[Faith-talk] Daily Thought for Monday, July 22, 2013

[Paul]

Hello and good day to all my fellow readers, whether you're reading this from a list or individually.  I hope and pray that, by God's matchless grace and His providential care, that your day is going well or went well.

Yesterday's daily thought message was a bit heavy, theologically speaking in my opinion, so we're going to switch gears today.  The article in question I have for you today has no author named, but if you liked the one on hummingbirds I gave you a while ago, you're going to like this one, at least I hope you will.  It's entitled "A Butterfly Is Born" and is rendered as follows:

Nature's most vivid image of rebirth is right in your own backyard.

Change, runs the cliche, is good.  But it's also difficult.  To lose a few pounds, break a bad habit--those things, for most of us, are pretty drabble.  (Sorry folks, but that's the way it was printed).  But to change on a deep level--to really and truly become different from what we were before--that's another matter entirely.

That's why, when discussing spiritual transformation--the most difficult, most challenging variety of change there is--people have so often brought up the most subtly miraculous transformation in all of nature:  when the humble caterpillar becomes that airy- flower-flitting, nectar-drinking, heavenly creature called the butterfly.

As different as caterpillars can look from each other (some are smooth and some are spiky; some blend into their environment while others have garish patterns that seem to boldly announce their existence to the world), all have a basically earthbound quality to them.  Bumbling, nearsighted, and constantly hungry (most spend all their lives doing little but eating), they're really the last animal in the world you'd expect to become a butterfly.

But that, of course, is just the point.  One day, after weeks or months of crawling around, eating, shedding its skin (caterpillars normally do this five times), and avoid being eaten (a daunting task, as countless birds and animals depend on them for food), the caterpillar gets a courageous new inspiration.  It finds a safe, secure spot--the branch of a tree perhaps, or the ceiling of a back porch--and hangs itself from the little anchor of silk.  It then sheds its skin for the final time and turns into a hard, peapod-shaped object called a pupa (from the Latin for "doll," a reference to the object's resemblance to a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes).

In many species, as the pupa hardens, small golden spots appear on its surface, spots which give the pupa its other, more familiar name of "chrysalis" (from the Greek word for gold).  Within the chrysalis, a genuine miracle occurs.  Over a matter of days or weeks, depending on the species, the caterpillar literally disintegrates.  Then, out of that pulpy, formless mass, a new creature coheres.  A butterfly is born.

It's a transformation that is as mysterious now as it was in the ancient world.  "Most people," Eric Grace write in his book The World of the Monarch Butterfly, "imagine the transition going on in the pupa as a steady merging from one form to the other with a part-caterpillar, part-butterfly stage halfway.  In fact, during the chrysalis stage, the caterpillar is almost completely broken down into a soup of cells before the butterfly becomes built up."

The caterpillar that wrapped itself up in its chrysalis and the butterfly that ultimately breaks out of it are both the same animal and not the same animal at all.  It's this paradox that makes the miracle of the chrysalis such a vivid metaphor for the transformations of the Spirit--that myriad of impossible changes that the soul must undergo on its own journey toward perfection.

According to the Catholic scholar Louis Charbonneau-Lassay, the chrysalis is an "image of the human being that has separated itself from the agitation, noise and anxiety of ordinary life to transform its inner state into a more perfect one."  The caterpillar-into-butterfly transformation can symbolize the change that occurs when a person goes from being an earthly minded believer to a heavenly minded believer.  It can also point to the ultimate spiritual transformation we undergo at death when we leave our earthly bodies behind and receive heavenly ones.  The ancient Egyptians sometimes decorated the cocoon-like sarcophagi that housed the bodies of their dead with images of butterflies to suggest this ultimate transformation.

In ancient Greece, the same word, "psyche," was used to signify both butterfly and soul.  Ancient Christian writers, meanwhile, saw the ultimate caterpillar-to-butterfly parallel in the resurrected Christ, whose body was, and was not, the suffering mortal body crucified on the cross.  What is the ultimate lesson hiding behind all these varied images? Perhaps the 16th century Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila said it best in her classic spiritual instruction manual, The Interior Castle.  "The silkworm," she wrote, "is like the soul.  When it is full grown, it starts to spin its silk and to build the house in which it is to die.  Let us hasten to perform this task and spin this cocoon.  Let the silkworm die--let it die, as in fact it does when it has completed the work which it was created to do."

The silkworm Teresa talks about here is our smaller self, that part in each of us that is afraid of change of any kind, afraid to give itself over to God for even a moment.  The self that bumbles and gropes along, intent on its appetites, earthbound and entirely oblivious to the larger, heavenly world above it, our inner caterpillar.

To become what it is destined to be, the caterpillar cannot change a little here or a little there.  It has to transform completely.  It was Teresa's understanding of this--her willingness to sacrifice that ever-hungry, earthbound aspect of herself--that transformed her from a humble Spanish nun into the leader of a religious order and one of the great religious geniuses of all time.

But even for those of us who are not up to such heroic standards of sanctity and holiness, the miracle of the chrysalis is one we can take to heart just the same.  Whether we are a great mystic or just an ordinary person who wants God's help in becoming better, change always means dying a little.  Like the lowly caterpillar, all of us are humble and flawed.  But also like the caterpillar, we are built for transformation, creatures capable of metamorphoses more wonderful and surprising than our wildest dreams.  All we need is the courage to allow them.

1.  Search:  The first step in the average caterpillar's journey to butterfly-hood begins with selecting a suitable out-of-the-way place in which to turn into a chrysalis.  The underside of a leaf is a favored spot for many species.

2.  Anchor:  Once anchored, the caterpillar sheds its skin one final time--while dangling in midair.  It's tougher than it sounds.  Imagine getting out of a tight pair of blue jeans while hanging from your heels.

3.  Emerge:  Butterfly wings don't come out of the chrysalis ready for flight.  Wet and wrinkled, they first need to unfurl and dry as the capillaries inside them fill with blood.  This is the most sensitive moment in the animal's life.

4.  Fly:  Finally, the butterfly's transformation is complete.  The creature that emerges is a symbol of the Spirit for people from Greece to the Gulf of Mexico.

And there you have it for today.  I bet that most of you never thought of the life of a butterfly as symbolic of the Christian life before, but it is worth the comparison, in my opinion.  When I first came online more than four years ago, one of the first people I met was a precious elderly Christian sister, and one of the first impressions I had of her was her delight in nature and how it works.

Before I close, I've got a "homework" assignment for you.  (No, there won't be a test or a quiz).  If you have access to a Bible concordance, look up the words "transform" and "transformation" and think of the verses cited in light of what you just read about the caterpillar, pupa, chrysalis and eventually a butterfly.  When I read this article originally a number of years ago, I did just that, and, by reading the verses associated with the words found in my concordance and meditating on them, I learned more than a few secrets of my Christian life that I otherwise would not have learned.

And now may the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob just keep us safe, individually and collectively, in these last days in which we live.  Your Christian friend and brother, Oil of Gladness