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The Lives of Animals
December 12, 2004 UU service
Meditation
Walt Whitman, from “Leaves of Grass”:
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.
…….
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
…….
The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night,
Ya-honk he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation,
The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listening close,
Find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.
The Lives of Animals:
The Winter Solstice and the Web of Life
John Ashenhurst
I'm going to talk this morning first briefly about the Winter Solstice generally and then about the significance of animals in the Christmas story, the central focus of the dominant solstice celebration in our culture, I'll go on to talk about the comfort and wonder of animals and then about how J.M. Coetzee has disturbed my peace. That will take me to Chief Old Tent Sheets and Rene Descartes. I'll finish up by reading an excerpt from a sermon by my favorite Unitarian poet and minister, the late Jacob Trapp and then I'll invite you to share your observations.
1) The Winter Solstice
As you know the Winter Solstice has been celebrated time out of mind all across the planet. It observes the end of the shortening of daylight hours and the turning of the wheel of the seasons toward spring and summer. This year the solstice occurs at 4:22 a.m. Tuesday the 21st but the elevation of the sun's path through the sky isn't noticeable without instruments until about the 25th. Yvonne and I have celebrated the solstices and equinoxes with the same friends in Boulder for more than 20 years.
A few years ago Yvonne and I had a chance to visit 5000 year-old Newgrange. in Ireland, north of Dublin, one of the oldest know solstice observation sites and one of many megalithic passage tombs in the Boyne River Valley. The tomb is built so that the rising sun illuminates the foot of its 60-foot passage for about 17 minutes on the winter solstice.
The winter solstice was important within the Roman Empire and it order to consolidate power within the empire Emperor Aurelian, about the year 275 blended a number of Pagan solstice celebrations of the nativity of the god-men/saviors Appolo, Attis, Baal, Dionysus, Helios, Hercules, Horus, Mithra, Osiris, Perseus, and Theseus into a single festival called the "Birthday of the Unconquered Sun" or Sol Invictus on December 25th.
Mithraism is especially interesting in this context. An element of Zoroastrianism arising in Persia about 2500 years ago, Mithra was worshipped by the Roman legionnaires and was a significant competitor to early Christianity, a religion that seems to have adopted many of its elements. Mithra was born of a virgin mother on December 25th, had 12 disciples, performed many miracles, was killed and resurrected, taught morality, and was known as mankind's savior and the light of the world.
The fourth-century Roman emperor Constantine, who made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in order to foster unity, moved the celebration of Christmas from January 6th (what is Epiphany today) to December 25 deliberately blurring the distinctions among Christianity, Mithraism, and other sun cults of the day.
As I talked with my son James yesterday on our drive back from SeaTac, he described how the Elaine Pagels course on early Christianity he just finished made clear how people take their current religious practice to be an eternal given when in fact it's always the result of a contingent historical process of human creation and decision - always with specific ends in mind.
2) Christmas and animals
The nativity scene, with animals surrounding the baby in the manger suggest that animals have an important connection to us and to the message Jesus brought to mankind. Over the centuries we've seen an elaboration of the role of animals in the Christmas story including the invention and promotion of Rudolph the Red Nosed reindeer in 1939 by Montgomery Wards as my son James reminded me.
My daughter-in-law, Natasha, recently pointed me in the direction of Bill McKibben's book, Hundred Dollar Holiday. McKibben is also author of The End of Nature, a book I commend to you. In Hundred Dollar Holiday, McKibben points out that
in the earliest Christmas traditions, the ox and the ass bent low over Jesus bed of straw, breathing through their great nostrils to warm him. In Spain, the midnight church service on Christmas Eve is known still as the Cockcrow Mass, from the legend that the rooster crowed Christus natus est at the moment of his birth.
Across Europe, it was believed that animals could speak at the stroke of midnight on Christmas Eve, and Thomas Hardy, in a poem called "The Oxen," recalled the Dorsetshire tradition:
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
'Now they are all on their knees,'
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
It took Saint Francis, the great nature mystic of Christian tradition, to suggest a way to turn those stories into rituals, into celebrations. Animals, too, he urged, deserved to celebrate the great joy of this day. But how? He suggested that on Christmas everyone wander the fields and forests scattering grain and seed; that way the birds and beasts would have an easier time for a day- a day off from the hard work of finding food.
Here's another perspective: Rev. J.R. Hyland, an ordained evangelical minister active in issues of female equality and animal rights: makes the following argument: Animal sacrifice was common in Jesus' day but the gospels never mention his participation in it - and of course that is consistent with the spirit of the Christmas story. Perhaps, ultimately, the founding of Judaism can be read as a rejection of human sacrifice (remember Abraham and Isaac?) and the founding of Christianity the rejection of animal sacrifice. Maybe so.
3) Animals I have known
We've probably all had and enjoyed pets at one time or another, most likely dogs or cats. The companionship and affection pets can provide is a kind of friendship and it might not be inaccurate to call some of these relationships loving in both directions.
