Fireflies are an unmingled delight. I know their crepuscular bioluminescence is intended to attract both mates and prey, but I still find them utterly delightful. When I was a young boy, I would sit with my grandfather on the family homestead and we’d spend the hour or so before summer suppertimes watching the fireflies blink on and off in the evening shade. I remember wanting to catch some in a jar and the old man telling me they’d “lose their light and die” if I did. Now I sit on the porch of my little homestead and watch the fireflies again and discover my delight in them is still as fresh. Now I know they won’t die in the jar from sorrow because they “lose their light” but because they suffocate; now I know they don’t sprinkle the dusk with their illuminations for sheer joy but as a survival mechanism, but every time I see the stab of light in the evening’s darkness, something in me lights up, too. The little beetle is indeed bioluminescent by nature, but his brief night-time flash says more than he knows.
The firefly shines so he can be seen. He’s invisible, otherwise—I certainly wouldn’t know he was there if he didn’t make a show out of himself. My delight in him is the unexpected flash of light he gives in the midst of darkness. It’s not enough to see him for more than a second, just enough to say he’s there; a light shining in the darkness.
It’s probably scandalous, or at least a bit unwise, to write this, but the firefly shines with something of a Divine Light.
Not merely because he recalls the Scriptural statement that the Light shined in darkness (which failed to understand What it was seeing), but even more compelling, the firefly is invisible for those many, many seconds when he’s not shining his light. So too with God. The wondrous moments of illumination which periodically dot our lives with signs of God’s presence are separated by long periods when God seems invisible, inaccessible, hid from our eyes. It’s easy to understand why people so often lay aside belief. This isn’t a “modern” crisis; it’s been the case with all of us since the beginning. That’s why the little glow, that instantaneous flash of light—here, then gone!—delights. Between flashes, life can seem a drudgery, one problem or disappointment after another, but then, for those who know to look, there’s a flash, and then, there, another! Faith enables us to see there is meaning in the light that shines in our darkness. When we realize the darkness can’t overcome it, that the flashes of light persist, then, as the old Quaker hymn says, “How can I keep from singing?”
Perhaps, from time to time, as we delight in the Light, you and I can flash too, and briefly illumine the darkness for others.
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Don't keep yourself from singing.
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I think having lived where there are no fireflies makes them even more special. I still remember my mother taking us outside in the twilight in postwar Ohio and showing them to us for the first time. We were thrilled, as least thrilled enough to readily capture the little bugs in our bare hands, something we'd have been hesitant to do with any other insect.
A marvelous metaphor for the hidden glory of God, denied us here except for tiny glimpses: synchronous events, accidental encounters, numinous dreams, and found objects that betoken God's eye upon us.
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