Prophet

I don’t believe in magic.

I’m not even what you’d call a spiritual person, honestly. I was raised in the Catholic church, a religious community I abandoned when, around age nine or ten, I listened to a priest who stood before our congregation and heard him, in so many oblique words, tell us that we could buy our way into Heaven (or, alternately, miser our way into Hell, one supposes). I was a kid at the time, sure, but even then I knew that wasn’t right.

I’d now consider myself Agnostic — I can neither confirm nor the deny the existence or a personal or impersonal God, though I tend to lean toward thinking along the lines that the divine isn’t a man in flowing white robes, issuing condemnation and approval from some Great On High. If there is, in any sense, a realm of the spirit, I think it’s likely something we puny earthlings can’t even begin to understand or wrap our minds around (so why not anthropomorphize, I suppose). Anyway, the point is that I still, despite my skepticism, hold out some hope for that. For whatever reason, throughout my entire life, some root part of me still searches for The Transcendent long after having given up The Church. Even as I question it, scrutinize it, and examine it for holes that will drain it of all mystery, I look for it still. The Divine It.

. . . . .

Since moving into this house five years ago, I’d regularly noted the abundance of praying mantises in and around the front garden with an immutable kind of excitement and awe. There’s just something about those things… something serene and otherworldly, fascinating and alien. In the process of doing some reading about upkeep for our sprawling garden a while back, I read of them:

The praying mantis is the oldest symbol of God: the African Bushman’s manifestation of God come to Earth, “the voice of the infinite in the small,” a divine messenger. When one is seen, diviners try to determine the current message. In this culture they are also associated with restoring life into the dead. “Mantis” is the Greek word for “prophet” or “seer,” a being with spiritual or mystical powers.

The praying mantis shows the way. In the Arabic and Turkish cultures a mantis points pilgrims to Mecca, the holiest site in the Islamic world. In Africa it helps find lost sheep and goats. In France, it’s believed that if you are lost the mantis points the way home.

During one summer a few years ago, we had one mantis that, curiously, seemed to live entirely on our front porch. Back when M used to take midday naps, I’d retire to the porch early each afternoon and sit with it, me on one of the folding wooden chairs that served as our porch seating, my praying mantis friend on the thatched metal side-table I’d picked up at Target one day on a whim. It was an odd relationship, one I never quite knew what to make of. I mean, surely this thing knew I was there, sometimes mere inches away, but it never budged. Only when I made some kind of fast movement or gesture would it stir, cocking its head to one side in a gesture that suggested it might be thinking, “O RLY?”

So it seemed odd to me that I hadn’t seen even a single mantis all year this year. Maybe not odd — after all, my attention has most certainly been elsewhere, far away from the transcendent… far from nature, for that matter. In any case, that I hadn’t seen one seemed a bad omen somehow. Though, lately, I’ve taken to seeing bad omens in so many things.

Then, yesterday, I opened my front door, and saw this:

Photo

It was an enormous one, easily the largest mantis I’d ever seen. It was attached to the side of my house, hanging from a shingle near the front door. As I approached it with my iPhone to snap this photo, its head rotated just slightly in my direction, “O RLY?”

. . . . .

I don’t believe in magic, the hocus pocus of so much spiritualism and religion. And yet I still can’t help but look for the divine in the real, the transcendent poking through the fabric of the material world. The infinite word of some God I’m not even sure I believe in, scribbled on a mote of dust.

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14 Responses to Prophet

  1. BusyDad says:

    Wow. Paragraphs 1 and 2, I could have written word for word for my blog. Same age, same result, everything. Just not as eloquently. But my praying mantis story would be that my kid and I found a praying mantis and we gave him a critter cage home and fed him crickets. And filmed him catching them and chewing their heads off. I like yours waaaay better.

  2. Chad says:

    Grandfather Mantis is always with you.

  3. stacey says:

    Wonderful and moving as always.

  4. cindy w says:

    That's a really genuinely lovely way of looking at it. But praying mantises (mantii?) totally freak me out. I know they're harmless – I mean, unless you're also a praying mantis (aren't they the ones that the females eat the males after mating?). I'm just irrationally wigged out by most insects. Nice to think of them as good omens, though.

  5. I absolutely believe in magic. It took a tragedy for me to see it, and it was wholly unexpected, but I saw it, and felt it. And not in the religious way. Not whatsoever. The magic I witnessed was the kind that would inhabit a praying mantis long before a church.
    Beautiful.

  6. Keryn says:

    That was really lovely, Tracey.
    I'm with you on this.

  7. Christine says:

    I've always loved mantises. They have such a strange grace about them. I did not however know any of the mythology associated with them. It makes so much sense.
    Lovely post as always. Hope you have an equally lovely and magic filled weekend.

  8. Bethany says:

    Just because you have "where is my mind" in your playlist… makes me heart you more. This post is thought-provoking. Lovely and interesting and somehow all I can picture is you sitting beside that mantis. Very calm and collected of you, I must say. ;-)

  9. Carrie says:

    I get it – all of it.
    Gave me shivers, in a good way.

  10. Zoeyjane says:

    Personally, I can't not believe in something, but that whole heaven/hell, be good or your eternal soul won't get Christmas present thing, no. It's too much and it's too malleable. But I believe very much so in *something* that might have brought your same mantis home, might have provided patterns in numbers for all of the most important people in my life, and that, for the most part, good things happen to hearts who deserve it.

  11. I believe in magic. I'm pretty spiritual — when I have the time…. That's a beautiful sign if I've ever seen one!

  12. tysdaddy says:

    I am a recovering Pentecostal, so I can relate in so many ways. I now, after A. J. Jacobs, call myself a Reverent Agnostic. I am fairly certain there are Sacred aspects of all that is around us, but we get lost in the pursuit of it . . .

  13. indycitygirl says:

    I believe that God,or whatever being one believes in is everywhere and I totally get what you are saying,beautiful words Miss Tracey.BTW, best wishes on your inking tomorrow,please put a pix up when it is all said and done!!!!

  14. Wow, chills. Though my path is different (raised in a militant atheist family, am now Catholic) I love how we can all find transcendent beauty in the little things. Love, love your writing. I hope you know how talented you are!

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