The kingdom of God is like a matsutake mushroom
By the Rev. Jeffrey Metcalfe
Canon Theologian
Let’s not kid ourselves. We are living in the midst of ruins. Like a boreal forest that has been clearcut and replanted, at first glance it might appear as if the trees we see now are the trees that always were. Yet the health, the very identity of an old-growth boreal forest, is not only in its canopy but in its hidden soils, in a rich life that runs deeper than our vision—if not deeper than a bulldozer’s blade.
The truth is we are living in damaged landscapes on injured soil, both real and metaphoric. Whether the industry that extracts value where you live is built on the remains of trees, rocks, rivers, or meadows, it has left a mark on the land and on you before it has left altogether. And it will leave. Once it has accomplished its task of extracting value from the land and from you, you will be left to live in the scars of what remains: open-pit mines where once were mountains, tree plantations where forests reigned, hydroelectric dams interrupting fish runs, farming villages replaced by deserted monocultures of corn.
We must acknowledge that the church has never been innocent of these extractions. Missionaries always preceded the industrial mercenaries, and the barons of industry built and left parishes in their wake. We are the people who remain—the contaminated church.
As Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing describes in her spiraling ethnography The Mushroom at the End of the World, contamination is a mixed metaphor. It is not necessarily negative; it can also describe a site of collaboration and transformation that arises out of our encounters with each other and the land. Against a politics of purity that would hearken to “the good old days” (that were never really good for a great many creatures), thinking of ourselves as contaminated helps us to hold together our histories of exploitation alongside the beautiful relationships we have built within those histories, holding up the possibility that further transformations are not beyond us.
For Tsing, the hope in the metaphor is a mushroom—a matsutake. What makes matsutake mushrooms particularly valuable is their refusal to scale. In a monocultured world, they arise not from factory fields but from within the ruins of damaged landscapes of clearcut forests. These mushrooms form patches across the land, and where these patches arise, so too do small and unexpected communities of mushroom hunters—South Asian refugees, American war veterans, and others—building networks from the margins that allow them to forage for their freedom, salvaging what remains long after the last loggers left. Despite its history of exploitation and extraction, the land provides.
The kingdom of God is like a matsutake mushroom. It does not scale. No church programs or outreach initiatives can pull us out of our ruins. No politics of purity can plaster over our contaminated histories and the injured soils on which we stand. We are a contaminated church. Yet this same contamination is also a site of encounter and entanglement, a patch called into being, constituted by an agency beyond us. Like mycelial filaments beneath damaged landscapes, the Spirit reaches out through our clearcut histories, drawing us, by its fruit, to forage, to collaborate with unexpected partners, to be transformed by our entanglements.
I witnessed this transformation in, of all places, a recent deanery council meeting. The meeting opened with each representative of a congregation telling a story of their love for their community, a love maintained in the midst of brokenness and decay. As I looked across the table and heard their stories, I was filled with hope in these small patches of grace. Not a hope that ignores the damaged present or flees it by projecting a future purity, but a hope of resilience; a hope that together, we might yet pursue a ministry of salvage amidst the ruins.
This item originally appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of the Quebec Diocesan Gazette.
Canon Theologian
Let’s not kid ourselves. We are living in the midst of ruins. Like a boreal forest that has been clearcut and replanted, at first glance it might appear as if the trees we see now are the trees that always were. Yet the health, the very identity of an old-growth boreal forest, is not only in its canopy but in its hidden soils, in a rich life that runs deeper than our vision—if not deeper than a bulldozer’s blade.
The truth is we are living in damaged landscapes on injured soil, both real and metaphoric. Whether the industry that extracts value where you live is built on the remains of trees, rocks, rivers, or meadows, it has left a mark on the land and on you before it has left altogether. And it will leave. Once it has accomplished its task of extracting value from the land and from you, you will be left to live in the scars of what remains: open-pit mines where once were mountains, tree plantations where forests reigned, hydroelectric dams interrupting fish runs, farming villages replaced by deserted monocultures of corn.
We must acknowledge that the church has never been innocent of these extractions. Missionaries always preceded the industrial mercenaries, and the barons of industry built and left parishes in their wake. We are the people who remain—the contaminated church.
As Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing describes in her spiraling ethnography The Mushroom at the End of the World, contamination is a mixed metaphor. It is not necessarily negative; it can also describe a site of collaboration and transformation that arises out of our encounters with each other and the land. Against a politics of purity that would hearken to “the good old days” (that were never really good for a great many creatures), thinking of ourselves as contaminated helps us to hold together our histories of exploitation alongside the beautiful relationships we have built within those histories, holding up the possibility that further transformations are not beyond us.
For Tsing, the hope in the metaphor is a mushroom—a matsutake. What makes matsutake mushrooms particularly valuable is their refusal to scale. In a monocultured world, they arise not from factory fields but from within the ruins of damaged landscapes of clearcut forests. These mushrooms form patches across the land, and where these patches arise, so too do small and unexpected communities of mushroom hunters—South Asian refugees, American war veterans, and others—building networks from the margins that allow them to forage for their freedom, salvaging what remains long after the last loggers left. Despite its history of exploitation and extraction, the land provides.
The kingdom of God is like a matsutake mushroom. It does not scale. No church programs or outreach initiatives can pull us out of our ruins. No politics of purity can plaster over our contaminated histories and the injured soils on which we stand. We are a contaminated church. Yet this same contamination is also a site of encounter and entanglement, a patch called into being, constituted by an agency beyond us. Like mycelial filaments beneath damaged landscapes, the Spirit reaches out through our clearcut histories, drawing us, by its fruit, to forage, to collaborate with unexpected partners, to be transformed by our entanglements.
I witnessed this transformation in, of all places, a recent deanery council meeting. The meeting opened with each representative of a congregation telling a story of their love for their community, a love maintained in the midst of brokenness and decay. As I looked across the table and heard their stories, I was filled with hope in these small patches of grace. Not a hope that ignores the damaged present or flees it by projecting a future purity, but a hope of resilience; a hope that together, we might yet pursue a ministry of salvage amidst the ruins.
This item originally appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of the Quebec Diocesan Gazette.