In August and September the Buddleia bushes in our gardens should be covered with colourful butterflies, sipping nectar from the sweet-smelling flowers. These are mostly from the Vanessid family: the native Small Tortoiseshells and Peacocks which survive the winter here as adults in sheltered places, including behind curtains in our houses; and the Red Admirals and Painted Ladies, immigrants from southern Europe and Africa, which arrive in Spring, breed here, and then return south in Autumn.
But where are they this year? Earlier in the year I saw many other butterflies, even a couple of tattered Small Tortoiseshells in early Summer. But as I write in late August there are almost no Vanessids to be seen at all. This I find very worrying.
Insect numbers generally have been falling over recent years, including butterflies. If you are my age, you will remember how car windscreens used to be matted with squashed moths and flies driving home after dark. But that is now a distant memory. There is less food now for insectivores like swallows and bats. One reason is changing farming practices, and the use of insecticides. Another is changes to the seasons due to climate change. The collapse of butterfly numbers this year is probably due to the disappointing summer we have had, connected to climate change. I hope that better weather next year will see numbers bounce back. But I fear we may be seeing signs of the collapse of the ecosystem that supports these butterflies. Future generations may never be captivated by their beauty, as I have been.
Butterflies are not mentioned in the Bible, not once. I wonder why not. They’re so beautiful and graceful. I can imagine Jesus, teaching outdoors, pointing to one, saying, “Behold, the butterfly…”, and using it to illustrate some profound truth. If he ever did, it’s not recorded.
But wait a minute. Consider the lifecycle of a Peacock butterfly. A tiny green egg is laid on the underside of a nettle leaf. A few days later a tiny, black spiny caterpillar hatches out. It devours the nettle leaves and grows until it is about 2in long. Then it hangs upside down from a stem and attaches itself with a thread. Its skin bursts and falls off, revealing a pupa. A few weeks later the pupa breaks open and the butterfly emerges with crumpled wings. It rests while the wings are pumped up with liquid and harden. Then it flies away in a new body perfectly designed for its new life, to seek a mate and start the cycle all over again.
These changes are called
‘metamorphosis’, from a Greek word meaning transformation. And this word is
used by St Paul in his epistles, twice:
·
Romans 12:2: Do not be conformed to this
world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may
discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
· 2 Corinthians 3:18: And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.
Perhaps Paul was inspired by the
transformations he saw in the lifecycle of butterflies. He tells us that as followers
of Jesus we should expect to be transformed, bit by bit, into entirely new
people, able to discern what God wants of us, becoming more like the image of
God in Christ Jesus. Just as the Peacock butterfly’s egg turns into a
caterpillar, the caterpillar into a pupa, and the pupa into the adult butterfly.
Joc Sanders
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