Part II: Capturing Fireflies and Faith

Everyone has faith and nobody's is the same

It was the kind of cool deep summer night we still had back in the 1980s, the kinds kids today will never know. The sun gone from hot and high to below the horizon, the crickets humming, the adults in lawn chairs holding cans of cheap beer while we kids spit watermelon seeds at one another and waited for the fireflies to begin their light show. We called them lightning bugs.

I was young, too young for too many formative memories, but I think it was a work picnic for my father, and mostly what I remember is one of the mothers getting us an empty miracle whip jar, the label residue still stuck to its sides, and all of us children cupping the lit life and putting them into the jar. I remember bringing the jar home with us and I remember the morning most of all, the dark butts of dead flies at the bottom of the glass.

Children were not often confronted with death in the 80s, and though I would lose grandparents and elderly neighbors soon enough, and my own brother in our teens, this was my first memory of killing something myself.

I have never seen a lightning bug since without this visceral memory coming, the remnants of a sinking sense of culpability bottoming me out and guilt rising up, filling up to my throat.

Perhaps you think it’s an extreme response, but I was a child and this is when our most core memories are made.

Catching fireflies is how I often think about faith these days. There is something mysterious, miraculous, some might say mystically about faith. There are times when you see it, feel it profoundly, and times when it is all but gone from you, invisible in a dark night. Eventually one might learn to simply observe their faith—the way it rises, falls, ebbs, flows—because to capture it, put in a jar, stick a lid on it, is to kill it.

To have faith is to put our trust in something we cannot see or control, cannot capture or contain, cannot fully understand or explain. It is irrational to have faith. To convince someone to have it or have more of it is impossible. It cannot be done. To fully explain how to come by it or where it comes from is an exercise in near futility. It is free for everyone and everyone has it to varying degrees and in various things. Our own experience with faith, of faith, through faith is as unique as our own fingerprint. It cannot be replicated or repeated.

While there is perhaps right doctrine or true history or real events, our experience with all of them will be unique. The way you read this will not be the way I wrote it, nor the way you speak of it to another, or the way they understand it.

We are faced with a choice then.

• Do we observe someone’s experience of faith, knowing it is not our own and cannot truly be understood or argued with?

• Or do we try to capture it, contain it, keep it, put it in a jar, and almost certainly kill it?

This is, as all preambles are, a long preamble to the next installment of the I Changed My Mind on Sexuality series. You can read the introduction here and Part One here.

This series is behind a paywall for many reasons. If you absolutely cannot afford a subscription right now, contact me and I’ll get you sorted. If you can afford a subscription, it’s most economical for you to do a year’s instead of a monthly one ($3.50 a month vs $7). This series may take six months, I’m not sure 😬