This stag beetle was on my deck this morning. I called Linda to show it to her while getting my camera. Isn’t it cool? Why would I want to just sit and stare at this thing and hope it hangs around and poses for some photos when I could be watching “Loonatics Unleashed” on TV right now? Because I’ve never lost the autochthonic childlike wonder that we all had – that means you, too – when we were little. For example, on our recent vacation there was a large green stink bug that greeted me and Linda outside our room. I took a lot of pictures of that thing, none of which turned out very well. And I just stared at it for a while. If you can get past the name it’s an amazing bug. The best adult book I’ve ever read about such things is Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Written in 1974, it won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s about the glory of God in the microcosmic world she discovered in a small creek by her home. There’s not a more brilliant writer in the world than Annie Dillard, and the fireworks of her wordsmanship are on full display here.
Watch how Dillard describes a cedar tree by Tinker Creek as the “tree with lights.” She writes: “One day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw a backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” Nooo…, that stuff is not really there in a tree by a creek, is it? The answer is: yes. You saw it when you were small. You didn’t have words to describe it. Annie Dillard has the words you and I didn’t have, so when I read her book there was a big “Yes!” happening in my soul. God displays his being in his handiwork, his creation, both on the macro- and micro-level. The good news for we Monroe County flatlanders is that the microcosmic display of God’s creativity is right here if only we would stop and smell the stag beetles. In order to begin to see this in all its blazing glory there must be a deconstruction of the American technophiliac passive screen-watcher in you and a re-learning to actually “see” again, like a little kid who’s not yet lost the wonder.
I have a friend at Michigan State University who is a professor of entomology, which is the study of bugs. I consider him very lucky because he never really had to grow up, the little boy who loved bugs getting to stay that way. One day I invited him to speak at my church to a group of our MSU students. He talked about his insect research and how it drove him inexorably to think of how great God must be.
The adult stag beetle eats next to nothing, flies around at night, and hides during the day, much like some teens I know. My specimen was just exiting when I caught his disappearing act this morning. My window of opportunity was there, so I sat in the chair next to the one he was sitting in, made some small talk, took a few closeups, and then watched him take a 30-minute slow-walk carrying his body armor on a straight vertical descent down the chair’s back and slip through a slat on the wooden deck floor.
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