Wadhams United Church of Christ
2569 County Route 10, Wadhams, NY 12993
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Sermon by Steve Smith
November 2 , 2008

           I Wish I Were a Butterfly                           

The week before last I went to a workshop on Transformative Aging, where someone who went to the same school I did for her degree in pastoral counseling talked about a new way of approaching the aging process. Since I’m still in complete denial about the fact that I’m getting older, most of what she said has been lost to me because of a persnickety problem I have with my short term memory. I do, however, remember a couple of analogies that she used, so I’m going to use one of them this morning to help focus our distractible thoughts. If I lose my train of thought or go grasping for a word I can’t find, please feel free to jump in with suggestions. I find that remembering things has become more of a group exercise than it ever used to be.
Our presenter talked about the process of transformation that takes place in a caterpillar when it curls up into a chrysalis and prepares itself to become a butterfly. I had never heard what she said before, so being the skeptical person I am, I went online to do the research for myself. You know how it can be with pastors and religious people: they’ll tell you anything and expect you to believe it, whether it’s true or not. So here are some fascinating facts about the life cycle of a Monarch butterfly.
The female Monarch lays about 400 eggs on the underside of separate leaves of milkweed plants. It takes the little yellow eggs about two weeks to develop. At the end of about two weeks, the eggs start to change colors and the caterpillar's head is visible through its eggshell. A newborn caterpillar is only 2 millimeters long, but eats voraciously. First it eats its own eggshell, then it starts feeding on milkweed. For the first few days, it eats day and night, only stopping to rest between meals. On the first day of life, it consumes its own weight in food. An adult caterpillar's size is about 2 inches long with a weight of about 2,700 times more than when it hatched.
This is where we have to be cautious about the application of our analogies. If you’re too literal about it, you could have serious problems. If we were going to apply this analogy to the retirement process, for instance, we would have to conclude that you should eat day and night for the first few days after you retire. On the first day of your new life as a retiree, you would have to consume your own weight in food, and after a year in retirement you should weigh more than two thousand times what you did when you started. While I’ve been a long time proponent of eating more for less stress, I can hardly recommend such a reckless approach to the fine art of retirement.
One thing I didn’t know is that a caterpillar has to go through the process of shedding its skin several times as it grows. When a certain limit is reached, the skin cells essentially detach from the exoskeleton above them, and manufacture a new exoskeleton underneath the old one – but the new exoskeleton is kept in a soft, flexible condition. When the new exoskeleton is ready to go, the insect ruptures the old exoskeleton, and either crawls out of that shell, or shucks it off like a pair of pajamas, and then expands its new exoskeleton. Judging by the size of my belly, I should be ready to rupture my old exoskeleton any day now, and the newer, sleeker version of Steve will emerge to take its place.
Here’s the thing that makes insects that undergo complete metamorphosis so vastly different from everything else, including other insects and arthropods. When one of these sorts of insects is an embryo, a number of tiny little buds of embryonic tissue, called imaginal discs, separate off from the rest, and just stay there inside the body cavity, doing nothing, all through the larval stages. The larva grows, and sheds its skin several times, until it comes time to pupate. Underneath the last larval exoskeleton, the skin cells form the exoskeleton of the pupa, and when that last larval skin is shed, the pupa is revealed.
Now comes the trick: inside this pupal shell, most of the innards of the insect, including the skin, basically disintegrate, except for those tiny little discs of embryonic tissue. They suddenly go into overdrive, consuming the nutrients and raw materials now floating in the body cavity and dividing, growing, and proliferating at a breakneck pace. They grow into layers of new cells, then form new organs, finally fusing together to form a new skin. This entirely new skin manufactures an entirely new exoskeleton underneath the shell of the pupal exoskeleton. That new exoskeleton is the body of the adult insect, and bears hardly any resemblance at all to the larval stages that preceded it.
Now you know the secret: it's not a case of morphing one physical structure into another, it's a new physical structure altogether, formed by a spare set of embryonic cells that had been hidden away. In essence, insects that undergo complete metamorphosis are born twice (or, at least, reborn), which is pretty amazing and pretty novel. While all of this may be fascinating, you’ve probably been asking yourself what it has to do with aging, or spirituality, or anything remotely connected to the sermon your pastor is supposed to be preaching.
