Welcome Up, Cicadas!

It sounds like a summer sci-fi action thriller movie: “The Invasion of Brood II.” But this is the way the media has been talking about the emergence of the 17-year cicadas this year. It’s always the language of “invasion” and “alien attack.” If you were anywhere near trees and grass this summer in the tri-state area, you might have heard them. It is kind of an alien, unearthly sound. [cicada recording plays] One summer every seventeen years, literally billions and billions of cicadas crawl out of the ground, climb onto the trees, leave their parts of themselves clinging to tree trunks, fly around, sing, mate, and die all within a month. Seventeen years underground. One month above.

I knew some people in Connecticut who were already stocking their bomb shelters back in May, getting ready to not leave their houses for that entire month. I pretended to commiserate with them, but secretly I was kind of looking forward to witnessing this drama unfold. And sure enough, right on schedule, millions of little flying creatures appeared out of nowhere, zooming around with little beady, red eyes, making these crazy noises. In places you couldn’t have a conversation with someone standing next to you, they were so loud.

People were fascinated with them. They seemed deeply foreign, totally other. A creature more different from us was unimaginable. They were the talk of the town. The newspapers were full of them. Dogs were getting sick from eating too many of them. Bloggers were blogging about them. I became fascinated by our fascination with them. Here’s part of a blog post I liked by Cathleen Falsani:
“I’ve been sitting on the chaise all week, staring at the grass in anticipation of their creepy arrival. Each time a blade of grass moved, I leaned over the side of the lounger expecting to see an army of arthropods fighting their way through the top soil, all alienesque and icky, before attaching themselves en masse to Henry, my mulberry tree, where they will sound like an opera of lawn mowers. My neighbor was bemoaning the havoc cicadas have wreaked in his yard. ‘Tell me this,’ he shouted over the hedge, ‘What exactly is the point of a cicada?’ They live more than a foot underground for 17 years, make an ungodly racket for a few days, have sex, lay eggs, die, and leave crunchy corpses all over the place,’ he said. ‘What kind of a life is that!?’”

What kind of a life is that, indeed.

But there was one family of humans who had a warm place in their hearts for these creatures. Someone had a large sign – words painted on a sheet hanging from their front porch. It said, “Welcome Up, Cicadas!” How beautiful! Welcome up, cicadas! This family was welcoming the cicadas up to our world; wishing for this world to be a good place for them. The family that lived in that house obviously felt some kind of kinship with the cicadas. And that got me thinking, are we really so different from these bugs? Are they really so alien?

Now, I know I might be anthropomorphizing a bit, but here’s what I think happens. (If there are any entomologists in the room, just hold your ears for this part.) Here’s what I think: during those seventeen years underground, the cicada is buried there, trying to remember something. He can’t quite figure out what it is. It’s like a dream, with just flashes of images that pass through like clouds. A memory of wings. Of flight. Wind. Vibration in the belly. Fluttering. Rhythm. Red. Something about light. Bright, white, open sky. Something about desire and breath. A cracking open.

That’s it – it’s a cracking open of something. And then suddenly, the memory comes flooding back to the cicada, like the universe in Krishna’s mouth, it’s all there, and the cicada is moving, climbing up toward the light. His exoskeleton is cracking open, what the cicada had thought was his own body is cracking open and there are wings inside. He’s unfolding the wings, spreading them, and a vibration begins deep in his gut, a deep trembling, and then sound – a roaring, electric sound coming out of him for the first time. And he’s flying and there’s wind and he remembers: THIS is what I am! This is what I have been all along! Not this grub living in a shell underground. How could I have forgotten? This is my true nature!

Many of us humans spend at least seventeen years underground, buried, stuck, just focused on bare survival. Maybe we’re buried working a job we hate, trying to support our family, or maybe we lost our job. Maybe we struggle with depression or an addiction that keeps us buried. Maybe we were abandoned and our sense of hope was buried and we can’t quite unearth it. Maybe we’re stuck in a bad relationship, maybe we’re buried in anger at our parents for things they did years ago, maybe we’re sick. Maybe we’re just scared – life has knocked us around enough – enough! – and we’re scared – we don’t want to be hurt any more and so we just hunker down into the ground, fragile and besieged. Like the cicada, we humans build up a thick exoskeleton to protect us while we’re underground. It’s hard to move in this exoskeleton; hard to take a deep breath, but at least we’re safe, ensconced underground and in our own shells.

Like the cicada, we forget that this underground creature is not who we really are – it’s not our true essence. And like the cicada, there comes a time when that safety, the protection of that underground armor no longer serves us. It becomes a prison. There comes a time when we have to fight our way to the light and crack open our shells. But like the cicada, we suffer from amnesia about who we really are.

