All God’s Creatures – Maggots

Sometime in August I went through my morning ritual of putting the kitchen scrapes in the compost pile, when, in one of those ghastly horror filled moments, that are usually best presented on the silver screen, it became apparent that everything was moving. A cautious push of the top layer of debris revealed a huge tangled mass of grayish brown, wiggling maggots! Clearly there were thousands, or at least hundreds. How does one count these things?

I jumped back, let out an entirely too loud shriek, and ran back to the safety of my kitchen. Michael Pollen did not mention this charming aspect of food production. A quick peruse of my gardening library offered no assistance whatsoever. Many descriptions of the loamy texture and comfortable fragrance of well kept compost, much admiration of the unity one feels with nature. Not word one on Maggots.

Clearly, I had a problem that no one else had – or that no one else wanted to admit to, which I understood. No way was my husband going to learn of this development.

So, in my lonely shame, I poured a cup of coffee and hit the internet. Two words on Google “compost and maggots” yielded some surprising results.

Turns out, these things do appear in the best of compost piles and, as Martha would say, are “a good thing”. They are not the meat eating maggots we associate with dead animals, but strictly vegetarian pupa of “Black Soldier flies” (Hermetia ilucens), that speed up composting and conveniently will die off in Fall with regular turning of the pile. Apparently, some people even pay for the things. Imagine that.

Reluctantly, I took another peek at my redeemed co-gardeners. Sorry to say, they were still wiggly maggots and my response to them was still, well, aversion at best. Nonetheless, we came to a truce of sorts – they could enjoy themselves in my compost and I would do my best to appreciate their contributions to the process.

This, of course, is not a well publicized part of composting. It can have its embarrassments. My son’s family was visiting for a few days when, after showing his children the garden he took me quietly aside and whispered (yeah, whispered) “Mom, do you know there are maggots in your compost?” His 4 year old son, did not share our uneasiness. Several times a day he would run out to the garden and watch the “worms”. After his fourth birthday party I found assorted wrapping paper, cardboard and plastic packaging added to the pile – his contribution of “garbage” to feed them.

I think small children are more in touch with the sacred, with the astounding reality of the universe, than we are. Not intellectually but in a visceral fundamental sense they get it. They are still innocent enough with the world to be fascinated by what we have labeled repugnant.

Children understand, at some level, that these little beings are God’s creatures, just as the jays that I love fluttering around my garden (and helping themselves to my strawberries), just as the worms that maintain the soil, just as we all are. Where to I have the right to label these creations as “good, or bad”, “beautiful or ugly”, acceptable or unacceptable”. Talk about hubris.

Of course, this si something we humans do all the time, at least those of us beyond the age of five or so. It so dreadfully complicates our lives just as predicted in the story of Adam and Eve where they bring sorrow into their lives because they ate the fruit of the tree of “Knowledge of Good and Evil” and dualism entered into our psyche. Traditionally this described as a “Fall”, a wise friend of mine named Harry said it was a fall “up”. We gained knowledge. But we also gained the ability to judge and cast dispersions on ourselves of being good and being evil.

We judge things that make us uncomfortable or cause fear in us, say maggots, or different kinds of people, or sharks, or bad hair cuts, as evil. And regrettably, we humans, all too often, take the next step – to sanctimoniously disparage or even eliminate the “evildoers” and, oddly in the process , validate ourselves, because we are “not them”.

We are funny creatures.

Did God forbid us to gain consciousness of “good and evil”. In other words, is it a bad thing that we make these divisions. Tough one. But those who first told story certainly understood the problems of such knowledge and how it separates us from the rest of life on this planet. Life has roared on and evolved and filled niches and expanded both in diversity and shear quantity over the last several billion years and probably would for several billion years longer. But a new comer, Homo sapiens with big brains and the willingness to divide God’s creation into acceptable (and not bothersome) and unacceptable (and therefore dispensable) has certainly put life on this planet in peril.

Is there evil in God’s creation?

Of course, one needs first to define evil. A friend of mine, now deceased, said that ‘evil” is that which is contrary to the continuation of Life (capital L intended). That would be life the big picture – the whole thing, the creepy crawlies, the algae, the carbon cycle, photosynthesis, frogs and maggots.

It doesn’t mean “little picture” life, that being me and the people I like and my “way of life”.

To preserve and respect life – to do good, not evil – I’m convinced requires us to accept and promote life in the biggest sense, on God’s terms, not on our own.