Blessed Are The Mourning Cloaks

Once in a while I see a mourning cloak butterfly on campus. They actually aren’t common on the coast but my college sits on the edge of a lake edged with willows, the butterfly’s host plant. Despite its name, this butterfly always gives me joy. Because it winters over, actually hibernates, it can sometimes be spotted on an unusually warm winter day or in the false spring we get here in early February. It’s unexpected beauty as it spreads its wings in the soft winter sun always speaks of hope. As I get older, I greet tattered mourning cloaks as fellow pilgrims who have wintered over to another spring.

Perhaps the rich dark brown of the wings is sad–but it is full bodied sorrow, deep and beautiful. It is the mourning Jesus said is blessed. Robert Pyle, author of The Butterflies of Cascadia says, “A Civil War vignette relates the butterfly to a lost soldier’s wife, coming out of mourning and just beginning to show a bright bit of petticoat beneath her widow’s weeds.” The yellow edges of mourning cloaks is hope peeking out. The comfort about to come.