Everything Is Connected
Composting, Integral Ecology, and the Jesuit Commitment to Our Common Home
This is the first essay in a series exploring Jesuit spirituality, ecology, and composting.
“Finding God in all things” is one of the most recognizable ideas in Ignatian spirituality. It is not difficult to understand what that might mean while standing beneath an old tree, looking across a mountain range, listening to music, praying in a chapel, studying the stars, or serving another person. Beauty and wonder make attention easier.
A bucket of food scraps presents a different challenge: banana peels, coffee grounds, half an apple, the end of a sandwich, eggshells, wilted lettuce, the remnants of lunch gathered from hundreds of students.
We call these things waste, and that word often ends our attention. We have finished with the material, so we put it in a bin. Someone takes the bin away, and our relationship with what remains appears to be over.
But if Ignatian spirituality really invites us to find God in all things, perhaps the invitation does not stop when something ceases to be beautiful, useful, or wanted. Perhaps there is something worth noticing even in what we throw away.
Finding God in All Things Means Paying Attention
Ignatian spirituality is grounded in the conviction that God is active in the world, not distant from it. The Society of Jesus describes “finding God in all things” as a spirituality of attention: encountering God not only in explicitly religious moments but throughout ordinary life, and becoming a “contemplative in action” whose reflection informs what one actually does.
Near the end of the Spiritual Exercises, in the Contemplation to Attain Divine Love, Ignatius asks the retreatant to consider God dwelling in creatures—in the elements, plants, animals, and human beings—and then to consider God working within creation. The world, in this vision, is not spiritually empty matter waiting for religious meaning to be added to it. Creation is already a place of divine activity.
That makes composting surprisingly interesting.
Look inside an active compost pile and there is an extraordinary amount of work taking place. Bacteria, fungi, and other organisms are breaking down organic material. Their metabolism generates enough heat that a well-managed pile can rise above 130 degrees Fahrenheit without any external heat source. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, moisture, physical structure, microbial communities, and time interact in a biological process that gradually transforms recognizable food scraps and plant material into stable, mature compost.
A banana peel appears to have reached the end of its story only because we have finished with it. Biologically, another story is already beginning.
That is precisely the kind of ordinary reality Ignatian spirituality asks us to notice. Finding God in all things does not mean romanticizing garbage. It means learning to look closely enough that the world becomes more than a collection of objects categorized according to their immediate usefulness to us. It asks for attention, gratitude, discernment, and eventually action.
And that brings us directly to waste.
The Throwaway Culture
Few modern religious documents confront waste as directly as Pope Francis does in Laudato Si’.
Francis connects environmental degradation with what he calls a “throwaway culture”—a way of living that quickly reduces things, and more gravely people, to something disposable. He contrasts this with natural ecosystems, where the organic remains produced by one part of a living system become resources for others. He argues that human industrial systems have largely failed to develop an equivalent capacity to absorb, reuse, and cycle their wastes.
This is one of the places where composting becomes more than a technique for managing garbage. A compost pile challenges the very premise of throwing organic matter away.
But there is an important order to this.
I am in love with composting, but composting food waste is a last resort.
If food can still nourish someone, let it remain food. Save it. Eat it later. Share it. Recover surplus food. Cook what is aging before it spoils. Feed appropriate scraps to animals where appropriate. Composting should never provide moral permission to waste edible food.
Pope Francis makes this point forcefully. In a 2013 audience devoted in part to food waste, he connected discarded edible food directly to hunger, saying that food thrown away is effectively “stolen from the table of the poor.” Laudato Si’ later becomes remarkably practical, naming among the habits of environmental responsibility cooking only what can reasonably be consumed, separating waste, reducing unnecessary consumption, reusing things rather than quickly discarding them, and caring for other living beings.
The hierarchy is therefore clear: first, do not waste the food. When edible food can still fulfill its purpose, protect that purpose.
