There are nearly fourteen thousand distinct species of ant. There’s the nearly two-inch long Amazonian Dinoponera Gigantea, meaning “Terrible Painful Giant” ant, which has a pretty potent sting and sharp mandibles. There’s the less threatening Carabara Atoma, the smallest known ant, which means “Heavy-Headed Speck” ant, which is as long from the tip of its antennae to the end of it’s abdomen as a credit card is thick.
Ants have a solid foothold on every continent but one, and that one is…kind of ironic, right?
Mostly, my encounters seem to be with the nearly ubiquitous Tetramorium Immigrans, the little black pavement ants that invariably find their way into mid-Atlantic homes when the weather gets warmer. They’ll come noodling into bathrooms, or booping across kitchen counters, and where one comes leaving a little pheromone trail, it means more will follow. “Dave, we’ve got ants again,” Rache will say, and I know it’ll be my sad duty to spray. Otherwise, I try not to kill them if I can avoid it, because they neither bite, sting, nor carry diseases.
So long as they stay in the yard, they’re welcome. There’s been a constant stream of Tetamorium Immigrans flowing across my carport this season, a relentless bustling rush of tiny chitinous bodies running right along the brick wall of the house, along a groove in the concrete, and then down and under the driveway. If it’s an average-sized nest, there are fifteen to thirty thousand of them down there, and so that flow doesn’t ever seem to stop, morning, noon and night, as relentless a bustle as any major human thoroughfare at the height of rush hour, with the only differences being 1) size and 2) the fact that the ants are actually moving.
Ants have a solid foothold on every continent but one, and that one is…kind of ironic, right?
Mostly, my encounters seem to be with the nearly ubiquitous Tetramorium Immigrans, the little black pavement ants that invariably find their way into mid-Atlantic homes when the weather gets warmer. They’ll come noodling into bathrooms, or booping across kitchen counters, and where one comes leaving a little pheromone trail, it means more will follow. “Dave, we’ve got ants again,” Rache will say, and I know it’ll be my sad duty to spray. Otherwise, I try not to kill them if I can avoid it, because they neither bite, sting, nor carry diseases.
So long as they stay in the yard, they’re welcome. There’s been a constant stream of Tetamorium Immigrans flowing across my carport this season, a relentless bustling rush of tiny chitinous bodies running right along the brick wall of the house, along a groove in the concrete, and then down and under the driveway. If it’s an average-sized nest, there are fifteen to thirty thousand of them down there, and so that flow doesn’t ever seem to stop, morning, noon and night, as relentless a bustle as any major human thoroughfare at the height of rush hour, with the only differences being 1) size and 2) the fact that the ants are actually moving.
I got to wondering: Where are they going? So I tracked them one day. They’re going to my compost bucket, where they push past the charcoal filter to help themselves to countless little bits of rotted tomato, carrot peelings, and the cut-tops of okra.
Should I begrudge them this? I know, given the frequency with which I receive flyers from exterminators eager to kill every insect on my property, that there are some folks who struggle with the idea that there might be any unauthorized living creatures on their land. Kill the bugs! Sure, spray kills mosquitoes and ticks, but it also kills nearly every other insect. It kills the ants and spiders, kills the beetles and butterflies, kills all of them, all for our convenience. We human beings can be weirdly territorial that way, mindlessly guarding even the crumbs that fall on the periphery of our lives.
The Gospel of Matthew delves into that a little bit, in a strange passage about a foreign woman who just wouldn’t back down, a woman who was not just subordinate because she was a woman, but also because she was a Canaanite, a Syrophoenician, to be exact. She was as other as other could be, and was treated as such by both the disciples and by Jesus himself.
First, she is ignored, as she cries out in faith for the healing of her daughter. She’s not a Judean. But she won’t stop, and the disciples finally get so sick of her persistence that they ask Jesus to send her packing. As the woman comes and kneels at Christ’s side, Jesus drops a surprisingly cutting metaphor. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” He’s the food, the children are Israel, and the dogs...well...she and her daughter are the subhuman creatures.
But her faith and her wit drives her to come back with an even better line, and Jesus...impressed by both her faith and her relentlessness...very publicly backs down. She is given what she has so persistently sought. Her daughter is healed.
It’s worth noting which Gospels have this story, and which Gospels do not. Mark has it, Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, Mark, clearly written for a community of Jewish Christians before everything in Judah fell apart. Matthew has it too, Matthew, whose primary goal is to show how Jesus meets and exceeds the demands of Torah and the Prophets, again for a primarily Jewish audience. Luke and John, which were written for Gentiles, all of whom were outside that first fold of Galileans and Judeans? They don’t have this story.
The difference seems obvious. There were ethnically insular Christian communities at the dawn of the church, who assumed that the Gospel belonged only to their particular race, nation, or ethnic group. The communities that first received Mark and Matthew tended that way. So Mark and Matthew made sure to remember to them that one time when Jesus allowed himself to be seen publicly changing his mind. Jesus himself, yielding to the insistence of a foreign woman who just wanted to experience God’s healing and grace, allowing his hardness to fall away.
