November
1994
Letter
from the Editor
By Martin Rowe |
|
|
Those who attended the service for the blessing of
the animals at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on the feast day
of
St. Francis (October 2nd this year) will have been struck by a number
of things. First, the sheer volume of people attending the service — not
only the congregation but the choir, dancers, musicians, and assorted
clergy numbered in the thousands. Secondly, the variety of companion
animals brought along to the service: cats, dogs, parrots, rabbits,
ferrets, snakes, pot-bellied pigs, turtles, and others. Thirdly, the
extraordinary sight of an elephant, a llama, and other animals through
plants and algae and rocks being led slowly down the aisle to the altar.
This parade takes place at the very end of a long, energetic, and highly
theatrical service. The music — an extended mass called the Missa
Gaia , composed and played by Paul Winter and his Earth Band — is
both mournful and ecstatic, conventional instruments mingling with
the calls of wolves, seals, and whales. The addresses, in this particular
service as in all others at the Cathedral, were self-consciously ecumenical
and called for a kind of embracing eco-spirituality, with the Earth
as an honored participant in our daily lives and the animals respected
companions on our journey. It was undoubtedly a powerful experience,
and yet for the animal advocate there remain puzzling and troubling
questions.
No one would deny, least of all theologians, that in the strictest
sense animals do not need our blessing. The point could be made that,
because
human beings are the vicegerents of God, we are entitled to bestow
blessing on God’s creatures in God’s stead; and that when we bless
them, we confer on them a higher status than already allotted. But this
is to deny God’s gift of animal-hood on animals; and it is also
to skirt the appalling, almost unremittingly evil, treatment we have
meted out to animals throughout the ages. We should be asking forgiveness
of them rather than conferring blessing. Animals are blessed in themselves;
as Walt Whitman — quoted in the service — noted, animals
are not full of cant like humans when it comes to experiencing the
divine.
They simply are.
So the service of the blessing of the animals is really not for the
animals at all. But what is it for? Certainly, the service brings together
human animal and animal animal in a very intimate way. Within the house
of God — perhaps itself a recollection of an ancient archetype
of a holy spot beneath the forest canopy — the greatest land animal
in existence walks among the smallest. It is a compelling idea, but
one hidebound in this case by the imprisonment of the elephant (who
had come from a circus), the leashing of the dogs and the caging of
the cats — by the essential ownership of these animals by
the dominant human species. Perhaps, ultimately, what the service points
to is the blessing of ownership, the stewardship principle by degrees
elided into property, the gilded cage of love we human animals extend
to the companions in our care.
Attending a talk the next day with the Dean of the Cathedral, James
Parks Morton, Father Thomas Berry, the scientist Brian Swimme, and
the
creation theologian Matthew Fox, I was struck by the passion (and the
vagueness) they brought to their discussion of the new demands and
vistas
of the so-called Ecozoic Age. A question at the end of the talk mentioned
our relation to animals and the possible vision of a necessarily vegetarian
world. Matthew Fox was the only one to answer in terms of personal
praxis.
He had stopped eating beef four years ago, he said, mainly after
reading Jeremy Rifkin’s Beyond Beef. But, he continued, he still
ate chicken and fish... and stuff. What — or rather who —
is or are this “stuff” he refers to. Could it be the live
beings who the day before had been championed as worth the blessing,
as being co-participants, co-religionists, co-habitors of this our world?
How could they become “stuff” so soon; how could they become
“stuff” at all?
If she or he had the choice between the open savannah or the forest
and the inside of a building filled with people, what do you think
the
elephant would choose? If you opened the window to a bird — would
she or he fly out? If an animal had the choice whether to be blessed
by a priest before being eaten or killed or blessed by neither being
eaten nor killed — which would she or he opt to do? We can bluster
that we care for the environment and its denizens; we can shout all
we like about the disappearance of wildlife and the pollution of the
waters and the land and the air; we can pronounce gravely that animals
are divine, or they possess rights, or they are God’s gift. But
until we recognize that the greatest blessing we can confer upon an
animal in the industrialized world (if not elsewhere) is not to kill
and/or eat her or him, then all of the above — all the piety and
prostration, the howl of the wolf or the rumble of the whale — is
mere sound and fury, signifying nothing.
The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is, without doubt, an extraordinary
place: suffused with all that is good about a diverse city and a passionate
commitment to social change and outreach. It is not ultimately at fault
here. What is, is somehow a failure of nerve, something within all
of
us that allows us to talk the talk without really walking the walk,
convinced that by expressing the power of the steps that need to be
taken, we are in fact taking them. Yet it is surely not too much to
ask those who preach the glory of the animals and confer blessings
upon
them to say to the animals of their own species, including themselves: “Think
of whom you eat; think of whom you wear; think of whom you kill. Think
hard and long and honestly. And then, and only then,
talk about blessing.”
 |
|
|
 |
