Healing grief – lessons from a monarch way station

Small creatures can teach mighty lessons.

In their annual migration, monarch butterflies coming from Mexico wend their way up through the United States and back in a journey that takes four generations to complete. Like thousands of other enthusiasts, our family registered our garden with its requisite host and nectar plants as an official “Monarch Waystation” to support this extraordinary endeavor. Here, eggs can be laid for the next generation to continue the journey.

A way station is an intermediate stopping point, not the final destination. When the first caterpillars appeared in our garden, feasting on our milkweed, we knew each would soon transition to a hard, opaque chrysalis and then emerge as a butterfly – from wingless to winged and on their way in a few short weeks. In the final hours before the butterfly appears, the chrysalis becomes translucent, and you can see the incredible change that has been going on. What a transformation to witness!

Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered the Science of Christ, saw a parallel in the quality of faith: “It is a chrysalis state of human thought, in which spiritual evidence, contradicting the testimony of material sense, begins to appear, and Truth, the ever-present, is becoming understood” (“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 297). And the Bible describes faith as “the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).

Faith is the confidence that something real and good is happening, even if the physical senses can’t perceive it. In fact, it is an active disbelief in the surface view of things and a calm trust that a deeper truth is unfolding. There may be many times we can’t see a way forward, don’t know the outcome, or find ourselves overwhelmed. Faith is a way station on the journey from that uncertainty to a fuller understanding of God as ever present and entirely good and of our own lives as reflecting the constancy and continuity of that spiritual reality.

We can find our faith sheltering us in the most extreme situations. While hunkered down in the trenches of World War I, a Greek scholar translated some of Paul’s epistles. Despite the devastating conflict surrounding him, he caught something of the eternal nature of life that the apostle had seen. He rendered one passage, “I no longer then, regard man as physical, but spiritual. The physical is no longer set before my eyes. Christ himself to me is no more a physical being; I see him spiritually, and in that spiritual vision I learn that man is a new creation. All former views of man now perish” (II Corinthians 5:16, 17, Gerald Warre Cornish, “St. Paul from the Trenches”).

Only limited, material views of man perish. Not man. Not the real man of God’s – Spirit’s – creating. Perhaps we could say that faith provides that mental space where we lose the caterpillar views of ourselves as we behold the butterfly we’ve always been – as we behold the radiant truth of our unchanging spiritual identity.

The transformative power of faith met a tender need when a beloved member of my family, prior to his passing, was in hospice following medical treatment.

While respecting his religious views and choices, I felt impelled to share aloud with him and his family Paul’s heartening words to the early Christians in Corinth from that inspired translation done in the trenches. A sweet, God-centered peace enfolded us. I was grateful to draw upon my ever-growing understanding in Christian Science that we can never be separated from God, who is our only Life.

This faith in God as Life itself provided me with an unshakable conviction that all we can ever really lose is a false view of ourselves and others as mortal. A new view of this loved one’s ongoing immortality had been unfolding in thought. It was something of a way station moment for all of us.

When I later learned of his passing, I felt the anchor weight of grief try to pull me down. But the powerful certainty of the true, spiritual nature of man immediately winged me upward. It was an instantaneous healing. The sorrow had lifted, and I felt complete freedom to begin comforting others.

Realizing something of the spiritual substance of man’s eternal being is always transforming. We continue to discover that life is uninterrupted in God, now and forever. Through the chrysalis of faith that allows spiritual understanding to emerge, the mortal views – including of those we dearly love – yield, and the spiritual reality of life becomes the substantial evidence that reaches the heart ... and heals it.

Adapted from an editorial published in the May 12, 2025, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.