Cricket in a Cup
by Karen Edmisten in Faith on Wednesday, March 24, 2010 6:00 AM
It was a quintessential summer evening, long ago. Every window in our tiny house was open, and soothing sounds wafted in from outside: laughter from Elly, our six-year-old neighbor, playing with her big brothers; the chirping of crickets; the hypnotic whoosh-whoosh of the sprinkler in the backyard. It was the kind of evening that makes you happy just to breathe. I—though breathing—was not happy. Newly Christian, I was puzzling over something. The tranquil evening whispered comfort, but I would not be comforted.
I was thinking about our recent miscarriages and mulling over my new Christian faith. I had grown up without formal religion, embraced atheism, and for a number of years shunned all things traditional, including marriage and children. I had barreled down a path of self-destruction, but God’s plans for me got in my way. He turned my life around. After my conversion, I assumed my dramatic about-face would yield startling, sterling results. Life would be easier now, wouldn’t it? It might even inch toward perfection. Yet here I was: a married, Christian woman, desperately longing for a baby, and what was my reward? Our first two attempts to start a family had ended in loss.
The chirping of the crickets grew a bit louder.
“How long are you going to be?” my husband called up the stairs.
“Just a couple minutes,” I called back, opening my journal. “I’ll be down when you start grilling.”
The crickets chirped again. It sounded as if one was nearby. I turned back to my notebook.
“Why do we have to endure these losses,” I wrote, “when our intentions are finally in the right place?”
Chirp … chirp. I was getting irritated, but I continued writing. “God’s plan is so obscure to me now. If there’s a reason for losing our babies, I just wish He would make it clear to us.”
Chirp … chirp. CHIRP.
Irked, I slapped the journal down and left the room. I returned armed with a paper cup and a firm resolve to pack up and relocate the cricket. Although I had no compunction about killing cockroaches, squashing spiders, or swatting flies, I’d never had the heart to dispatch a cricket. Perhaps it was a lingering superstition from my pre-Christian life, a vague sense that cricket-killing was bad karma. Whatever it was, it compelled me to catch crickets rather than stomp on them.
At the next chirp I located the offender and stealthily attempted a capture. I succeeded: into the cup he went. I headed downstairs, out the front door and released him in the yard, where he hopped off into the cool, green grass.
I sighed, thinking, “Well, at least he’s happy again.” As I walked back in the house, I was struck by a thought.
“What is it?” asked my husband, who met me in the kitchen. “You look confused or something.”
“I’m the cricket,” I said, eyes wide. Tom looked puzzled, possibly worried that I was flashing back to when I believed in reincarnation.
“Don’t you see?” I repeated. “I’m the cricket! We’re the crickets!”
He shook his head.
“The cricket had to go outside,” I continued quickly, “right? So I caught him in a cup and carried him out.”
My husband, uncomprehending but ever-supportive, nodded. “Oka-a-a-y,” he said. “Go on.”
“I knew I was actually doing a good thing for the cricket, that he’d be better off, but he didn’t know that. The whole time he was in the cup, all he knew was that he was trapped and he didn’t understand.”
“Exasperating things, crickets. They don’t understand anything,” my husband said, smiling.
I slapped his arm. “Listen!” I said. “When he was finally back outside, he knew he was home. But while he was in the cup, he couldn’t possibly know that the cup was a good thing, that it was helping him. Don’t you see?”
My husband smiled and nodded. “We’re the crickets.”
“Yes. We’re in the scary, awful dark, and we don’t understand about our babies. But when God is finished carrying us through all this, maybe we’ll be able to see what ‘the cup’ was. What the ‘good’ was. Then we’ll know.”
“Then we’ll know,” he said. He smiled and kissed me with all the affection I would expect from the father of my children, then went to start the hamburgers.
I watched him walk out of the house and onto the back porch. In the sublime, soft light of that quintessential summer evening, I whispered a prayer of thanksgiving for a simple but seismic shift. God was cupping us in His hands. He always would. I knew that I was learning to live in His time, to accept being cradled for a while in darkness, if that was what His merciful love deemed necessary.
And for the first time since the last miscarriage, I was happy just to breathe.
— Karen Edmisten is author of The Rosary: Keeping Company with Jesus and Mary. Read her blog at KarenEdmisten.Blogspot.com.
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