We forget who we are when we’re lonely and longing for the partner we can’t find. We forget who we are when our teenagers act like they don’t need us anymore. We forget who we are when our parents act like they don’t trust us. We forget who we are when everyone around us in office is getting laid off and we’re terrified that we’re next. We forget who we are when our country teeters on the brink of more war. We forget who we are when our loved one is dying and we can’t do anything about it. We forget our wings and the freedom of flight, and only remember our shells and the dark, heavy earth around us.

I believe that who we really are, the identity of our deepest souls, is God. If we dig beneath our exoskeletons, beneath the pain we’ve suffered, beneath the inheritance of fear and bitterness, each and every one of us would find the Infinite Eternal – all powerful, all encompassing, bursting with love and light. Like the universe in Krishna’s mouth, we all have that within us. Emerson called it the “supreme indwelling Spirit.” Our Unitarian faith teaches of the oneness of all; that everything and every one of us participates in that oneness; we contain it within us just as much as it contains us within it. Far from being isolated creatures individually wrapped in the ground, we are vitally connected with everyone and everything.

Remembering that connection in the midst of all the struggles of life is one of the greatest challenges of being human. I think this is what religious communities like ours are all about – trying to remember. “Remember,” not the past but as in “re-member;” bring together in loving-kindness all the dismembered parts of our selves and of the world. (Arthur Waskow)

There’s that story – I think I’ve told it here before but it bears repeating – the story of a four-year-old who asks her parents if she can have some time alone with her new baby brother. The parents are hesitant but they allow her to go into the nursery and close the door. They turn on the intercom that connects the infant’s room with theirs. They hear their daughter draw close to the crib. After a moment of silence she says to the new baby, “I need you to tell me about God. I’m starting to forget.”

The same idea crops up in many different religious traditions. In the Sufi tradition, the poet Hafiz writes in the 14th century, “You are a divine elephant with amnesia trying to live in an ant hole/ Sweetheart, o sweetheart you are God in Drag!” In Jewish tradition there is also a story of forgetting – according to this story, every baby in its mother’s womb knows the whole Torah – all the infinite wisdom of the universe is known to the baby. But just at the moment of birth, an angel comes down and taps the baby on the mouth (right here) and makes him or her forget everything. This is what caused that indentation right under your nose in case you were wondering.

Emerson warned that when we forget the “indwelling Supreme Spirit,” a “sickness infects and dwarfs the constitution… and the divine nature is denied with fury. Once man was all; now he is an appendage, a nuisance.” He doesn’t mince words. And Emerson’s favorite Bible passage was where Jesus says, “the Kingdom of God is within you.” (Interestingly, the Greek word for “within” can also mean “among,” which implies a more communal understanding of God’s presence.)

And then, still on this theme of remembering and forgetting our divinity, in the Hindu story Michele told earlier about Krishna and his mother, this idea of the infinite God within (that we forget) has a visual representation. Yashoda literally looks inside Krishna and sees infinity: “She saw contained within His mouth the complete beautiful creation. She saw outer space in all directions, mountains, islands, oceans, seas, planets, air, fire, moon and stars. Indeed, mother Yashoda saw within the mouth of her child the cosmic manifestation.” But then Krishna, wanting her to live a normal life and to mother him as a normal child, makes her forget what she saw.

Maybe if we fully remembered and recognized the infinite divinity within us, we wouldn’t be fully human. We would be already enlightened, already one with God. So maybe we forget so that we can have our human experience – our human trials and tribulations, our loves and passions and attachments here on earth. Our path here is a path through our humanity. The struggle, the quest then, is to remain fully human while simultaneously cracking open our shells to reveal the divinity within. Maybe that’s why it’s such an important mystery in the Christian tradition that Jesus was believed to have been both fully human and fully divine. Maybe he had mastered that trick.

But I believe that we all have that same divinity within us. Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s not in there, ’cause it is. We are all divine elephants with amnesia trying to live in an ant hole. Or maybe the poet meant – a cicada hole.

So to get back to that neighbor’s sarcastic comment about the life of a cicada, “What kind of a life is that?” I answer, it’s the kind of life we have. It’s a life spent often with years underground, spiritually buried, stuck in our own fears and pain. And it’s a life of climbing towards the light. It’s a life of slowly cracking open our emotional shells, and finding that we are powerful and beautiful beyond measure. We can fly, we can love, we can transform, we can even nurture new life. It’s a life of discovering that we are gods inside.

So welcome up, cicadas! Welcome up out of our amnesia, welcome up out of the ground, out of our shells, welcome to our wings, welcome to our divine Self. Welcome here to the practices and the music and the words that help us to live into our oneness together. Welcome to re-membering here in this congregation. Welcome to freedom. Welcome up! The sunlight is beautiful and we are on our way.

And now please rise up out of your pews in body or spirit and join me in singing “I’m On My Way” #116