The Ladybug

Today, I watched a ladybug die. I simply watched, unable to do anything to help it. At last, it was very clearly dead and very clearly in the middle of a walkway. I realised that it would soon be stepped on and crushed. The moment this realisation struck me, I was overcome with an outgrown instinct from my childhood: I wanted to give it a proper burial.

Taking great care not to cause any damage to its body, I picked it up and stared down at the lifeless creature in my hands. What I saw was not a bug, but, strangely, a friend, a loved one. It was a strange feeling to look down at something smaller than the nail on my pinky finger and realise it was a part of me.

I buried it in the small area of earth, woodchips, and plants that fill the small garden area just outside of the main office of my church (where the ladybug died). I dug a small grave, laid the ladybug in it with its feet beneath it, and whispered a prayer that came from somewhere beyond me or somewhere deep within me, perhaps both.

It wasn't until after I had finished the burial and finished my hushed prayers for the ladybug and for the world that it occurred to me how strange what I had just done was. It was something I had done many times as a child, unknowingly acting as a priest at the funeral of nature's tiniest creatures, but had stopped doing when I grew "too old" to do something so childish.

Yet, somehow, in the act of whispering prayers over the grave of this tiny creature, my soul felt no longer young, but old. My prayers over the lifeless ladybug, I realised, were also prayers over the lifeless friend whose death I was grieving. It was not, as I had suspected, naïvety nor innocence which compelled me to pay respects to the life of a ladybug, but a very real understanding that life, whether that of a ladybug or a human being, is sacred. I understood this as a child when I performed burials for the creatures that died and when I carefully extracted spiders and all manner of bugs from my shower before turning on the water that I knew would drown them.

In growing older, I forgot how sacred life is. Age, it seems, stole my childhood wisdom. And yet, age, it also seems, allows me to still find childhood wisdom again, even when I seem to have lost it completely, and grants the opportunity to learn new wisdom too. Age is a funny thing, often deluding us into the idea that we are too old for some wisdom and yet too young for others.

Blesséd be you, dearest lady bug, creature of the earth and of God.
Let your spirit be freed now and let it bring nourishment to the Spirit of the world.
From earth sprang you, ladybug, to fly through the mysterious air and walk the unknown surfaces of leaves, and to earth now you return, to give wisdom and nourishment to that which gave you life.
May your body peacefully return whence it came and let it bring nutrients to this earth in which it now rests.
May you have peace, now and forever more, that those who still breathe too may one day return to the earth and to God in peace.
Amen.








(Definitely not the verbatim prayer I gave earlier today; I could only remember the spirit of my child-like whispers, not the actual words.)