ALL allotments set out their rules and regulations in a tenancy agreement, which the plotholder has to sign. These regulations can cover all sorts of things, like keeping chickens, having sheds, using water, and lighting bonfires.

I particularly like one clause which I came across recently: “The tenant agrees . . . to keep the plot at all times properly cultivated with spade husbandry, well manured and free from weeds and noxious plants and in good heart and condition, and to so deliver it up at the end of the tenancy.”

This reads almost like an Anglican collect: “Deliver us Lord from all weeds and noxious substances, so that at the end we may come to you in good heart and condition.”

But what would it mean to be well-manured? Some plotholders may understand exactly, after a heavy and dirty day of shovelling the stuff round the allotment. Manure, together with “spade husbandry”, is key to keeping the plot “in good heart and condition”.

Using animal dung to produce lovely food may be a strange concept in cities, where waste is usually collected and taken away before it smells. As a young boy, I remember my acute embarrassment when my father, on the rare occasions that a horse came along our road, would go out with a bucket and spade to retrieve whatever droppings it had left. I stayed inside, fervently hoping none of my friends would see him. Now, of course, I might follow his example.

But even here in the city we can buy manure. There are stables near by, where I was offered a load, or half a load. Half a load seemed about right for my medium-sized allotment, but, when it arrived and was tipped on to the plot, it was far more than I had envisaged. A huge steaming pile! It wasn’t well rotted; so I needed to cover it up and leave it, until eventually it was ready to barrow round the plot. And it has been very useful: as well as providing nutrients, it also provides humus, which improves the structure of the soil.

Many people find that a beautiful garden helps them to think about God, but a pile of manure can have the same effect. Christianity is an earthly and earthy religion. Incarnation is about God entering into our messy world — in a stable — and getting his hands dirty; about using the raw and ragged material of our humanity to produce what is life-giving. The Jesuit, John Foley, wrote in a song:

Don’t you worry, my son, about the dirt in the soil.
Flowers still grow there, flowers still grow.
That man long ago with his low down birth
Found his glory planted in thearth.

In our prayers we can fall into the trap of trying only to keep things beautiful. We tell God the sort of things we think he wants to hear, or sanitise our prayers. But our faith needs feeding, not just on the beautiful, but on the raw stuff of human experience: the stuff that stinks; the stuff that gets wasted; the mistakes we’ve made. That’s what we need to include in our relationship with God, believing that it can all be redeemed, and turned into something productive. Sometimes we need to let it settle a bit, so that we don’t burn everything up with its rawness. That’s true both of manure and of our experience. And both can be life-giving.

IN LUKE 13, Jesus tells the story of the vine-dresser who won’t cut down an unproductive fig-tree, but wants instead to “dung it” to see if it will bear fruit the next year. Eugene Peterson, in his book Tell It Slant, sees this as a story that interrupts our aggressive, problem-solving approach to mission. Manure, he says, is not a quick fix; it’s a slow solution, but it is “the stuff of resurrection”.

Successful growing requires dealing with muck and dirt. That’s counter to our instinct to keep everything clinical and nice, and get rid of what isn’t pleasant. But the allotment teaches us that, if we are to deliver up, at the end, a healthy plot, it will have been fed with manure. If the ground is kept fed, the crops can flourish. If we feed into our prayer life the stuff of our human experience, then that harvest, too, is less likely to be superficial and thin. We, like the allotment, will be delivered up “in good heart and condition”.

The Revd John Austen, a spiritual director, lives in Birmingham.