Eventually, however, there are banana peels, avocado pits, eggshells, coffee grounds, bones, plant trimmings, and food that genuinely can no longer be eaten. Then we face a different question: Does being finished with something give us permission to stop caring what happens to it?
The throwaway culture says yes.
Integral ecology says no.
Everything Is Connected—Including the Lunchroom
One of the central ideas of Laudato Si’ is integral ecology. Francis insists that environmental, economic, social, and human questions cannot be pulled apart as though they belonged to separate worlds. “Everything is connected” is not merely a poetic observation in the encyclical; it is the basis for questioning models of production, consumption, development, and daily life.
Food makes that interconnection unusually easy to see.
A school lunch does not begin in a cafeteria. Before the apple reached the student, there was soil, water, sunlight, a tree, agricultural knowledge, labor, harvesting, packing, transportation, refrigeration, purchasing, preparation, and perhaps hundreds or thousands of miles of movement. A sandwich carries another chain of fields, animals or plants, workers, processors, kitchens, trucks, energy, and materials.
When lunch is finished, those relationships do not suddenly disappear because the bell rings. The remains still have a destination.
This is where environmental education can either become very powerful or strangely incomplete. A student may learn about climate change in science class, read Laudato Si’ in theology, study food systems, participate in a service project, and hear about the Jesuit commitment to care for our common home—then walk into lunch and participate in a waste system whose consequences are entirely invisible.
That does not necessarily mean the school is hypocritical. Institutions inherit infrastructure, contracts, habits, schedules, budgets, and systems that often lag behind their aspirations. But the gap is worth noticing.
Laudato Si’ itself warns that environmental education can remain merely informational without creating habits. Francis argues that education should help form an “ecological citizenship” expressed through everyday practices.
The lunchroom, then, is not separate from environmental education. It is one of the places where we discover whether that education has entered daily life.
Love Ought to Be Shown in Deeds
This is especially resonant within Jesuit education.
A major contemporary document on Jesuit schools, Jesuit Schools: A Living Tradition in the 21st Century, returns to a foundational Ignatian principle from the Spiritual Exercises: love is demonstrated more fully in deeds than in words. The document places this principle within the Jesuit commitment to faith and justice and within the mission of education itself.
The Society of Jesus makes the institutional implication explicit in its Universal Apostolic Preferences. When the Preferences were promulgated for 2019–2029, the Society called not simply for individual changes but for personal, communal, and institutional conversion—including changes to ways of living and working that hinder the mission.
That is an important phrase: institutional conversion.
Ecological responsibility cannot rest entirely on asking individual students to care more. The institution has choices too.
What food does it purchase? How much is wasted? Can edible surplus be recovered? What happens to unavoidable food scraps? What materials does the campus send to landfill? What happens to leaves and landscape material? If organics are hauled elsewhere, what happens to them there? If compost is eventually produced, what is its quality and where does it go? What does the school itself return to the soil it occupies?
A Jesuit school teaches through all of these choices. It teaches through its curriculum, certainly, but also through its cafeteria, maintenance practices, landscaping, purchasing, buildings, transportation, energy use, and waste stream. Students absorb an understanding of the world not only from what adults tell them but from the systems adults construct around them.
A school can tell students that everything is connected while operating as though lunch scraps cease to matter once they disappear into a dumpster. Or it can allow students to experience the connection.
That difference is where composting becomes interesting.
A Compost Pile as a Place of Attention
There is something deeply Ignatian about an activity that begins by asking us to notice what we normally ignore.
Food scraps are easy not to see. They accumulate during lunch, are scraped into containers, and disappear. Composting interrupts that disappearance.
Suddenly the material has weight. A school can know how many pounds of food scraps it produces in a day, a week, or a year. Students can see the difference between edible food being wasted and genuinely unavoidable scraps. They can begin noticing patterns: Why is so much of this particular food being discarded? Are portions too large? Can something be saved? Is there another use before composting?
Then, for what genuinely belongs in the compost system, another kind of attention begins.