We know, we do, that this selfishness of soul still lives in the heart of humankind, and that we are prone to treating certain others as if they are not human, as if their hopes and their sorrows aren’t as known to God as our own. It seems just part of our lingering soul-blindness, that inability to offer the grace we mistakenly assume is ours and ours alone.
Should I begrudge them this? I know, given the frequency with which I receive flyers from exterminators eager to kill every insect on my property, that there are some folks who struggle with the idea that there might be any unauthorized living creatures on their land. Kill the bugs! Sure, spray kills mosquitoes and ticks, but it also kills nearly every other insect. It kills the ants and spiders, kills the beetles and butterflies, kills all of them, all for our convenience. We human beings can be weirdly territorial that way, mindlessly guarding even the crumbs that fall on the periphery of our lives.
The Gospel of Matthew delves into that a little bit, in a strange passage about a foreign woman who just wouldn’t back down, a woman who was not just subordinate because she was a woman, but also because she was a Canaanite, a Syrophoenician, to be exact. She was as other as other could be, and was treated as such by both the disciples and by Jesus himself.
First, she is ignored, as she cries out in faith for the healing of her daughter. She’s not a Judean. But she won’t stop, and the disciples finally get so sick of her persistence that they ask Jesus to send her packing. As the woman comes and kneels at Christ’s side, Jesus drops a surprisingly cutting metaphor. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” He’s the food, the children are Israel, and the dogs...well...she and her daughter are the subhuman creatures.
But her faith and her wit drives her to come back with an even better line, and Jesus...impressed by both her faith and her relentlessness...very publicly backs down. She is given what she has so persistently sought. Her daughter is healed.
It’s worth noting which Gospels have this story, and which Gospels do not. Mark has it, Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, Mark, clearly written for a community of Jewish Christians before everything in Judah fell apart. Matthew has it too, Matthew, whose primary goal is to show how Jesus meets and exceeds the demands of Torah and the Prophets, again for a primarily Jewish audience. Luke and John, which were written for Gentiles, all of whom were outside that first fold of Galileans and Judeans? They don’t have this story.
The difference seems obvious. There were ethnically insular Christian communities at the dawn of the church, who assumed that the Gospel belonged only to their particular race, nation, or ethnic group. The communities that first received Mark and Matthew tended that way. So Mark and Matthew made sure to remember to them that one time when Jesus allowed himself to be seen publicly changing his mind. Jesus himself, yielding to the insistence of a foreign woman who just wanted to experience God’s healing and grace, allowing his hardness to fall away.
We know, we do, that this selfishness of soul still lives in the heart of humankind, and that we are prone to treating certain others as if they are not human, as if their hopes and their sorrows aren’t as known to God as our own. It seems just part of our lingering soul-blindness, that inability to offer the grace we mistakenly assume is ours and ours alone.
Typically, I read this passage as speaking most directly to our ethnonationalist biases, to our tendency to look on those from other cultures as unworthy. It's not primarily about how we treat our dogs, eh?
But I do wonder, at times, if the measure of the grace we will receive might rest in our willingness to show compassion not just to our human neighbors, but also to those creatures that really and truly aren’t us, and that we consider less than us.
Just to be clear, I’m not considering converting to Jainism. Nor will I…and my wife will be relieved to hear this…be scattering crumbs for the ants in our kitchen. If there were some way to come to an agreement with ants, in which they’d only come into the kitchen to clean up debris between the hours of one and four am, we’d be good. But I don’t speak any of the many varieties of ant-language, as the pheromones I produce aren’t of much help.
That said, I’m aware, as I watch the ant highway to my compost bin, that they’re God’s creatures too, and I watch where I step. I’m aware, as I tend to my garden, that the dozens of species of native bees and little wasps and tiny shining flies that bustle from my flowering mint to my bolting basil to those great gorgeous okra blossoms are the very farthest things from pests.
Sure, they’re small and their lives are fleeting. But so are we, and so are ours.
But I do wonder, at times, if the measure of the grace we will receive might rest in our willingness to show compassion not just to our human neighbors, but also to those creatures that really and truly aren’t us, and that we consider less than us.
Just to be clear, I’m not considering converting to Jainism. Nor will I…and my wife will be relieved to hear this…be scattering crumbs for the ants in our kitchen. If there were some way to come to an agreement with ants, in which they’d only come into the kitchen to clean up debris between the hours of one and four am, we’d be good. But I don’t speak any of the many varieties of ant-language, as the pheromones I produce aren’t of much help.
That said, I’m aware, as I watch the ant highway to my compost bin, that they’re God’s creatures too, and I watch where I step. I’m aware, as I tend to my garden, that the dozens of species of native bees and little wasps and tiny shining flies that bustle from my flowering mint to my bolting basil to those great gorgeous okra blossoms are the very farthest things from pests.
Sure, they’re small and their lives are fleeting. But so are we, and so are ours.
It’s a hard world for little things, but we don’t need to contribute to making it any harder.
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