I Saved a Moth
I had a long day at the office. Really it started late. I didn’t get to the church until 10:45. It was intentional. I stayed straight through until choir tonight and when I do that, in order to find some balance and not short-change my children, I spend some time in the morning with them and come in later.
I got home at almost 8:00 tonight. The boys were already asleep. I was a hot shower away from hitting it myself. I got in the shower and noticed something out of the corner of my eye. There was a small moth making it’s way around the edge of the shower door. I didn’t think much of it. I figured it would settle in a spot until the shower was over and then follow me out. It didn’t, of course. I’m bad at predicting things these days.
The little moth, no bigger than my thumb-nail, flittered around the shower for a minute before getting hit by the spray and flipping over on its little back in the shallow pool of water near my feat where it prepared to drown or struggle until it killed itself.
These are the moments — right here. This is that moment when I am effectively tested. My values come into question. My theology of life is staring me in the face.
I bent down to the little moth, knowing that I couldn’t stand there and rinse what was left of the shampoo out of my hair as the little moth wallowed in the chemicals from my ‘rinse-and-repeat’ that was about to take place. I couldn’t stand there and watch its little legs struggling desperately to flip itself over. I couldn’t let it die.
That’s just who I am.
I reached out my hands knowing that my motions if they weren’t calculated would accidentally put the miserable insect out of its misery, but I’m good with my hands — gentle and precise as any artist should be. I poked around its edges to see if I could get under it and flip it over. No-go. I put my finger on its legs. This would work. Just as I hoped, it latched on to my finger and I was able to work, in tandem with the bug, and rescue it from the water.
I opened the shower door and placed it gently on the bathmat to either die (it didn’t look so good), or dry out and flitter off into my house where at some other point it would die.
I finished my shower.
When I got out, it was still sitting there motionless. I prodded it gently and it flittered its wings. Good. Still alive. I prompted it to crawl back on to my finger. It took a minute. I held it and looked at its details for a moment. Moths are quite beautiful if you pause to take notice. It wasn’t interested in flying off just yet. I think it was in shock.
Then I took the moth outside and placed it carefully on the rail of my deck, knowing that I’d done a good thing — a “right” thing.
The little moth really has my parents to thank for this. I was raised with a great appreciation for life. Not black lives or Hispanic lives or furry lives or tree lives or unicorn lives. I was just raised to really appreciate and care for life.
This doesn’t make me weak, feminine, overly-sympathetic, girly, a pansy, a pushover, or too emotional. It just means I care. The little moth, for instance, had these beautiful, well-thought-out details on its wings. Its even tinier heart was beating and likely beating very fast when it found itself stuck in my shower. It has a nervous system, eyes with which it can see, and was breathing. It was alive. It hatched. It grew. It had survived. It was a living and breathing creature that could feel. I care about things that can feel.
I’ve said very little about the death of Cecil the Lion in Africa, but I care about it. I care about life. But I care about it from an angle that might be a little different. I care about the life of an animal, an insect, a neighbor, a stranger, or a friend because I want the world to follow suit. I want the world to understand that all living things feel pain as well as joy. I want the world to be careful and compassionate. And, yes, I understand the created order but this is what I understand about that order: Humanity was given the planet to care for. The world is not our playground, given to us to do with what we please simply because it pleases us. When I contemplate the things that “please” people, I quickly envision a very perverted world — distorted from the intention with which it was created.
And because of that perspective I tend to think that it’s ironic that hunted animals are called “game.” I’ve always understood that hunting ought to be for the purpose of survival: feeding someone who’d otherwise be hungry and thus helping to control the population of whatever is being hunted for the sake of our safety. To me, that’s survival — creatures given to us to eat that we might live — not a “game” to play that might hone in on whatever perverted joy we’d get from watching something die. It’s not on TV. It’s not in a video game. It’s really life and, thus, really death. That doesn’t sit well with me. It can’t because I want better for the world, I want better for my world, and I want better for my son’s world.
No, I won’t raise them to hunt for sport. I can’t. I can’t celebrate that and we can afford to go buy what we need. It can’t be a game for me. If we needed to hunt to survive or to supplement our food supply — if we needed to be hunters and gatherers, we would. We’d do that. But here’s the point: I won’t raise my boys to hunt because I simply cannot allow them to celebrate death as though whatever they’ve hunted is a pawn in a game of chess and they, the white queen who can move whichever way she’d like, is superior.
I can’t teach them to hunt for sport because I cannot celebrate alongside them something contrary to the values I want them to learn: humility, kindness, selflessness, beauty. The world has enough bullies. It has enough people who think that they are superior to someone else for any number of reasons. The world has enough people who think they’re in control or ought to be. But what the world is truly missing is kindness. It’s missing compassion. It’s missing gentleness. And the struggle to engender this in the next generation comes with the grand contradiction that anyone or anything is less than the “other.”
Maybe the world will call them weak or small or meek or lowly. Maybe that’s what I am. I seem to remember some Beatitudes about those attributes……But my “trophy” at the end of this life will be that my children made the world a better place for someone else. Maybe a tiny moth who needed a helping hand or something as grand as a mighty lion — maybe someone who looks different than them in their class at school, or a stranger on the street. Maybe it’ll simply be recognizing the difference in another person and loving them for those differences. Maybe it’ll be saving the life of an injured bird. I don’t know what it will be but I know that it will be.
It’s kind of like that fable of the man walking along the beach throwing the starfish back in the water. A second man approaches the first and asks why the first is doing this — he’s not going to change the world by throwing a few star fish back in the ocean. The first throws another star fish back and then says to the second, “I changed that one’s world.”
My saving a moth isn’t going to change the world for other than that little moth but I have a chance to spur a domino effect by my example. I choose kindness, gentleness, and love. I choose to pay those things forward in my children.
