This week, a saw two monarchs in my garden.Then later, standing on the porch a monarch was flying from the milkweed patch and then back toward me. I reached out my hand, welcoming this amazing life back to the north. I wanted to jump up and down and shout my babies are back, but really they are the descendants of the monarchs that hatched here in the late summer, early fall. Only those monarchs are the migrators according to National Geographic, they make the trip to Mexico, but it takes generations for them to come back. National GeographicYou can read all about them in that link.
The complexity of the monarch life cycle, the things that need to be in place for it to survive is mind boggling. The late Sallie McFague said in her book The Body of God: “What has evolved (regardless of why or how it occurred) is complex, diverse, intricate beyond our wildest imaginations.”
So monarch survival is amazing, they are still alive after the specific things they need to live, like a milkweed plant, like no wall to stop their tired little wings so that they can get to Mexico. Then that gets us to thinking about the wall and children in detention camps, and then children of color in our country that have a totally different way that society treats them than white children. It is hard to find joy when all these truths are swirling around. Yet we are reminded that we have a responsibility, if we are the called out ones, the ecclesia, those who want to follow a way of life that is modeled after the Christ, or modeled after those teachers who have inspired compassion and love throughout the ages, then we take responsibility to make changes in our culture that will have lasting effects for the healing and reconciliation of the world.
In McFague’s theology of nature, she invites to us frame our lives in such a way that acknowledges that we are “interrelated and interdependent..all of us, living and nonliving, are one phenomenon, a phenomenon stretching over billions of years and containing untold numbers of strange, diverse, and marvelous forms of matter - including our own. The universe is .. a matter bodied forth seemingly infinitely, diversely, endlessly, yet internally one.” The monarchs are a marvelous creation, our relatives, we are all part of the whole.
Joy is one of the divine attributes that empowers us to make a difference, to live in different caring way, to speak the truth in love to power, to change the way we consume so that the future generations can benefit and live on a planet that has breathable air, just societal structures and clean water.