Students can encounter decomposition not as a diagram but as an event. They can feel the heat produced by microbial metabolism, observe how materials change, study bacteria and fungi, measure temperature, consider carbon and nitrogen, understand why oxygen and moisture matter, and eventually encounter mature compost that bears almost no resemblance to the food scraps that entered the process.
The theological meaning does not need to be forced onto the biology. The biology is fascinating enough.
But Ignatian spirituality asks what happens when we pay serious attention to reality. Ignatius’s Contemplation to Attain Divine Love invites precisely this kind of looking: God dwelling and working within creation. A compost pile reveals an extraordinarily active world that ordinarily operates beneath human notice. Billions of microorganisms do not become spiritually important because we decide to use them as a metaphor. They were already there, living and working.
The spiritual movement begins in noticing, and then gratitude can become responsibility.
From Throwaway Culture to Ecological Conversion
Laudato Si’ does not ultimately call Christians merely to become better-informed environmental consumers. It calls for ecological conversion—a change in the way a person understands and lives his or her relationship with creation.
Francis is explicit that care for God’s handiwork is not an optional addition to Christian life. He connects ecological conversion with examining the ways our actions and failures to act have harmed creation and then changing our relationship with the world around us.
That language fits remarkably well with the Jesuit tradition of the Examen.
The Examen is a practice of attention: looking back over lived experience, noticing what happened, recognizing gifts, becoming aware of failures and movements within oneself, and discerning how to respond differently.
What if we brought something like that attention to our material lives? Where did this food come from? What did it require to reach us? Did we use it well? Why did so much remain? Where will it go now? Who or what bears the consequences of that decision? What could we do differently tomorrow?
These are environmental questions, but they are also questions about gratitude, justice, habits, and relationship.
The purpose is not guilt. It is conversion.
A well-designed compost program can make that conversion physical. Instead of simply announcing that waste should be reduced, a community encounters its waste. Instead of speaking abstractly about biological cycles, it participates in one. Instead of treating soil as scenery around buildings, it produces something valuable to return to that soil.
The cycle becomes visible enough to enter consciousness.
Caring for Our Common Home Is a Jesuit Mission
This is not peripheral to the present mission of the Society of Jesus.
The fourth of the Society’s Universal Apostolic Preferences for 2019–2029 is Caring for Our Common Home, expressed as a commitment to collaborate, with Gospel depth, in the protection and renewal of God’s creation. The Society’s mission today also describes reconciliation with creation alongside reconciliation with God and with humanity.
For Jesuit schools specifically, this is not a small network concern. Jesuit and companion schools educate students around the world, giving the tradition an enormous capacity not simply to teach ecological responsibility but to embody it in the daily life of educational institutions.
Imagine what that educational reach could mean.
Imagine students not merely hearing that creation should be cared for, but participating in institutions that systematically examine what they consume and discard. Imagine schools preventing edible food waste, recovering what can still feed people, composting unavoidable organic material where appropriate, returning high-quality compost to soil, measuring what they divert, studying the living process, and allowing students to see that environmental responsibility belongs to ordinary institutional life.
Not every Jesuit school can compost all of its food waste on campus. Some lack space. Some lack appropriate infrastructure or expertise. Some may need regional collection systems. Good composting itself requires knowledge, management, and sustained commitment.
But every Jesuit institution can ask the question:
How much of what we call waste actually needs to become waste?
And where on-site composting is feasible, another question follows: Why send biologically recoverable material away if the community can responsibly transform it where it was generated and use the finished compost locally?
The answer is not merely about carbon emissions or waste-diversion statistics, important as those are.
It is also about formation.
What a Jesuit Institution Does After the Meal
There is an important difference between teaching a value and arranging communal life around it.
A theology class can study Laudato Si’. A science class can study decomposition. Students can celebrate Earth Day, plant a garden, discuss climate change, or learn about the Universal Apostolic Preferences. All of that can be worthwhile.
But eventually lunch happens. The plates are cleared. What happens next?
