Top photo caption: Pixabay image
By Effie Caldarola, OSV News
In the picture her mom sent, my 5-year-old granddaughter is staring wide-eyed at the praying mantis she has just discovered on the back of her chair at breakfast.
Alice loves bugs. She has a box full of dead bees and cicadas she has found in her yard. In my humble opinion, a live cicada is ugly enough and death does not enhance its appearance. But perhaps Alice is a budding entomologist.
Later, the praying mantis is taken outside in a plastic cup to be released and briefly sits on the end of Alice’s finger before leaving.
A praying mantis’ two front legs hold together in what some regard as a posture of prayer. Its funny little head is triangular. How marvelous is the Creator.
This insect lives only six months to a year, a brief life.
But the older I get, the more I realize how brief all life is. The 1974 hit “Oh Very Young” by the artist then known as Cat Stevens (now Yusuf), reminds us, “You’re only dancin’ on this earth for a short while.”
Those words invite me to make my spin on this earth joyful.
The swiftness of life, both for me and for the fleeting little green bug, is part of the Creator’s mysterious plan. Somehow, this God journeys with us through history, through time, through life. Resting in this knowledge makes me aware of the God of presence, of a big God, a God beyond time.
In Matthew 10:29, Jesus tells us, “Two sparrows are sold for a penny. Yet not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s permission.” That probably holds true for those dead cicadas as well. That’s a very big God.
Cat Stevens has always been special to me because when I was “oh very young,” an Ursuline nun befriended me at my first Catholic school teaching assignment. She was an English teacher, just a few years older than I was. I saw myself as a history teacher, but wisely picked up an English major as well, since in those olden days, social studies jobs often went to guys who were needed as coaches.
So I found myself teaching English classes which included sentence diagramming. I hated diagramming — when I studied Yeats and Shakespeare no one had suggested I diagram a sentence. My new friend, Sister Carolyn Marie, taught me how. And taught me so very much more.
Sister Carolyn Marie loved Cat Stevens, and “Morning Has Broken” was a favorite. These many years later, when I hear those words of creation, “Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird,” I think of Sister Carolyn Marie and the friendship she offered, the influence she had on me. I came to her school a confused agnostic. A couple of years later, when I left to join the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and teach in Alaska, I had an entirely different spirituality, moving from the guilt-ridden one impressed on me by other nuns in my little mission parish, into a hopeful one that pointed me towards a very big God.
While I was teaching in Alaska, Sister Carolyn Marie was killed, way too young, in a car accident.
“And the goodbye makes the journey harder still,” Cat Stevens tells us in “Oh Very Young.”
But the journey is full of good-byes. To the praying mantis as he escapes into the yard, the cicadas treasured in a box, the little girl who grows up before my eyes. Change is inevitable, good-byes part of the journey.
“We’re all just walking each other home,” are words attributed to the poet Rumi. So one clings to joy and to hope. Keep on dancin’.
Effie Caldarola is a wife, mom and grandmother who received her master’s degree in pastoral studies from Seattle University.
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