The Pastor Who Picks Up the Trash: John Marboe and Sonja Ausen-Anifrani

May 29, 2015

John Marboe has three jobs: as a pastor, a university professor, and a garbage collector. His experiences in these professions has given him a wide breadth of insight into contemporary American life, structured as it is within what he sees as a "disposable society." In this conversation, Marboe discusses his work and spirituality with his university colleague Sonja Ausen-Anifrani.

This story was produced by StoryCorps.

This story is a part of the American Pilgrimage Project, a conversation series that invites Americans of diverse backgrounds to sit together and talk to each other one-to-one about the role their religious beliefs play at crucial moments in their lives. The interview was recorded and produced by StoryCorps, a national nonprofit whose mission is to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.

John: If I tell people that I'm a Reverend, they have a certain response. If I tell people that I have a PhD and teach at the university, they have a different response. And if I tell people that I'm a garbage man, they have yet a different response.But if I put all three together, people either laugh or they look at me like I'm crazy, which is the perfect response for me. The blog is really about my experience, primarily as a garbage hauler in St. Paul and the ways in which I've found sort of spiritual insight, lessons about life, or just curious, quirky things about the citizens of St. Paul and our neighbors.

Sonia: Can you be more specific and talk about what some of those things that you've learned have been?

John: One of the main things that I've learned is what a disposable society we live in. Our economy is built on it, and we all participate in it. But it's messy, dirty, often vile, vile work. There's something important about that. To me, it connects with those spiritual traditions, not just in my own tradition, but in other traditions where people beg, people live on the streets, people choose a life of simplicity and menial work as a kind of spiritual practice. And that's a huge part of why I do it. So I wear a white collar on Sunday and a blue collar on Monday.

Sonia: One thing that I think is really beautiful about your story is that when we think of trash haulers in this society, one would not expect to hear words like, "I'm using this as my spiritual practice". this is giving me a lot of metaphors about life in general. And you also have this other profession as a pastor. And so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how this grounds you spiritually and then how your work between pastoring and trash hauling relates to one another and how do they inform each other?

John: Well, they certainly do. Our sense of sort of being here in the world often has so much to do with our roles. We get caught up in what other people think of us and how other people regard us. And when we gain a sense of power in the world that way, we gain a sense of self in the world. It's important, I think, to do things that sort of strip away that sort of mode of self-identity. And for some, it could be meditation. For some, it could just be stillness. But for me, there's nothing that does it like going from say preaching and presiding at a church service on Sunday to putting on this dirty shirt and being a garbage man and solidarity, too, with people who do the very menial jobs that we all depend upon.