).
And if nothing is wasted in God’s hands, then all things can become sites of the sacred, the locus of Divine presence. In the novella A Man of the People, Ursula LeGuin tells the coming-of-age story of Havzhiva, a boy who grows up in what is considered a cultural backwater of the larger interstellar civilization known as the Ekumen (and I’m summing up what I vaguely remember!). Cut off from the world, Havzhiva is restless, though not aware of the influences that circumscribe his life—not aware, that is, until he meets an Ekumen historian who tells him of the broader world and invites him into it. He is drawn to the prospect, but he also fears that leaving will mean leaving behind not only people, but the traditions and customs and beliefs that nurtured him, including the belief in the sacrality of the created world. Trying to assure him, the historian affirms, “The world is sacred, Havzhiva. The cosmos is sacred. That’s not a knowledge I ever had to give up. All I learned, here and there, only increased it. There’s nothing that is not sacred.”
Nothing is wasted; all things are sacred. I’m not sure I always believe it, but I always want to believe it, so I wrote a simple cyclical song that would help me sing myself closer to belief. The tune name, JAMPSA, is my paternal grandmother’s maiden name, a woman who turned so much of what others might see as waste into a beautiful and sacred life.
Nothing is wasted,
no, nothing is wasted,
nothing is wasted in the hands of God.
Nothing is wasted,
no, nothing is wasted,
nothing is wasted in the hands of God.
All things are sacred,
yes, all things are sacred,
all things are sacred in the hands of God.
All things are sacred,
yes, all things are sacred,
all things are sacred in the hands of God.
© 2024 GIA, Inc.
Other stanzas can be improvised as well (e.g., “all things are cherished” or “death is defeated”) depending on the theme and context. Here’s a demo—note the same shirt as the last one.
You can purchase the music here on GIA Unbound.
Wonder-ings
I’m usually not a big fan of ekphrastic poems (poems written about other works of art) because they bring to mind snobby poets walking through cavernous galleries in their chunky glasses and cashmere sweaters thinking deep thoughts about fine art. But Keene Carter’s “Christ Preaching,” based on the eponymous Rembrandt etching below, manages to bring something new out of the image in a fresh and simple way that I found both humorous and moving.
I forgive the absent boy. He’s happy.
I forgive the downcast faces when
I speak. I know it’s difficult to look
Into the eyes of someone telling you
You matter: shame turns you away because
You know you don’t. And I forgive the yarn.
My words keep no hands warm.Listen. That
Is all. And while you’re at the sink, or on
The way to murder, pause the jealous thought
Where death has made a rivalry of equals.
Think how you are like the things you hate,
And, met by similarity, smile. This blind man
Here has looked and found the source of air.
And that boy there, bored? He will never die.
I love that line, “Think how you are like the things you hate, / And, met by similarity, smile.”
I’m just dipping my toes into Louise Glück’s oeuvre, and I’m already discovering little gems like, “Such a mistake to want / clarity above all things,” and “how ignorant we all are most of the time, / seeing things / only from the one vantage, like a sniper,” and “a wound to the heart, / is also a wound to the mind” (that last one holds a dissertation on how dangerous ideologies develop).
May you see the sacred that is all around you, even in—maybe even especially in—the things you thought were wasted.
Peace,
Dave