All around us is the image of the skull. We are in a living memento mori. Everything and everywhere ceaselessly depicts for us in word and image the demise we find ourselves inhabiting. We do not look upon the skull from without: we observe it as we dwell from within.
Yet composting habituates in a person an unanxious embrace of death. The real end of one thing can usher in the real beginning of another. God, just as much now as He did on Pentecost, has provided for us all that is necessary for life and godliness in this and every age. We have what is dead and what is dying, and He has sent to us His Spirit which gives us air and heat and moisture. It is only left to us to prayerfully and care-fully place it all together and pay attention.
We Christians are, God as our helper, both the gardeners of Western civilization, cultivating its rise and enjoying its fruits and now amassing its remains in the compost pile, and its heap-dwelling microorganisms, responsible for discerning the bits and pieces that are worth decomposing into the precious stores of nutrients and energy that will become the fertile soil of a future crop and its harvest.
When the culture becomes the memento mori, we become the shepherds of decay.
Source: Shepherds of Decay by OblateNate