Touching Another’s Soul Part 6
The Butterfly’s Homily
A butterfly landed on the porch this morning and came to rest near my feet. It was a simple occurrence, easily overlooked, yet her visit felt deeply significant to me. I believe God can touch our souls through butterflies.
As symbols of transformation, these beautiful creatures have always enchanted me. Whenever I encounter one, I am reminded of how profoundly life changes us—how existence can be both fragile and resilient, delicate and astonishingly strong.
More personally, butterflies remind me that I am cared for by God. During certain seasons of my life, they have seemed like messengers from heaven, arriving at precisely the moment when I needed reassurance, encouragement, or hope. At one stage of its life, the butterfly is a caterpillar, bound to the earth. At another stage, it rises into the air on wings that did not previously exist. Its life is a living testimony to metamorphosis: the mysterious transformation by which one form of being gives way to another.
Metamorphosis is more than a biological process. It is an archetypal theme woven throughout theology, philosophy, mythology, and spiritual tradition. Human beings have always wondered whether genuine transformation is possible. Can we become more than the person we have been? Can our deepest patterns truly change? Can the soul emerge from its confinement and learn to fly? Not everyone believes that we can.
In The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Orson Welles offered this unsettling observation:
“Human nature is eternal; therefore, one who follows his nature keeps his original nature—in the end.”
The line suggests a form of determinism—that an unchanging inner nature ultimately governs human beings. It infers that we may attempt to reform ourselves, adopt different behaviors, or appear to become someone new, but eventually our original character reasserts itself.
There is some truth in this. Our ego patterns are deeply ingrained. They can operate automatically, repeating the same thoughts, reactions, defenses, and emotional habits year after year. We may sincerely desire to change yet find ourselves returning to the same familiar ways of being. But are these patterns truly our original nature to which we always return? I believe not.
What we call “human nature” is sometimes only our conditioning—the protective personality we formed in response to life? The ego may be persistent, but persistence is not the same as permanence. Beneath our habitual patterns lies something more essential: the soul’s original capacity for truth, compassion, courage, freedom, and love. Our soul child— our essence. If one needs proof of this, all they have to do is talk to a two- or three-year-old— be present with them and feel their presence. This is or true nature,
If determinism were the final word, spiritual growth would be impossible. We would merely live on autopilot, repeating what has already been programmed into us. Prayer, self-awareness, repentance, forgiveness, and spiritual practice would make little difference. We would remain forever enclosed within the identity we have constructed.
But the butterfly tells a different story. This morning, in living color, she became a tiny homily about transformation. Without speaking, she reminded me that I am not condemned to live within my established patterns. I can emerge from old ways of thinking. I can outgrow reactions that once protected me but now confine me. I can rise above despair, resentment, fear, and the limiting conclusions I have drawn about myself.
Once on a private spiritual retreat, I hiked up a mountain, and the trail became a labyrinth within a dark thicket. For me, the thicket represented the heavy trial I was going through in my work at the time. All of a sudden, from out of nowhere in the prickly tunnel I was in, a butterfly fluttered around me and landed on my lips. The butterfly was a blessing— a kiss from God.
Today another butterfly comes my way, uninvited but welcomed in the deepest regions of my soul.
Transformation does not mean becoming someone entirely different. It may mean becoming more fully the person God created us to be—the person whose possibility has always been quietly present within us, like wings hidden inside a caterpillar. For me, the butterfly’s message is not that change is easy, but that change is woven into the sacred structure of life. What appears to be an ending may be the dissolution of an old form. What feels like confinement may be the beginning of emergence. What seems hidden may simply be waiting for the proper season in which to unfold.
Sometimes God touches our souls through the soul of another person. At other times, God sends a butterfly.
Spiritual Practice
Make a list of the major transformations you have already undergone. Consider not only the outward changes in your circumstances, but also the inward changes of heart, understanding, faith, and identity.
Then make another list of the transformations for which you are still praying.
As you place the two lists beside each other, what do you notice? What new possibility begins to emerge?
Inquiry
What part of you agrees with the idea expressed in the Orson Welles quotation?
What part of you resists it?
Are the patterns you repeat expressions of your deepest nature—or are they protective habits from which your truest nature is still trying to emerge?
Prayer
Dear God,
Thank You for appearing in such a gentle and reassuring way this morning.
Through this small and silent messenger, You calmed my fears, eased my doubts, and lifted my spirit. Without a single spoken word, the butterfly reminded me that transformation is possible, that I am cared for, and that no stage of life is necessarily the final one.
Help me trust the sacred work taking place within me, even when I cannot yet see its wings.
Amen
