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Starting
Point
Exodus to the light
By JONI WOELFEL
This time of year in the
South,” Libbie Adams writes, “there are huge garden spiders that
build the most magnificent webs and make a little pouch to lay their eggs in.
They stay in that web until almost wintertime, at least until a good heavy
frost comes, and I love to watch them. I can easily see God’s superior
intelligence in the creation of that beautiful spider and her web, and in the
way the spider catches flies, grasshoppers and crickets. Nature has implanted
within its being all it needs to know to survive.”
“We have another kind of spider,” Libbie writes, “a
fat, reddish/brown one who builds a web up high, usually under the eaves, who
comes out and builds her web just before sunset. Then, in the early morning,
she unwinds it strand by strand, drawing it back into herself before she crawls
back into the eaves to sleep the day away. At sunset, she’s busy again,
spinning the most amazing masterpiece -- a trap to catch her evening
meal.”
Libbie says that seeing God in all of nature has given her a
wonderful kinship with it and freed her to enjoy it. She writes that there is
no separation among the things God has created and that separation can only
exist if we perceive it that way. As my husband so beautifully put it,
“Nature is our world, and we have an intuitive sense to learn of and from
it.”
Our village was recently invaded by Asian beetles that were
introduced in 1916 to devour aphids that were wiping out crops. I had stepped
outdoors to appreciate one of the last warm days of the season before winter
set in. Within seconds, flying bugs tangled in my hair and crawled in my ears
and down the neck of my shirt. Flailing at them, I dashed into the house but
not before noting what seemed like thousands of them encrusted on the front of
our house like it was a giant beehive. They were beetles that resembled orange
and black ladybugs. Everyone in our village was talking about their invasion.
They infiltrated everything that had a minute crack or crevice. It reminded me
of a biblical pestilence.
That night, while reading in my sitting room, I began to hear a
popping, rustling sound overhead. I looked up and right above me, the ceiling
was writhing with well over a hundred beetles, drawn to the light of my reading
lamp. We have ceilings of antique sculptured tin that have a lot of unsealed
crevices and the bugs were getting in through the attic. I flew off the daybed,
wondering what to do.
Then, I got an idea. I snapped off the light, plunging the room
into darkness and turned the light on in an adjoining closet. Within seconds,
it was as if a command was issued, and the beetles swarmed en masse across the
ceiling, like an exodus out of Egypt. They gathered on the walls of the closet
where I could sweep them down into a dustpan and empty them outside. I’d
never witnessed such a dramatic response to the lure of light.
The experience stayed with me as I thought of the compelling power
of light. I thought about what it is like to spiritually journey out of
darkness into the light of optimism, hope and healing. As dramatically as with
the beetles, I realized that beyond our hardships, sorrows and challenges, we
are all on an exodus to the light. From deep within the intricate, beautiful
and complex webs we weave in our hearts, we are instinctively drawn to the
illuminating consolation of prayer, faith and communion with God. It draws us
on the darkest night, even when we have lost our way. Always there, always
planted within our being, always a reality -- love draws us home as surely as
beetles are drawn to light.
Joni Woelfel is the author of Tall in Spirit, The Light
Within and Meditations for Survivors of Suicide.
National Catholic Reporter, November 15,
2002
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