The presenter likened the butterfly’s transformation to the process of aging. While we may not be able to literally shed our skin, we do find ourselves in the position of having to shed some of our responsibilities as we get older. We can also look back and see that there are some things we can no longer do, because we no longer have the balance and coordination we once did, or we are lacking the strength and vigor, or because our family and our doctor convinced us that it would be dangerous to do so. We can experience a series of losses that feel increasingly painful or devastating, or the effects of disease strip away layer after layer of independence and self reliance.
These kinds of events have the tendency to make us pull back inside ourselves, as we try to reorient to the new realities facing us. The pulling back isn’t a bad thing, as long as we process what is happening to us with an eye to growth and transformation. When the caterpillar pulls back into its pupa or chrysalis, it’s hard at work on the inside to reinvent itself as something completely new and different. When we want to withdraw into the protective folds of isolation, we have to remind ourselves that the events which have disintegrated life as we used to know it are designed to serve a greater purpose in our lives. That greater purpose is one of constant reinvention, as God uses all of life to remake us into people who have been transformed by their spirituality.
Just as those tiny discs of embryonic tissue come to life after the repeated stripping away of the outer layers of the caterpillar, the divine energy or divine life-force embedded in each one of us is activated each time life brings us to another shedding experience. Each time a loved one dies, every time we come up against something we can’t do anymore, each time our heart aches for what used to be, every time we longingly turn our gaze toward God for help in coping, or connecting, or enduring the latest hardship, the very life and love of God is hard at work within us to transform our thoughts, our attitudes, and our very souls.
While it might seem like everything within us has dissolved into chaos and clutter, we need to remind ourselves that these meltdowns can serve the greater purpose of reorganizing our lives to more closely resemble God’s greater plans for our lives. She wasn’t sure she could take any more, and she told God so repeatedly through the terrifying days she kept having to face. Her husband had died, then her son. She was left to face the world alone, trying to raise her kids, trying to find and keep work, her mind racing with the terrors of becoming homeless, or having to give her kids up for adoption because she couldn’t support them by herself.
Somehow, by the grace of God, she was able to survive the unending nightmares of those years. Now, she had remarried, and her husband kept pushing her to shed the layers of isolation and resentment she had used in order to survive her ordeal. By a series of events that were no mere coincidence, she had become the director of a bereavement center, and it was there that she spread her wings to reflect the glory of the God who had been hard at work to transform the tragedies of her life. It was there that each and every experience she had known as a young widow and a grieving mother would come to bless the people who came to the center for help and support.
It was in the camp she started for bereaved children that her own child’s departed spirit could soar among us and lift our gaze to the possibilities of life beyond pain and uncertainty. She became for me a living example of what God can do with the life that has seen much of grief and anguish. She was for many of us the butterfly that all of us wanted to become as we worked at reinventing ourselves after our latest meltdowns. She was, in short, an inspiration, even after her own untimely death, because Camp Nabe continues to inspire children, teens and young parents some twelve years later. Incidentally, Nabe is the Korean word for butterfly, and one of the activities we had the kids do was make a chrysalis to take home with them.
Once a Monarch butterfly reaches maturity, its great calling is to reproduce, and then head south for the winter. Since the average lifespan of a Monarch is around ten months, not a single one of them will complete the return trip to the place of their birth. In their journey through the seasons of the year, they will fulfill their calling without once being able to go back to being what they used to be. Though we may long to return to a time or space in life that somehow seems safer or more secure than the constancy of change that we encounter as we grow older, the nature of the journey is to keep moving forward, not backward.
The hopeful message embedded in the DNA of this maturing process is that we can fulfill our calling without being able to do all the things we used to do when we were twenty, thirty, or fifty years younger. Each and every shedding experience changed us forever. Each and every inward movement brought us back out into our world as different people, as people who are that much more sensitive to others who are going through similar hardships. The very life and love of God has been hard at work in each and every one of us to bring us to this point on our journey through the seasons of life, and God has no intention of seeing all that hard word go to waste.
So when that next blow lays you low, when the most recent loss leaves you feeling raw and vulnerable, don’t be afraid. It simply means that you’ve grown too large for your old skin. If you go through multiple trials that reduce your thoughts and emotions to primordial ooze, do not despair. God is already hard at work to use everything you have endured to serve a greater purpose. If you start to ask yourself what could go wrong next, just hold that thought and give God the room and the time to restructure your life around the imaginal discs that God has hardwired into our brains.

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