Homily for the Full Moon, written 3-24-24.
Dearly Beloved,
Happy Full Moon! And such a special Full Moon…a full lunar eclipse and the “Worm Moon”. As such, I am moved today to speak about worms.
As I always remind myself and everyone, as pagans we believe in a naturalized theology. We look to the patterns of nature, the Logos, for our knowledge of both the nature and the will of the Divine, and our current moment in these patterns of nature is that of early Spring. It is this moment, commemorated in the Farmer’s Almanac as the “Worm Moon”, the time of Spring when the earthworms start to churn the Earth beneath our feet, that I wish to speak of today.
Worms are often thought of as lowly creatures. Often a character portrayed as powerful in a story will refer to a character portrayed as weaker as a “worm”. Worms live beneath our feet, in the dirt and underneath the stones. Worms are simple, with a sparse nervous system, and are not known for their intelligence or courage, traits that we humans tend to value.
But worms are amazing.
Worms eat the decaying matter left behind by the amazing and beautiful variety of life produced by nature. Worms break up and allow air to pass into the soil, allowing for the growth of plants that most animals, including ourselves, need to live. Worms transform the world from one full of death and broken things into a world ready and waiting for new life and growth.
Now, many people are disgusted by worms. They squirm around in disturbing ways. Often they are slimy and covered in the soil and decaying matter they thrive upon. For these reasons, often we don’t want to see worms. We want them to stay in the deep, in the dark, underneath the surface. We acknowledge their important work, but we want them to do that important work far away from us.
This meditation upon worms leads me to an important question: what other things, what other people, are we benefitting from that we prefer to stay underneath the surface? In the dark. Far away from us. Who else are we consistently forgetting? The Covid pandemic showed us that the service workers, health workers, grocers, sanitation workers, and so on were “essential workers”; we learned that the world ran on the backs of these humble, underpaid, overworked, and often horribly exploited people. But we didn’t pay these people any more. We didn’t give them better benefits or conditions of labor. We didn’t give them a share in ownership of the means of production. And this is just one example…migrant labor, prisoner labor, volunteer labor, temporary and day labor, service labor, the labor done by the disabled, the labor done by the disenfranchised…all of this labor that is required for our world to live and grow and thrive is often unseen, unacknowledged, and poorly rewarded.
So let us look under the rocks. Let us look in the shadows. Let us look in the dark. Let us look for the unappreciated and necessary workers that make our world possible, and raise them up. Let us show them how much we really appreciate what they mean and how valuable they are. Let us celebrate and lift up the worms.
Happy Full Moon.
In love,
Soror Alice
Art: “Zoology: Earthworm”, Line Engraving, Granger Collection, (19th Century)