Caterpillar Soup

Welcome to Word for the Week, the series in which I:

share my experience of hearing God’s Word in Mass last weekend,
explore what I believe the Lord is calling me to do about that Word, and
ask how this Word might impact your life, as well.

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For the entirety of last week, I had no idea what my Word for the Week was. Maybe if I looked back through the Mass readings now, I could figure it out. I know a specific word caught my attention during Mass. But then it left my memory.

It was a challenging week. I felt like I regressed in my recovery from disordered eating. I sensed a constant, dull panic, and eating three meals a day took all of the discipline I could muster. The image that came to mind was of a caterpillar inside of a cocoon.

Months ago, a friend described my sabbatical as my “cocoon phase.” She encouraged me to embrace the hiddenness of the process, and she reminded me that many moms take down time after giving birth. After each of our children were born, however, I worked as hard as I could to get back to full health as quickly as possible. And I missed my “cocoon” moment. Until now.

This is definitely that. After some research, I learned that at a specific point in the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly, the caterpillar digests itself into a jelly-like, soupy substance. If the cocoon was broken open at that point, all you’d see is liquid. And that’s how I have been feeling for a month, especially last week.

This imagery also reminds me of Holy Saturday. When Jesus is in the tomb, and the earth is silent. The struggle is over, but the victory is not yet apparent. Maybe you can relate with the quiet that comes from the unseen. Or, to put it another way, with stillness that contains no form.

This moment of apparent nothingness is crucial in nature, as in the case of the caterpillar/butterfly. And the great stillness of Jesus’ full tomb is also necessary to the resurrection story. For anyone else who finds themselves in a “soupy” moment, I pray we all receive the grace to rest in hope of transformation and resurrection.

I plan to be back with another Word for the Week, in which I actually remember the Word. (For instance, the Word for this week is “My joy shall be full,” which I’m taking to mean that the Lord wants me to eat full meals. (Or maybe that I’m “fully” in the cocoon. Hmmm.) For now, I’ll end with a rather melancholic poem from Emily Dickinson. 

“Cocoon”
Drab habitation of whom?
Tabernacle or tomb,
Or dome of worm,
Or porch of gnome,
Or some elf's catacomb?

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