Sacred trash

December 2, 2022 7:47 AM

Heritage out of Control: Disturbing Heritage, Birgit Meyer's essay on the idea of material waste in religious objects, thoughtfully compares Dutch and Ghana as religions, colonialism and modernity intertwine. Going from the academic to the practical, Decluttering Dilemma: What to Do With Religious Items (multi-religious) and a librarian for a Catholic collection on What can you do with unwanted holy cards and Grandma’s religious statues?
posted by dorothyisunderwood (11 comments total)

I used to work for a church-affiliated college with historic ties to a Scandinavian country. So everyone who had a Swedish bible was sure we would want it. Conflict-avoidant staff had stuffed a storeroom with them. When new staff took over they had to find the appropriate way to dispose of the hundreds of virtually identical volumes because there was no room for them. I’m not sure of the details but it involved a blessing and actual disposal. Which I don’t think included burning thought that had been considered.

There are a lot of cultural artifacts that pose the same problem: you don’t want it, but it’s too special to treat like trash. In fact books - any kind of books in whatever condition - are donated to libraries because it makes them responsible for their care and feeding when, really, the staff time dedicated to disposing of them is draining. And god forbid you get caught sending books to a recycler. Sacrilege!
posted by zenzenobia at 9:40 AM on December 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

I come from a religious culture that in principle abhors religious iconography, and copies of the Qur'an isn't considered as one, but disposal was still a question requiring scholarly input since books do degrade, and a Qur'an with incomplete pages is just as bad as a defaced one, in practical terms. Anyway, for us, burning and burying the ash seems to be the conventional solution.

The other thing I'm learning is how the pattern of religious conversion as an imperializing force operated on a scale in Africa that feels beyond for us here - a lot of pre-Islamic cultural artifacts were slowly decontextualised from its pagan/animist and even Hindu-Buddhist meaning (e.g. the hilt of a keris moving into abstract shapes from earlier clearly indicated human/animal/being figures) - so they still exist in some form and not made to be thrown away. If anything, that's happening NOW with extremist puritanical thought becoming mainstream, and that's us inflicting injury on ourselves.
posted by cendawanita at 10:30 AM on December 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

I've been trying to justify the devotion I have to physical books, and thinking about culling and why I hold on to some books, and how my family background very much treated books as almost holy items.

This is definitely driven to the fore by my mom talking about how valuable her collection of books on her chosen topic is, and how she'll haunt us if we just dumpster them when she goes, and yet her chosen topic revolves a lot around pseudo-science and anti-vaccine quackery, and even if she gives us a place that would come in and box them up I don't think the world is a better place for even the fractional portion those ideas represented by that one collection of books continuing to exist.

Similarly, I have a monogrammed Bible given to me by my grandmother, and... I guess all of the articles and the comments made so far are gonna make it a lot easier for me to just dumpster these things. Thank you.
posted by straw at 10:33 AM on December 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

I once bought a Sacred Heart candle at a garage sale. Tag read Works. $1 They lied.
posted by theora55 at 10:36 AM on December 2, 2022 [4 favorites]

This is a real problem in Jewish circles, because there are so many items - prayer books, mezuzah scrolls, haggadahs, tefillin, all mentioned in the article - that require specific burial as disposal. But as the older generation dies, who are often more religious, and in many cases more likely even to affiliate as Jewish than their kids and grandkids, these items often just get tossed. There are groups of people who scour thrift shops to rescue donated Judaica both for proper disposal as well as to sell to other Jews in communities that don't have access to it. I'm in a "Judaica thrifting" group on facebook and it's amazing some of the things that turn up.

Because of the quantity of materials and effort involved, synagogues often collect items either to prevent destruction or to allow for a mass burial at a later time. One consequence of this was the Cairo Geniza, a cache of hundreds of thousands of medieval Jewish documents that were discovered by archaeologists, including business and marriage contracts and personal letters. You can see some of them here.
posted by Mchelly at 10:41 AM on December 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

I won the Junior Scripture Prize aged 11 and opted for a "gold-plated Bible". The school duly gave me a KJV bible with edge-gilded pages. Within a few months, a young bravo had anonymously defaced the prize book-plate with an obscene picture and a matching insult. I cut out the page with my pen-knife and kept the rest of the book; but without its heirloomocity it will go in the trash when I die. So many bibles, so little utility - like cuff-links
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:53 PM on December 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

The "what to do with the religious iconography after the owner dies" question has come up in my family a number of times. What usually happens depends on the person dealing with the material. When I was responsible I would just take the objects home, my grandmother's Virgin Mary plate is on display in a place of honour, and the various holy cards, especially if they have a lenticular image (of say Handsome White Jesus, Sacred Heart Jesus, Padre Pio, sundry Mary images, various child "saints"... etc) become bookmarks. Anything "old", say as in my case, a holy card regarding Dionne Quintuplets gets a place of honour. Any rosaries, St. Christopher or "Miraculous Medal" would be passed along to those closest to the deceased. However, when it wasn't me if anything was mass produced it was tossed regardless of age or emotional weight. Done in secret and taken to the dump directly to avoid any possibility of scandal. Bibles with inscriptions or other physical icons would be passed along to some other old person. In our experience, we've had the parish priest take the crucifixes to be "recycled" (passed along to another soul).

But you know, a lot of stuff does filter down to the religious run charity stores / second hand stores and sometimes you can find the odd unusual religious object. A friend of my found a cast iron mold for baking a host. My partner, with a different religious background, brought home a small glass with the image of a monk and some writing in Spanish. I had to explain that the glass formerly contained a candle, I think it was of St. Joseph, and was used as a kind of prayer. She was horrified but we used it as a glass to drink from until it was broken. One time we found an old tin pyx, a little box used to carry a sanctified host to a person on their sick/death bed, that someone had made it into a fridge magnet. We found a similar thing that was an ash tray for a car but featured an image of St. Christopher. Again my partner was horrified when I explained these items.
posted by Ashwagandha at 4:20 PM on December 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

For anyone else who was also disappointed when clicking on host not to find the cast iron mold, here's an aluminum one.
posted by aniola at 8:15 PM on December 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ha! That one was very fancy compared to the one my friend had, his was likely from a monastery and had a simple construction. It was blackened cast iron, about a metre long, likely used over a fire pit or a wood fired oven and had a similar mechanism as a tortilla press or a pre-electric or stove top waffle iron. I think there was a simple pattern on the press part - I forget exactly but I think it was a crude crucifix and IHS.
posted by Ashwagandha at 11:23 PM on December 3, 2022

Thanks for the description! I had imagined something like what you describe, but with a shorter handle. This is the closest I could find to what you describe, it is also quite fancy though.
posted by aniola at 12:06 AM on December 4, 2022

Yes, very similar to that though the image on the press part was a little cruder and was circular. We weren't entirely sure of where it came from, he had bought it in auction in rural Nova Scotia and we thought it likely came from a monastery but weren't sure but Catholics had been in the region a long time. He ended up selling it to a Toronto collector in religious paraphernalia used by clergy - another place one's religious knick knacks end up.
posted by Ashwagandha at 5:22 PM on December 4, 2022