Praised be to you, my Lord, through Sister Dragonfly, sentinel on the wing whose aerial agility and colorful display delight us with wonder and whose guardianship protects us from many biting pests.
This modern stanza in the mode of St. Francis’s “Canticle of the Sun” expresses marvel at the intrinsic and instrumental goodness of a conspicuous suborder of insects. Though fierce in appearance, with a name to match, dragonflies are not a threat to humans. Rather, their predation on mosquitoes, gnats, and other biting or bothersome insects is of great benefit to us. They are like elusive Middle Earth Rangers who protect our Shire from devastating foes.
We might humor St. Francis for his thirteenth-century praise of God through Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire, and Sister Mother Earth; or for his coaxing a cricket to perch on his finger and sing for hours. But what would we make of a twenty-first century Poverello who walked through our suburbs or inner cities praising God for dragonflies? Would we think this peculiar, something proper to a pantheist or Wordsworthian Romantic but not respectable for a person of the technological age? Would this really be Christian behavior?
Leaving dragonflies aside, have we ever praised God, like St. Francis, for the sun, moon, wind, water, or fire? Do we think of God or, more specifically, Jesus Christ when we see the sun and moon, feel the wind upon our face, gaze upon a lake or stream, or experience fire’s heat and light? What is our relationship to the natural world of God’s creation? What is the relationship of creation—and even a blue dasher dragonfly—to Jesus Christ? How does our relationship with Jesus Christ affect our relationship with dragonflies and the rest of creation?
In 1979, St. John Paul II named St. Francis the patron saint of those who cultivate or promote ecology (oecologiae cultorum ediceretur). Many Christians and non-Christians alike have in mind the “birdbath Francis,” who loved animals simply for themselves. Doris, from Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos, loved St. Francis not because he loved Christ but because he loved titmice.
But Doris misunderstood St. Francis. St. Francis loved creatures and the natural world because he loved Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word through whom all creation comes into being. The evangelist St. John directly connects his Gospel to the book of Genesis. Life in Christ is a new beginning. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be” (John 1:1-3).
John provides a Christological deepening of the Genesis story of creation. God spoke ten times in Genesis, and the entire universe was created. God speaks his divine Word (Logos), and everything comes into being through the Word. The Word is the formal cause of creation, the form or pattern through which all comes to be. Everything—from quasars, black holes, the Andromeda Galaxy, and the M57 Ring Nebula in the constellation Lyra; to the Rocky Mountains and the Indian Ocean; to dolphins, octopi, jellyfish, coral reefs, and algae; to tulip poplars, sunflowers, titmice, and blue dasher dragonflies—is because of the Word of God.
And that Word of God became incarnate by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, was born in Bethlehem, suffered and died on the cross on Calvary, rose from the dead, and ascended to sit at the right hand of the Father. St. Francis loved animals and plants and the wind and moon because they were created by Christ. His burning love of the Crucified One was the source of his love of all things natural. The order of creation and the order of redemption are not separated but are part of God’s single, divine economy or plan of salvation.
Creation and redemption
In the Cathedral of St. Catharine (sic) in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the stained-glass window of Christ with the sun, moon, earth, and palm trees expresses this Christian truth of faith. It is the first in a series of ten windows, five on each side of the cathedral, that presents Christ in creation and in all aspects of our human life—the human race, baptism, meal blessings, Christian education and development, religious life, our labor, and our death. The cycle culminates across from the creation window with the coronation of Mary titled “His Promise Fulfilled.”
Creation is the first gift that is not abandoned and left behind in the Resurrection. Rather “the destiny of all creation,” as Pope Francis indicates in his encyclical Laudato Si, “is bound up with the mystery of Christ” (99). Creation, like redemption, is of the order of God’s love. Do we encounter Christ’s love for us not only in the Eucharist but also in creation?
Wheat and grapes, fruit of the earth, are transformed by the work of human hands into bread and wine, which we offer through the priest in the sacrifice of the Mass, and it becomes the Body and Blood of Christ. We are baptized with running water. The matter of water and the spoken Trinitarian formula brings about our spiritual birth into the life of Christ.
Often baptismal fonts or even baptisteries are eight sided, a theological symbol of Christ’s resurrection on Sunday, the first day of the week, which marks a new creation. The Genesis week of creation ran from Sunday to the Sabbath on Saturday, the seventh day. Easter Sunday is, then, the eighth day. Christian eyes should see the splendor of creation through the lens of Christ’s glorious Resurrection and give praise to God, who has created all that is through Christ in the Holy Spirit.
For the Christian, every day is a festival day and in that joy we should rejoice in all that God has created. Our joy in creation should be a taste of God’s divine delight in what he has created and lead to our praise of him: “May the glory of the LORD endure forever; may the LORD be glad in his works! Who looks at the earth and it trembles, touches the mountains and they smoke! I will sing to the LORD all my life; I will sing praise to my God while I live. May my meditation be pleasing to him; I will rejoice in the LORD” (Ps. 104:30-33).
