Chasing after “Fireflies in the Garden”

When I was a child, I spent long summer evenings catching fireflies in our backyard. I would chase them through the grass as dusk closed in, watching for those tiny lights to flare out in the gathering darkness under the trees. Most of us, I suspect, have a natural dislike of bugs. We don’t really relish the idea of spiders or beetles crawling in our hands, flinch when a fly lands on our skin, and something as simple as a persistent gnat can ruin a perfectly good outdoor reading session. For some reason fireflies are an exception. I had no problem whatsoever with capturing a firefly in my cupped hands and peeking inside to see it light up. It was like holding a star in my hands.

I’m middle-aged now, but I still like watching fireflies. Even more, I like to watch my children chase them through the yard and giggle when one finally lands in their palm. My daughters will bring them over to me so I can glimpse and admire the treasure they’ve wrangled from the sky. I offer suitable words about how impressed I am. And I really am. I’m not pretending.

Even God himself seems to be a fan of catching fireflies and showing his friends. As it says in the book of Job, “In his hands he hideth the light, and commandeth it to come again. He sheweth his friend concerning it, that it is his possession.” (Job 36:32-33, Douay-Rheims) It’s a creative reading, I know, but I’m sticking to it.

Another man who was fascinated with fireflies was the poet Robert Frost. I’ve always loved his poems for their deceptively simple descriptions of nature. On the surface, he seems to write pleasant little poems about fireflies or snow or birds, as if he is nothing more than a man who loves the woods of New England and figured out how to write a few sentences that rhyme. Take, for instance, this poem called, “Fireflies in the Garden.”

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

It’s nice enough as a piece of writing but it appears at first glance like something any halfway motivated English student could write for a class assignment. It’s six plain short lines. Look deeper, though, because this poem blazes like a firefly in the night air.

You have to pay close attention or it disappears and you’ll miss it. Frost is setting up an analogy between two different kinds of lights – fireflies and stars. One is small and the other is great. More specifically, one type of light is temporary and earthly, imitations arising from bugs that emulate flies but aren’t really flies and whose lights emulate stars but aren’t really stars. The other type of light, made by the stars, is permanent and heavenly.

Both of these lights fascinate us. Which of hasn’t stared at the stars in wonder and which of us hasn’t chased fireflies around the yard? Frost is pointing out that both are, indeed, wondrous and in this sense the same. But in another way, they very much are not the same. So, they’re connected but not connected.

Frost, in six lines, has developed a sophisticated theology of beauty: Namely, that earthly beauty is a reflection of heavenly beauty and, while the two are connected we should not confuse them. The beauty of Heaven is permanent and unbounded, whereas the beauty of earth is a reflection that cannot “sustain the part.” As beautiful as this world can be, its beauty always leads to Heaven. Without God, the beauty of this world cannot last.

However, Frost isn’t a mere sentimentalist waxing poetic about how much he loves fireflies on summer nights, and his analogy isn’t limited to stars and fireflies. There’s another comparison lurking, here, which is that between light and darkness. The fireflies make a star-like start but cannot sustain it, and in between the brightness of their efforts the atmosphere recedes into shadow. We are like those fireflies, struggling to let our light shine, trying our best to become saints. We get close at times but fail to sustain it. The world is capable of great beauty, but it isn’t yet perfected. We have a long way to go. This is the bad news. The good news is that, when our light does shine, we can be part of meaningful, real moments of goodness.

But to return to that concept of a greater and a lesser light. “God is Light,” says, St. John, a fact which he later confirms in a vision of Heaven, during which he notes that there is no need of the Sun anymore because God’s glory illuminates everything. I always imagined St. John writing those words, “God is light,” while on the island of Patmos watching the sun rise over the sea and thinking of the Risen Lord. Or maybe he was looking fireflies.

It’s worth considering that God created light even before he created the Sun. This means there’s a spiritual light at the heart of existence, a heavenly glory that illuminates our world, waxing and waning as we avail ourselves to see it. The Sun and other stars are but a small glimpse of it. They’ve become fireflies in comparison. The light of those little bugs isn’t insignificant. Neither is the light of the Sun, or the light of our lives. These lights are precious messages from Heaven. The instinct of children to chase after them and cherish them seems to me to be particularly sound.

It would be naive to claim that our world isn’t shadowed by darkness – suffering, heartache, war, sin – but the light is what will endure. Even if it feels that we cannot “sustain the part,” the darkness will fade with the rising Sun. Even so, the small light by which we currently see already contains within itself its own heavenly destiny, and even the limit of perfection that exists here on earth turns out to be nothing less than a threshold into the beyond.

Maybe we’re all fireflies lighting up the dark. Maybe we’re stars.