The monarch butterfly was little more than a splash of orange across the yawning chasm of blacktop parking lot. It’s amazing my daughter even saw it.
It fluttered a few inches into the air then toppled over, one wing repeatedly dashing itself against the pavement. It moved like a leaf in a tiny windstorm: swaying this way, tumbling that way, bouncing up, down and sideways. Whatever grace had once propelled this creature to dance upon tufts of invisible air currents had given way to desperation.
“Something is wrong with its wing,” my wife said.
“Will it be okay?” my daughter asked.
My wife pursed her lips together. “A butterfly can’t really survive with only one wing.”
An uncomfortable silence fell upon us then, as we watched the sad little insect continue its hopeless attempts to regain altitude. Again and again, it crashed to the ground.
Our daughter wanted to pick it up, hold it. I was against the idea — “Let the thing be!” — but then she said she wanted to carry it upstairs and place it in a flowerpot on the deck overlooking the lake as a final resting place, and well, it was hard to argue with that.
“And maybe it will get better,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow it’ll be gone.”
“Maybe,” we said, though we encouraged her not to get her hopes up.
Carefully, carefully she walked up three flights of steps, through the family home we were visiting and back out into the sunshine. She slowly opened her hands, and the butterfly tumbled out and onto a cluster of pink flowers.
We watched it slowly open and close its wings. We watched as its grip on the petals visibly loosened. We watched as it regained its footing, determined to remain upright, beautiful.
“We’ll check on it tomorrow.”
Tomorrow came and the butterfly was still there, motionless, lifeless, though still full of color. It was a sad moment.
“At least it got to become a butterfly,” our daughter said in the car hours later. She’d been mulling over the whole ordeal. My wife and I were caught off guard. We asked for clarification. “At least it didn’t die as a caterpillar,” our daughter said by way of explanation.
I’ve been thinking about that simple statement for several days now. There was something beautiful and haunting and primal in those words. I’m amazed that, at seven years old, my daughter was able to articulate it. Put simply, we’re made for more; we’re made to flourish. And yet, we don’t all get the opportunity.
I’ve been reading “A Theology of Flourishing: The Fullness of Life for All Creation” by Paul Schutz, associate professor of religious studies at Santa Clara University, in preparation for an interview on an upcoming episode of “AMDG: A Jesuit Podcast.” Undoubtedly, my reading colored my experience with the butterfly and how I heard my daughter’s words.
For Schutz, Jesus’ declaration that he has come so that we might “have life and have it more abundantly” is foundational to the Christian project (Jn 10:10). Our focus can not solely be on the afterlife; we must relish and delight in the goodness God provides in the hear and now. Flourishing, Schutz says, is “an embodied process of self-actualization whereby creatures come to live in the fullness of what they are in relationship with God and other creatures.”
The image of a butterfly is a good one. There’s some comfort, perhaps, in our knowing that the butterfly we laid to rest was — in a measurable though imperfect way — the fullness of life for that caterpillar. It became what God always intended it to be. There is joy to be found in that.
Near and far, it’s not hard to see that we are falling short of the abundant life Jesus desires for us. It’s not hard to see that we are growing numb to this reality, that we are settling into a status quo that I can only imagine our God of abundance finds abhorrent.
And yet, I am buoyed by my daughter’s words. The desire for abundance, for flourishing, for more — the magis — seems to be an intrinsic one. God has placed it in our very selves from the beginning. I wonder what the world would look like if we all unearthed this holy desire, buried in our souls. I wonder what our own lives would look like, what we might do differently.
I wonder what the world would be if we all could live with confidence, trusting that each of us might one day flourish and flutter as our fully formed butterfly selves.