That question interests me because the answer is completely ordinary. Nobody experiences it as a dramatic theological event. A student has finished an apple. Someone cleans a kitchen. A custodian empties a container. A grounds worker tends a landscape.
And yet this is precisely where a spirituality of finding God in all things becomes demanding.
“All things” includes the magnificent and the mundane. It includes contemplation and operations. It includes the chapel and the cafeteria. It includes what we admire and what we would rather have removed before it begins to smell.
Perhaps this is part of what integral ecology asks of an institution: not simply to add environmental subjects to the curriculum, but to reduce the distance between what the community professes and how the community physically lives.
When unavoidable food scraps are composted where they are generated, students can follow their material through the cycle. What came from soil becomes food. Food nourishes people. What genuinely cannot be eaten feeds decomposer organisms. Those organisms transform the material. Finished compost returns organic matter and nutrients to soil.
The community has not merely diverted something. It has participated in return.
Everything Is Connected
There is a risk of making compost carry more theological weight than it should.
Composting is not a sacrament. It is not uniquely Catholic, and it is certainly not uniquely Jesuit. Bacteria do not perform their metabolism differently on a Jesuit campus. A properly managed compost pile obeys the same biological realities whether it stands behind a Catholic school, a synagogue, a public school, a farm, or somebody’s house.
But traditions help us understand the meaning of our actions.
Ignatian spirituality asks us to find God in all things and to become contemplatives in action. The Spiritual Exercises ask us to notice God dwelling and working within creation. Laudato Si’ challenges the throwaway culture, insists that everything is connected, and calls Christians toward ecological conversion. The Society of Jesus identifies reconciliation with creation and care for our common home as part of its contemporary mission. Jesuit education insists that love must become deed, not remain word.
Composting does not prove any of those ideas. It gives us somewhere to practice them.
It asks us to pay attention to what we normally stop seeing. It asks us to distinguish food that should still nourish people from material whose next role can be biological. It asks us to understand decomposition rather than hide it. It can reconnect food with soil, consumption with consequence, science with wonder, and environmental teaching with institutional behavior.
Most of all, it challenges one of the central assumptions of the throwaway culture: that once something has ceased to be useful to us, our responsibility for it has ended.
If everything is connected, then the connection does not end when lunch does.
It continues through what we save, what we waste, what we discard, what we recover, how we treat the organisms that transform what remains, what we return to the soil, and what kind of world our institutions teach students to inhabit.
Care for our common home does not begin only in grand gestures. It is practiced through ordinary decisions, repeated until they become habits and embedded until they become culture.
Even after lunch.
Even behind the cafeteria.
Even in what we were about to throw away.
Sources
St. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, especially the Contemplation to Attain Divine Love (§§230–237) — God dwelling and working in creation, contemplation in action, and love expressed through deeds.
Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home — throwaway culture, integral ecology, the interconnectedness of ecological and human life, everyday environmental responsibility, and ecological conversion.
Pope Francis, General Audience, June 5, 2013 — food waste, hunger, and the moral consequences of discarding edible food.
Society of Jesus, Universal Apostolic Preferences 2019–2029 — especially the fourth preference, Caring for Our Common Home, and the call to personal, communal, and institutional conversion.
Society of Jesus, Jesuit Schools: A Living Tradition in the 21st Century — Jesuit education, faith and justice, ecological responsibility, and the Ignatian principle that love finds expression in deeds.
Society of Jesus, materials on ecology and Jesuit spirituality — reconciliation with creation within the contemporary Jesuit mission.
Jesuit Global Network of Schools — the global educational mission of Jesuit and companion schools and its commitment to reconciliation with creation.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Approaches to Composting — aerobic decomposition, carbon and nitrogen, oxygen, moisture, temperature, and compost biology.
Cornell University, Compost Science and Engineering resources — microbial communities, biological heat generation, active decomposition, curing, and maturation.
Related essay: There Is No “Away”: What Really Happens to Our Food Waste—and Why Composting It Where We Live, Work, and Play Matters.
