Last Sunday we held our congregation’s first Animal Blessing at Columbia Park in North Portland. We’ve talked about offering an Animal Blessing for years but it was Rev. Alison who encouraged us to try it this year. And what a blessing it was.
We gathered on that warm afternoon with our animal companions. Lots of dogs. One hedgehog. Some stuffed animals that represented animals in our lives. Some brought photos. Some brought ashes from their deceased pets. Those were some of the most tender moments for me, remembering those pets that had passed and just how important they were for us. Moments of blessing and beauty.
For many of us our animals are important companions on the journey. That has been even more apparently during these Covid years. At our house we have a 10-year-old pug Olivia and our 10-month-old puppy Oskar. Oskar has pug and Boston terrier and Australian shepherd in his profile. He’s a handful sometimes. And a blessing. The gathering at the park was Oskar’s first time in the role as preacher’s pup and he seemed blessedly oblivious to whatever importance I was placing on his behavior. He just showed up as himself.
And maybe that’s part of the blessing of our animals. The call us to show up as our better selves. In the midst of all the challenges in our world these days we are asked to show up as best we can. To move out of that place of interdependence. And it helps, I think, when we do that with the awareness that we are not alone. how we are part of this creation and how our lives are connected with the lives of all creatures. That as we are blessed, and know we are blessed, hopefully we are more able to be blessings.
In recognition of that, I offer one of my favorite poems by Galway Kinnell entitled “St. Francis and the Sow.”
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
or everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath
them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
Blessings,
Tom
Rev. Thomas Disrud he/him
Associate Minister
First Unitarian Church of Portland