c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) They’re late. The cicadas.

I’ve been sitting on the chaise all week, staring at the grass in anticipation of their creepy arrival.

Each time a blade of grass moved, I leaned over expecting to see an army of arthropods fighting their way through the top soil, all alienesque and icky, before attaching themselves en masse to Henry, my mulberry tree, where they will sound like an opera of lawn mowers for a few days before they die and become one more thing we have to sweep up.

But alas, after 17 years of waiting, the cicadas have not landed, er, surfaced. At least not in my sunny patch of suburban Chicago.

They have made their unwelcome debut about 20 miles west of here in a colleague’s back yard. “My lawn looks like it’s been aerated in a thousand places, and they’re destroying the ornamental grass and the hosta!” he told me.

“Tell me this,” he shouted (he really is fond of that hosta), “What exactly is the point of a cicada?”

They live more than a foot underground for 17 years before finally tunneling to the surface. Then the slimy-white, red-eyed disgusting things molest the vegetation, make an ungodly racket for a few days, have sex, lay eggs, die and leave crunchy corpses all over the place, he said. “What kind of a life is that?”

I think what he was trying to express, in essence, is something Socrates was getting at about 2,400 years ago. “Examining both myself and others,” the great philosopher said at his heresy trial, “is really the very best thing that a man (or woman) can do, and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living.”

In other words, is an unexamined bug’s life not worth living?

Magicicadas, as these particular creatures are formally known, don’t appear to serve any helpful purpose _ although in Chinese medicine they are used to treat high fevers, cataracts and even the common cold. They don’t harm humans or animals or, according to several scientific reports I’ve read, vegetation (despite what my hosta-loving friend seems to think).

They’re not exactly traditionally beautiful, either, although I have read some descriptions of cicadas after they molt their exoskeletons that call them “ethereal,” “fantastic” and “ghost-like.”

Most folks, though, just think they’re gross. Certain cultures find them delicious, which is a whole other realm of the subjective; some folks find the intestines of newborn lambs and tree bark delicious, too.

The ancients, however, revered the lowly cicada as a symbol of resurrection and rebirth, a totem of spiritual fulfillment, and their song _ so much racket to our modern ears _ as a hymn of transcendence.

The Greek philosopher Plato, in Phaedrus, one of his famous dialogues (with Socrates, in fact), creates a romantic myth around the cicadas that are serenading the philosophers from a tree. He says the cicadas are actually men who fell in love with the music of the Muses, and were so obsessed with the goddesses’ songs that they stopped eating and died singing. As a reward, Plato says, the Muses turned the men into cicadas.

Another ancient Greek _ a poet _ describes the bugs this way:

“We know that you are royally blest

Cicada when, among the tree-tops,

You sip some dew and sing your song;

For every single thing is yours

That you survey among the fields

And all the things the woods produce.

The farmers’ constant company,

You damage nothing that is theirs;

Esteemed you are by every human

As the summer’s sweet-voiced prophet.

The Muses love you, and Apollo too,

Who’s gifted you with high-pitched song.

Old age does nothing that can wear you,

Earth’s sage and song-enamored son;

You suffer not, being flesh-and-blood-less

A god-like creature, virtually.”

God-like creatures? Summer’s “sweet-voiced” prophets?

Perhaps there is more to these insects than meets the eye _ and did I mention cicadas have five?

One Christian-themed Web site, http://www.hiscreation.com, uses the cicada as a device to describe the spiritual transformation a person makes from non-believer to believer. Out of darkness, into the light, if you will.

“Once the cicada has emerged from darkness, it never again returns to its earthly home,” the unidentified writer says. “Now free from its soiled skin, the cicada soon flies to a higher spot in the tree, using its new wings. It then takes up a lofty position of worship that no one can ignore, except the deaf.”

Pest or blessed, cicadas might have a thing or two to offer us mortals, even if it’s just a metaphor.

(Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of “The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.”)

KRE/LF END FALSANI800 words

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