Dear Friends,
Once again, we are holding our Blessing of the Animals service (this Sunday, 29th September) – and once again we are holding it at a time when parts of our world are marked by grief and conflict.
Last year this event was in the immediate aftermath of the 7th October attack on Israel, and this year we are watching this conflict spread to Lebanon. According to the ABC news today the aerial barrage over the last two days has killed more than 560 people in that country and left an estimated 500,000 displaced. We are grieving for this terrible loss. (For a wonderful collection of prayers, from faith leaders from different traditions. go to this Jesuit resource – https://www.xavier.edu/jesuitresource/online-resources/prayer-index/prayers-in-times-of-crisis/prayes-for-peace-in-the-middle-east.)
It seems a strange time to be gathering to bless a bunch of dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pigs, bearded dragons and acyloxyls (based on the creatures that have attended in previous years) but perhaps it is something good, something life-giving that we can do – for ourselves and our local community. After all, Martin Luther, the seminal figure of the Protestant Reformation, is said to have said, “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”
Perhaps we need the reminder, as Psalm 150:6 says, that, “everything that has breath praise[s] the Lord”; that every single thing and every single person, no matter where they are found, matters to God.
Perhaps we need the healing power of God, that flows through to us from the amazing world God has made. I am reminded that last year, at the Blessing of the Animals, we reflected on the words of poet Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Perhaps, too, our witness to the value of every living thing to God; and our embrace of the healing God offers – in the beauty of this world – is a blessing that we can extend to our community – an invitation for our friends and neighbours, for the people of Kingston and beyond, to come and experience the peace and the blessing of God.
That would be my prayer – that everyone who is part of our Blessing of the Animals this Sunday will be blessed – and will share that blessing with others.
Grace and peace,
Belinda