Monarchs and Miracles

What a full day it's been! This morning, as we continued our "Standing on the Side of Love" summer sermon series, Heidi Mastrud, our Director of Congregational Life, preached a wonderful sermon about being an ally and what that means. (The sermon will be posted here, soon.)

It's been a full day of Pride related events, including being a witness to the incredible momentum that is building in the effort to defeat the freedom limiting Marriage Amendment that will be on ballot in November.

And I've been following the events and reports from Phoenix, as the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly meets there.

But the thing that made my heart sing today was this:

A few weeks ago, a neighbor gave our son a monarch caterpillar to raise, watch, and learn from. A few weeks ago, the caterpillar stopped eating and transformed into a chrysalis. This morning, as our son and I were eating breakfast, he noticed how dark the chrysalis was (a stark contrast to its normal translucent golden/green color), and how he could see the outlines of orange and black wings. After breakfast we removed the netting on the top of jar the chrysalis was in and took it outside.

Shortly after that, a monarch butterfly emerged. If you've never seen this before, it's remarkable. What initially emerges hardly looks like a butterfly. The wings are shriveled and wrinkled, just little stubs, really. But after a few minutes, they fill out, and before long, there's a beautiful monarch butterfly hanging from its empty chrysalis.

It's stunning. But what's even more stunning is how the caterpillar turns into "goo" inside the chrysalis, essentially disintegrating; in the middle of that "goo" the sleeping "imaginal cells" awaken and over a few weeks turn the "goo" into a butterfly.

It was a gift to be with my son for this experience, to witness this butterfly's emergence.

I was reminded that there's a lot of "goo" in the world, a lot of brokenness, heartbreak, injustice, and despair. Our sacred task, our imaginative task, is to wake up, to see differently, to begin to organize our compassion, empathy, commitment and love - so that together, we might create a new world. Justice is love in action.