In the Act of Blessing, Blessed
This may sound like a bold or perhaps peculiar statement to make on Animal Blessing Sunday, but here goes: I don’t watch cute cat videos. Or cute puppy videos. Or avidly devour feel-good stories about animals saving lives or predicting the outcomes of elections or traveling thousands of miles to be reunited with their families. I can explain my lack of interest in cat videos by admitting that due to a pretty severe allergy, I’ve deliberately hardened my heart against felines over several decades.
As for the rest, my disinterest isn’t the result of a cold, anima- hating heart. Our dog Nora is here today to be blessed along with the other animals. Years ago I read several of James Herriot’s books–All Creatures Great and Small, All Things Bright and Beautiful, All Things Wise and Wonderful, and The Lord God Made them All–most of them more than once. I don’t hate animals or animal stories. Really I don’t. Rather, there is a part of me that thinks, Of course, that dog found its way home after getting lost on vacation. Of course, that cat can sniff out tumors. Of course, those goats adopted that abandoned baby wild boar. Animals are amazing. They have senses that operate in frequencies and ranges and with precision far greater than human senses, or at least in very different ways from human senses. And those that are pack animals are pack animals, so of course they find their way home to their pack or welcome stragglers in.
The truth is I have the same reaction to most feel good stories about people, too. I have an entire anti-angel sermon based on the premise that people, flesh and blood, ordinary, flawed people do all the things we attribute to angels. But that’s for another time. But my natural instincts in this instance are wrong. Not on the angel argument, but on dismissing the miraculous bonds and abilities of animals.
Just because animals are amazing and we all know they are amazing, and we all know our lives would be poorer, less health-ful, mind-numbingly boring without them, is no reason to fail to celebrate and honor and bless their miraculous, flesh and blood, ordinary, flawed existence. We need to celebrate and honor animals in big and little ways through the course of our days and year, and bless them in rites such as the annual animal blessing–because animals are worthy of such celebration and honor, and because in the act of blessing, we are blessed.
The act of blessing another being is part of a cycle that is intrinsically good for us. First we notice the person or the animal, then we name their exceptional or noteworthy or beloved characteristics or situations, finally we bestow a prayer for their continued or improved good fortune. Each of these three–noticing, naming, praying–is in itself a mini-blessing. Together they comprise what we think of as a blessing in rituals such as the one in which we are about to engage.
When we undertake the act of blessing–whether in response to a sneeze or in a life-cycle ritual or a specific ceremony of blessing–when we bless another we are blessed because the noticing takes us out of ourselves and reminds us we are situated in a web of creation.
When we bless another we are blessed because the naming of what is exceptional or noteworthy or beloved in a flawed being reminds us that there is that which is exceptional, noteworthy and beloved in all flawed beings, including ourselves.
And when we bless another we are blessed because in bestowing a prayer for continued or improved good fortune we are both claiming our place among those who would cast good upon creation and wielding our innate power to do so. Our ability to spread good in the world deepens and sharpens the more we practice it. And in knowing ourselves, limited, flawed and ordinary though we be, to be practitioners of good, we come ever closer to rejoicing in our inherent holiness.
In the act of blessing, we are blessed. Let us, therefore, commence:
Blessing Our Animals
Reverend Lisa: (__________________) with your presence and by your being you bring joy and companionship, affection and love, unique in all the world. May you likewise know joy and companionship, affection and love, not for what you do but for that you are.
All: Blessed be you, creature of Holiness.
Blessing All Animals
Reverend Lisa: All creatures of the land, sea, and sky, with your presence and by your being you bless us with sustenance, labor, amusement, and as integral part of our ecosystem. May we be respectful, benevolent, temperate, and humble stewards, neighbors, co-inhabitants alongside and among you within the interdependent web of all existence.
All: Blessed be you all, swimming, flying, creeping, walking, burrowing, slithering creatures of Holiness.
Amen