God delights in his wisdom, personified in the Old Testament as Lady Sophia, by which he fashions and orders the world. “When he fixed the foundations of earth, then was I beside him as artisan; I was his delight day by day, playing before him all the while, Playing over the whole of his earth, having my delight with human beings” (Prov. 8:30-31).
In the New Testament, Jesus Christ is identified as the Wisdom of God. He calls us to come and take his yoke of wisdom upon our shoulders. We are to eat and drink at his banquet. When we gaze upon the world with wisdom, the world becomes transparent to the divine and nature thickens to become creation. As Catholics, we have a sacramental view of the world. Nature, as wondrous as it is in its particularity, points beyond itself to its origin: God. God’s first revelation of himself is the gift of creation. Redemption is God’s second gift in the death and resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ, the High Priest who is the mediator of the new and definitive covenant through his sacrifice offered once and for all.
Priests of creation
As creatures of God, we are to be priests of creation, offering ourselves and the entire world to God in praise. The unity of creation and redemption in the divine economy is revealed in Scripture. The seven-day creation account of Genesis 1 is paralleled by the instructions for the construction of the Tabernacle in Exodus 25-31, 39-40. The consummation of each is the declaration of the holiness of the Sabbath.
All of creation is directed to the praise of the Lord on the Sabbath. The sevenfold structure of days in Genesis 1 corresponds to the sevenfold instructions God gives to Moses in Exodus, with each speech paralleling each of the days of creation. The meaning of this connection is that, just as the priests and high priest are to serve and worship the Lord liturgically in the Tabernacle, so are Adam and Eve to serve the Lord in the cosmic temple of Eden.
The divine command to Adam to “till and keep” the garden has direct parallels to how priests are to serve and worship in the Temple. King David instructs his son Solomon to “keep” the Law (1 Kgs. 2:2-3). As Solomon is to keep and observe God’s Law, humans are to “keep” or cultivate and care for the earth. Creation and redemption are ever connected.
In the seven-day account of creation, God speaks ten times, “Let there be . . .”. His ten commands that usher in creation are connected to his ten commandments in Exodus. The order and structure of the created universe is not disconnected from the order and structure of being human. Our moral life and call to holiness in the order of redemption takes place within the larger orbit of the divine order of creation. We and the world are created and governed by God’s wisdom, which is Jesus Christ himself.
Do we live in Christ and see God, ourselves, one another, and creation with this wisdom of Christ? The Lord commanded us to consider the lilies of the field. Do we truly profess belief in God the Father, Maker of heaven and earth, such that every moment becomes an opportunity to praise and thank God for the goodness and beauty of creation all around us as expressed in Psalm 148 or by the three men in the fiery furnace (Dan. 3:57-88)?
Rediscovering God as Creator bears fruit in acclamations of praise throughout the day that find their fulfillment in the great act of Thanksgiving—the Eucharist—on Sunday. Redemption in Christ, celebrated liturgically in the Mass each Sunday, is not disconnected from the daily praise of God encountered in and through the sacramental world in which we live Monday through Saturday with family life, school, labor and work, chores, shopping, preparing meals, cleaning, recreation, and nurturing relationships.
We bring the entire world and ourselves to offer on the altar: “Pray, sisters and brothers, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God the almighty Father.” The sacraments of the Church use the material goods of the earth (e.g., water, oil, bread, wine) to effect the redemption the sacraments signify. The seven sacraments are celebrated within a created order that itself is a sign of God and suffused with his presence.
For the Christian, each moment is an opportunity for praise and worship and to share in the Master’s joy. Sunrises and sunsets, rainbows, the crescent moon, a night sky of stars, mountains, forests, lakes, and oceans can all move our heart with their beauty and call forth praise of God. The microscopic and the telescopic realms reveal more of the grandeur of God previously hidden from us. Disciples of Jesus Christ should be filled with joy at what is and have a profound humility in how we relate to God’s creation.
But there is a certain blindness many Christians suffer that prevents them from seeing the unity of creation and redemption and the presence of God in everything. Part of this diminished vision comes from a false understanding of the domain and fruits of scientific investigation and understanding of the world that mark our contemporary culture.
Science and creation
Creation necessarily and by definition points to the Creator. God is self-existent being; God’s very essence is his existence. When God creates, God bestows existence to that thing, which we call a creature. Everything that exists does so only because it participates in God’s being. Creation, then, as St. Thomas defines it, is fundamentally a relationship between the creature and Creator—specifically, a relationship of dependence upon God for existence.
Thus, creation is not a scientific category but a philosophical and theological one. No scientist as a scientist studies a relationship to God (i.e., creation) but only nature. Nature is reality as it is observed and can be studied in its particularity and interconnections. Nature is accessible to anyone who has senses. How does anyone perceive a dragonfly? (See below.)
