Sounds of crickets celebrating Mass

Sounds of crickets celebrating Mass

Commentary by Walter Hesford | FāVS News

My favorite sound of late summer is the singing of crickets heard best right after twilight. Compared to people in other parts of the country, we in the inland Northwest are treated only to a relatively short and soft cricket serenade. Where I grew up in New England, by August the crickets sang throughout the day. When I stayed with family in Detroit, they sang loudly well into the night, sometimes keeping me awake, sometimes lulling me to sleep.

Here crickets sing neither long nor loud. Still we are lucky to have them around us signally however slightly the coming end of summer. I find their song hauntingly beautiful. What does it signify?

According to the “Songs of Insects” website, we are probably hearing the courtship songs of male fall field crickets. These earnest lovers hatch in the spring and sing and mate through the late summer until killed by the frosts of autumn.

So the singing of these fall field crickets may express their sexual desire, their biological need. Through this they perpetuate their species. Maybe a lot of our singing expresses the same thing.

The need to make meaning

It is also in our nature, however, to project onto the sights and sound of nature our own moods and our need to make meaning out of what we see and hear. So in a bird’s song we may hear joy, in its flight, see aspiration. But of course we can’t really grasp the meaning any natural phenomenon has for itself. It remains wholly, holy, other.

No one observed and honored the otherness of nature more than Emily Dickinson. In an 1865 poem as hauntingly beautiful and elusive as the sound of crickets, she presents them as having a mysterious sacramental experience: “Further in Summer than the Birds — / Pathetic from the Grass — / A minor Nation celebrates / It’s unobtrusive Mass.” (The “incorrect” apostrophe in the fourth line is hers.)

It takes a “Nation,” she writes, a mass of crickets hidden in the grass, to celebrate “Mass.” They sound as if they are filled with pathos, or maybe their sound fills us with pathos, with pity, with longing.

“No Ordinance can be seen — ” writes Dickinson at the beginning of the second stanza, using an old word for the Eucharist through which grace is made visible and accessible. In the cricket Mass, the unseen grace comes gradually, “Enlarging Loneliness — .” The loneliness, we assume, not of the crickets, but of the poet and of us who have the grace to understand our otherness, too.

When the fires of summer die down

Fortunately I am not writing here a paper for an English class. I have no obligation to wrestle with all the other obscurities in Dickinson’s poem. A reader of this column may wonder how I know that she is referring here to crickets. A riddle herself, Dickinson enjoyed presenting her fellow creatures as riddles also. The third stanza provides a further clue: “When August burning low / Arise this spectral Canticle.” Whose eerie song arises from the grass but that of crickets as the fires of summer die down?

The fourth stanza concludes with a comment on the consequences of the crickets’ communion celebration: “… a Druidic Difference / Enhances Nature now — .” Apparently, the Nation of crickets is not Christian, but pagan. They do not offer communion to us but rather communicate their difference from us through their heathen communion with each other.

In the poet’s estimation, this does not lessen nature’s appeal, but enhances it. It cannot be understood, appropriated, owned by us. In its holy otherness lies its salvation. Maybe ours, too, if we refuse to be owned by anyone but the holy other. Dickinson herself surely felt this.

So step outside on a late summer evening. You may be met with silence if for some reason the crickets are not singing. But if they are, you will be washed over with waves of rhythmic chirpings. Appreciate its otherness. Appreciate your own otherness as your loneliness grows before you step back inside.

The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News. FāVS News values diverse perspectives and thoughtful analysis on matters of faith and spirituality.