Amongst the most familiar wheeled vehicles that clutter up our world is the supermarket trolley. These utilitarian mobile baskets have a massive influence on our lifestyle, health, shopping habits and financial outlays.
Consider. If we shopped with ordinary baskets we couldn't load it with all the processed and tinned food, plastic bulk packed vegetables, cartoned yoghurt, 36 pack crisp bags, frozen foods. 3 for 2 and BOGOF offers. We'd need to go shopping oftener, or go as a team, or pay to have the stuff delivered, or order online. So the trolley colludes with our appetite for quantity, our lust for bargains, our downhill addictions to more than enough.
Trolleys are the workhorses of the postmodern consumer, necessary hardware to enable the big shopping, the habit of impulse buying - do we ever notice that contradiction interms. That we've become habituated to buying what we didn't think we need, because it was there. And they come in various sizes and styles, from the deep loader, to the standard and then there's the quick whizz round version that can still take about four bags of stuff if you pack carefully.
The photo was taken on a walk along the front, the shipwrecked supermarket trolley an eloquent protest at our capacity to grab ands gobble, produce and procure, spend and consume, load up, pay up and use up. When I walk the front most often I'm down on the sand, enjoying the sound of the waves, liking the smooth billiard table feel of sand compacted by tide, feeling body and mind begin to find the rhythm of wave, wind and weather. Next time I'll take a carrier bag and a pair of gardening gloves, and see how far I can walk until the bag is full of the rubbish that washes up, much of it previously transported to the checkout on a four wheeled basket trolley. Much of it around Aberdeen is just as likely to have come from the industrial catering and offshore maintenance of oil rigs and oil fields.
Of course filling a carrier bag is a futile gesture, not even a drop in the ocean of debris and detritus that washes around our shores. Why bother? Maybe as an act of symbolic repentance for our greed and carelessness; perhaps a prophetic enactment of our inability to look after our planet and yet the defiance that will be required if we are to make a difference; maybe as a prayer for the healing of creation, an embodied act of cleansing of a broken and soiled world; or even a liturgical act of doing for others what they haven't done for themselves, taking away their rubbish.
The Christian doctrine of creation is less about arguments on cosmological origins, and more about stewardship, creation care, environmental ethics rooted in accountability beyond ourselves. Organised clean-ups of beaches and parks, forest walks and mountains are not mere acts of damage limitation; they are statements of value, enacted resistance to the consumer disposable culture, rich in things and poor in soul, satisfied only when consuming, and suffering a hunger which remains an ache no matter how much we stuff ourselves with stuff. Perhaps alongside harvest thanksgiving there should be organised occasions of clean up, cultivation, culture, conservation and celebration of creation, and an asking of forgiveness for our sins against the Creator.
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