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Good Morning, As much as 80% of stuff can be recycled. And at my local refuse centre, they can recycle up to 27 different materials. Since they’ve reopened, I’ve been going there a lot. It’s surprisingly satisfying. You get to de-clutter and enjoy the psychological benefits that accrue from this – the catharsis of feeling lighter, purer, somehow unsullied by the burden of goods; as well as the virtue of knowing that most of them will be re-made, fixed up or given new life by someone who needs them. Strange to admit but these trips to the recycling centre are more enjoyable than the shopping trips I did when buying the very goods that I’m now getting rid of. There was a day when we were told that buying things was good for the economy and that it was our duty to shop. But at a time of overflowing landfills and rising inflation, this sounds like the mantra of some extravagant and extreme religion. I must have been a believer, because I managed to make five trips to the refuse centre over the Easter break. I was amazed and faintly embarrassed by how many carloads it took to shed unneeded clothes, furniture, toys, Blue Ray dvd’s, a lawnmower, a tv that plays videos. Stuff that, not so long ago, seemed so indispensable. Things once coveted now just the detritus of a changing life. Perhaps I like going there for what it represents. A place where we not only offload things we no longer need, but where we feel some kind of absolution from buying them in the first place. It also exposes our other rubbish – the insatiable need to have more, the vanity of status anxiety, our carelessness with the environment. It would be good if we could dump this somewhere, put our fears in the green box, our greed in the brown skip, our thoughtlessness in the yellow bin. Leave it there and be transformed somehow, upcycled into someone better. We all share a need to unload our unwanted stuff, our distress, our appetites. Some of this can be done through physical exercise, or through therapy. Some do it through faith. It is at this time of year that many have been remembering the God who died on a rubbish tip. Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles but in Golgotha, a notorious, stinking dumping ground just outside the city walls of Jerusalem. Some believe that He invites us to take our rubbish to this dump and leave it there with Him. And that by taking that burden He re-makes us. It sounds like the creed of an extreme and extravagant religion. It is strange and scandalous. And not necessarily an easy place to go. But it’s at the very heart of the Easter story. Unexpected salvation found in a rubbish tip.