The Case for Animal Blessings
As a priest, one is called to bless all kinds of things, food, houses, rosaries, statues, etc., there’s even a blessing for spacecrafts in “A Manual for Priests of the American Church”! And while you’ll find a blessing for livestock and cattle, what you won’t find is a blessing for pets. The tradition of blessing the animals that sustain us and work for us is ancient but the notion that we should bless our pets is a rather recent development. Should we be making such a big deal about our pets? Should we be blessing them? The way I figure it, if we bless our homes and the stuff that fills them, we might as well bless the living things that we share the homes with.
When we take animals into our homes, we make a vow to nurture and care for them, to provide for them because we have removed them from the places that their natural inclinations and abilities have evolved to operate. They now inhabit places that we have made to our own liking and not necessarily to theirs. That doesn’t mean they can’t thrive in our world; it doesn’t mean that in their relationship with us their situation has not improved. Threats and struggles that they evolved to face are largely absent and must be taught and trained to curtail instincts and tendencies that can be a problem.
These are all valuable lessons for us and as much as we teach them how to behave in their new homes, we can begin in small ways to emphasize with the God of Creation and how much trouble we have been in His training of us.
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Sitting on a half-acre in an in the industrial area of Compton, CA sat Crews Evaporator & Drier, the business my grandfather, started in 1947, there was no shortage of strays who wandered the area. Packs of them would roam about and in the early morning or late at night, you could hear the terrible sounds when one wandered into another’s territory.
So my grandfather, Jack, was not happy with his employees started tossing scraps to a scraggly looking stray dog who had started strolling by when the roach coach showed up for lunch. He had German shepherd coloration on a Dobermans frame. His tail had been doxed. He would bark franticly if anyone made a fist and raised them at another person. He did the same thing if you made ‘finger guns’ and made like to shoot.
They called him ‘Stretch’ and very soon his time outside the fence went to zero and the time he spent following my grandfather and sleeping under his feet at the drafting table took up most of his time. He slept there at the shop and guarded the property from interlopers. We would find the results the next morning, stray dogs and feral cats with their necks snapped. Stretch knew how to kill. Even after he grew old and lost all his teeth, he never lost the skill.
But he let me pet him and play with him. I can still feel his coarse, bristly fur under my hands, that you could only rub in one direction and his tail nub waggling his entire rump as he stretch out his back, closed his eyes, and seemed to smile.
My grandfather died there, at the shop. Heart attack. We wondered what Stretch would do now? Who would he follow? What he did was start to follow my dad. He followed my dad until Stretch died at the shop, too.
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All too often in the modern world, pets have become a substitute for real relationships with others, especially with children. Walking around Main Street, I count about half the strollers carrying small, yippy dogs rather than children. Unlike people, the love one has for a dog will not go unrequited. It’s a risk-free venture to love an animal, not so with humans. But the fact of the matter is that treating them like little people, rather than as animals is unfair to them. What is essentially happening is that they become vessels for one’s own sense of inadequacy and fear and when those feelings subside, the dog who was once a little person becomes a nuisance and is discarded when they become inconvenient.
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He was just a mutt. Reddish-brown coat, white on his chest, paws, and chin. He was born in the desert, 29 Palms to be exact. I named him Krypto after Superboy’s dog in the old comics. He loved chasing balls. He loved chasing anything really but the quickest way to his heart was to play with him, throw a ball or play tug of war with a toy, he loved it. He assumed you loved it too, because if you were sick, he’d bring you a toy to play with. When I had to go out of town on business, he’d stay with my parents and my mom would try to bribe him with food, even scrambling him eggs. He’d scarf them down but wouldn’t hang out for her to pet him but instead right back to my dad who had unending patience when it came to playing with him. At night, he’d jump into bed with them, snuggling against my dad, using his paws and legs to try and push my mom out.
Before Krypto I’m not entirely sure I knew what love was. With the love one has for one’s parents or family, it’s kind of already there, assumed. You can’t really identify it well because you don’t know what its like without it. When you ‘fall in love’ with someone else, as a young person, a whole lot of self-regard is wrapped up into it. It’s about how the other person makes you feel but real love has very little to do with me and mostly to do with the other. With Krypto, I learned that I could love something other than myself.
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The blessing of the animals is an opportunity for a reorienting of our love for our pets, an opportunity to celebrate them as they are and not what we project onto them, not what they do for us but what our responsibility is to them. The church doesn’t need to promote pet ownership or encourage adoption. What it does need to do is to teach what our relationship to them is. While we are all animals and share that with our pets, the fact of the matter is that humans are infinitely more important than them. We possess rational souls and bear the likeness of God. They are not our equals but that doesn’t mean we can’t love them, just that loving God and loving other people is what we were made for. Loving and caring for pets can be good training and practice but aren’t a substitute.
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It was just before Halloween and as I was driving into the plant, ‘Doc on the Roq’ was giving a news report how a bunch of strangled crows had been found in a trash bag out in Riverside and such incidents are sadly common this time of year. He ended by urging people keep their black cats indoors. As I parked, I noticed a commotion by the coffee wagon serving the garment factories that shared the parking lot. A black kitten was strolling past the patrons. I shrugged and walked into the plant, not noticing the little black cat following me in.
She followed me to my office, meowed for my attention. I bought her some milk and took her home, thinking she might help Krypto not be lonely while I was at work. I named her Spooky.
Krypto immediately started harassing her, poking her with his muzzle and trying to paw at her. I thought for sure this was a failed idea and I would have to get rid of her the next day. But as I sat on the coach with Krypto sitting on the cushion above my shoulder to avoid Krypto, I saw this tiny little kitten jump down, smack Krypto on the rump and then jump back to her perch before he knew what had happened. That’s when I knew she could take care of herself.
She liked to go on walks with us, strutting around and letting Krypto know she didn’t have to wear a leash. Often, she would stalk slowly into the room to make sure Krypto was paying attention before making a mad dash to get him to chase her, which he always did.
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And while it is unfair to treat animals as little people, it is true that through our relationships with them that they can develop some semblance of personhood. They will never be persons, they lack rational souls, they can acquire traits that suggest that they have begun to exceed their animal limits. This teaches us that our own personhood is not something necessarily natural to us but rather something acquired through our relationships, with other people and more importantly through our relationship with God.
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Spooky died rather young. She was only 8 years old when her kidneys failed and I had to put her down. Krypto, on the other hand, made it just two weeks shy of his 17th birthday. At the end, I was taking him to the vet for weekly shots to alleviate the severe arthritis in his spine. The vet informed me that the dosage he was getting was no longer adequate but they couldn’t up it because it was already causing damage to his liver as it was. It was time to put him out of his misery. I stood there in the room, my hand on his head as the light faded from his eyes. I closed them for him.
Years later, I would enter the room where my father died and close his eyes for him and anointed his eyelids.
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I don’t know if the anointing did anything. All I can do is pray and hope. The same is true when we bless the animals, pray and hope. There’s really nothing more Christian than that.