There is more to the dragonfly than meets the eye and intellect of the backyard observer, naturalist, or trained scientist. Studying the book of nature with its catalogue of species and ecosystem dynamics, one needs a philosophical or theological vision to recognize the divine author of the book. The Christian sees the dragonfly not only as a natural organism but as a creature created by God. Formed by the Word of God, each creature speaks a word or message to us revelatory of some aspect of God.
St. Paul teaches that anyone who encounters the natural world can find the Creator through creation. “Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made” (Rom. 1:20). This understanding and perception, however, is available neither from a purely scientific understanding of nature nor from a physical perception. It requires a higher wisdom that comes from a philosophical and/or theological reflection.
Wisdom and creation
Many scientists do not encounter God through their study of nature. On the contrary, they think that science leads away from and even disproves God’s existence. But this is not the fruit of science per se but from the prior philosophical commitments the scientist brings to the study of the natural world.
The fourth-century saint Basil stated that the scientists of his day—natural philosophers—were unable to encounter God through their study of nature because they were “deceived by their inherent atheism.” There is nothing in the practice of science itself that leads one to atheism. Science studies measurable and observable changes in the natural world under specific restraints. It seeks to understand these changes as effected by natural causes. One can be an atheist or Catholic and study the natural world scientifically.
However, faith is the best context in which to understand science. The entire endeavor of science rests upon presuppositions that are beyond scientific explanation and verification and that scientists must accept on faith: that the world is real; that the world is intelligible; that truth is worth pursuing. For the atheist, no explanation is possible for these non-scientific presuppositions. For the Christian, the presuppositions make perfect sense because the universe is created through God’s divine Logos—his reason, intellect—and Wisdom. The world is intelligible because it is the work of the divine intellect.
Difficulties arise not between science and faith but between scientism and faith. Reason and faith can never be in conflict, because they have their common source in God. Scientism is the philosophical position that science alone is the way to the truth. Associated with it is the philosophical error in moving from a natural method that seeks to uncover only natural causes (and thus methodologically brackets off non-natural causes from consideration) to a metaphysics of naturalism that holds that all that exists is only natural and that there is nothing immaterial or divine.
A couple centuries before Christ, Scripture remonstrates those who study the natural world but do not find God. “For they search busily among his works, but are distracted by what they see, because the things seen are fair. But again, not even these are pardonable. For if they so far succeeded in knowledge that they could speculate about the world, how did they not more quickly find its Lord?” (Wis. 13:7-9).
The person of science has knowledge about the natural world. Let us call this person homo sciens—the knowing human. But this person lacks wisdom—sapientia—about the ultimate cause of nature, namely God. We are more fully human when we are wise—that is, homo sapiens. The wise human sees reality as a sign pointing to the Creator.
St. Bonaventure holds out St. Francis as the true wise human. Filled with the Spirit, he had so conformed himself to Christ that he bore the stigmata, the marks of the crucifixion, on his body. His love of Christ crucified, the incarnate Word through whom all of created reality came into being, was the source of his ecstatic joy and love for creation. St. Francis is not unique but a model for the wise vision all Christians should have of God, oneself, one’s neighbor, and all of creation.
The next time you see a dragonfly, may the words of the psalmist in Psalm 8:10 be yours: “O LORD, our Lord, how awesome is your name through all the earth!”
Sidebar: Sister Dragonfly
To encounter a dragonfly is wondrous. We are amazed at dragonflies’ colors and flying ability. Greens, blues, reds, yellows, and ambers decorate their wings and body surfaces. They are strong fliers, patrolling and defending a territory back and forth, living in the air as they capture prey on the wing. Some even mate while flying in a heart-shaped tandem.
Dragonflies exercise independent control over each of their four wings, which allows them to fly forward or even in reverse and to glide. They are one of the few insects or organisms at all on the planet that can truly hover—and this in the horizontal or vertical plane. Their biplane-like wing architecture dates back 300 million years to the Carboniferous period when the first winged insects appeared, 150 million years before the dinosaurs of Jurassic period fame. Back then, dragonflies were monstrously large, with two-foot wingspans (compared to the two- to five-inch spans of today and the last 150 million years).
The known 6,000 species of dragonflies are completely aquatic, except for a few semi-aquatic kinds, before they mature into winged adults that stay near the freshwater ponds, marshes, lakes, streams, or rivers from which their nymphs emerged. Their presence, as nymph or adult, is a bioindicator of the water and ecosystem quality. They rarely tolerate polluted water.
Ecologically, dragonflies are voracious carnivore predators, primarily of other insects and invertebrates. The nymphs live in water and are mostly sit-and-wait predators buried in the benthic muck up to their large eyes. They lunge out at prey with their prehensile mouthparts, often assisted by a jet-propulsion expulsion of water from their back end that rockets them forward. Nymphs will eat mosquito larvae, other insects and invertebrates, terrestrial insects that fall into the water, and even tadpoles and small fish. Dragonflies, however, are also prey food for fish, amphibians, and birds. Both the taxonomist naming new species of dragonflies or an ecologist studying the individual, population, community, or ecosystem dimensions of dragonflies can be filled with wonder about the natural world, and dragonflies in particular.