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:

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.