In last Sunday's gospel Jesus spits in the dirt and rubs the mixture together so as to make mud, then smears it over the face of The Man Born Blind. Told to go "wash in the Pool of Siloam", the Man's sight is suddenly restored.
    The words "spit" and "mud" appear very few times in the Bible, and in few of those references are the terms used favorably. Most of the spitting is done to express contempt and/or superstitious fear, and the mud is usually of the "O Lord save me from sinking in the deep mire" variety. If, as I seem to recall reading in some scholarly work, Aramaic faith-healers used spittle in their shamanistic protocols, they did so without concern for biblical precedent. Apparently Jesus was no exception.
  In any case it is entirely consistent with the earthy portrayal of Jesus in the Gospel of John for the Word-made-flesh to appear in public with muddy hands on the Sabbath Day. It is also consistent to find him acknowledged and worshipped by one regarded as having "been born entirely in sins" and expelled from his synagogue.

    Meanwhile, in the State of Washington a whole community gets buried under a freak mudslide. If, as we can safely assume, "neither these victims nor their parents sinned (at least any more than the rest of us), then what "work of God" might we hope to see revealed in the context of their tragic end? Heroic rescue efforts? Greater precautions by the inhabitants of similar landscapes?
    We have plenty of mud in Michigan at the moment, but it is more likely to track up the house than submerge it, simply because it is spread out relatively flat. I am trying to see it as dirt mashed together with God-spit, an ointment for the healing of frozen ground and my own blindness. I am trying to see the victims in Washington as, in some fashion, muddy Christs, martyred messiahs whose souls now inhabit even our Michigan mud and, by virtue of their union with the Son of Man, plead from the ground for us to love the mud and the spring and the unstable earth while we  have an option to do otherwise, because the days are coming when the mud will leave us with no option but to welcome its embrace from head to toe.
  "I am sinking in deep mire, *
    and there is no firm ground for my feet, " laments Psalm 69, and it is in that place where, if anywhere, Christ is to be found and known.