And from time to time we encounter wild creatures - otters, seals, orcas, raccoons, deer, ravens, eagles, coyotes, bison, or even bears. Yvonne and I had the privilege of spending some time in East Africa a few years ago. We watched two elephant families meet and exchange greetings, a newly born baby elephant trying to keep up with its mother, a baboon band taking it easy, many grooming one another and the babies getting into trouble. And one morning we found ourselves in the midst of a thunderous wildebeest stream crossing. We were amazed and delighted day after day.
Here on the island last fall my dog Samantha and I watched a raven float over Pole Pass for fifteen minutes facing into a southwest wind and I'm certain marveling at the sunset. In September two pair of ravens played in the sky right above our roof for half an hour before noticing a hawk and rushing off to pester it.
When I take the time to stop and watch wild animals I'm reminded, or perhaps I should say struck again and again by the fact that they have complex, purposeful, lives that include making a living, learning, loving, caring, playing, observing beauty, and sometimes feeling pain, fear or contentment.
Without fail when I attend to the lives of animals on their terms I feel I'm in direct contact with something mysterious, wonderful, deeply moving, and wise. The 30,000 year old wall paintings in the Lascaux caverns show that our hunter-gatherer ancestors strongly experienced what one could call animal power or spirit. This power isn't human, kind, or sentimental. It is sublime, beautiful and awe inspiring,
So where am I going with all this? Our culture's solstice story is Jesus' nativity - whatever our religion - and that story features animals in a prominent role in a peaceful and apparently mutually beneficent relationship with humans. We have those relationships with our pets and treasure them. At the same time we sometimes see in the lives of wild animals what it would be reasonable to call an expression of god, the divine mystery, something beautiful but unfathomable. Animals serve as our helpmeets and companions and they are also an unmistakable expression of the divine, the numinous and the transcendent. I wouldn't want to live in a world without wild animals.
It's a nice story, isn't it? Warm and cuddly animals giving us affection and wild and wonderful animals intimating god. I don't know about you but this cozy, comforting story makes me sleepy.
4) But not for long as Coetzee slips me a tall, skinny triple shot latté and a change of pace
Recently I read two books - the first “Disgrace” and the second “The Lives of Animals” - by J.M. Coetzee, a South African novelist and winner of last year's Nobel Prize for literature. Some of you know the author and the books. They are deeply troubling - not because Coetzee is pessimistic, he's not, but because they are prophetic, not in the sense of divining the future but because they call us to better selves we don't yet understand.
“Disgrace” is set in South Africa not long after the fall of apartheid. It's not a happy time. The old world and its pain lingers. The new world is struggling to be born. It's a wonderful novel, compactly written, and not unlike other good contemporary books you've read. But one aspect is striking and unforgettable - the treatment of dogs.
In one scene three marauding black men who rape the protagonists daughter gratuitously shoot and kill her dogs in their kennels. It seems bizarrely cruel until we realize that all the dogs have been bred to be attack dogs intended initially for whites to use to intimidate blacks. They have been used as a tool of suppression.
Later in the novel the protagonist, David Lurie, helps dispose of dogs he has helped a vet destroy, dogs brought to the Animal Welfare by their owners to be “dispatched to oblivion” - because they are too many, breeding indiscriminately at the edge of the human world that loves then discards them. Each Sunday Lurie drives the bodies of the dead dogs, each it own plastic bag to the hospital incinerator.
“There he loads them, one at a time, on to the feeder trolley, cranks the mechanism that hauls the trolley through the steel gate into the flames, pulls the lever to empty it of its contents, and cranks it back, while the workmen who job this normally is stand by and watch.
On his first Monday he left it to them to do the incinerating. Rigor mortis had stiffened the corpses overnight. The dead legs caught in the bars of the trolley, and when the trolley came back from its trip to the furnace, the dog would as often as not come riding back too, blackened and grinning, smelling of singed fur, its plastic covering burnt away. After a while the workman began to beat the bags with the backs of their shovels before loading them, to break the rigid limbs. It was then that he intervened and took over the job himself,”
Lurie asks himself why he must intervene. “For the sake of the dogs? But the dogs are dead; and what do the dogs know of honor and dishonor anyway? For himself then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat the corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.”
A second book, “The Lives of Animals,” records a lecture Coetzee gave at Princeton and the reactions to it by four academics. Rather than giving a straightforward lecture to his Princeton audience that day, Coetzee read a fictional account of a woman writer, Elizabeth Costello, giving a lecture at a fictional Appleton University. Coetzee, a notoriously private writer seems not to want to confront the audience directly.
In any case, Costello's/Coezee's lecture is startling and troubling. Costello sees our use and abuse of animals as a continuing and horrific holocaust and she doesn't know what to do about it. By the way, Coetzee isn't the first writer make the connection. Isaac Bashevis Singer suggested the analogy almost 50 years go, and it wasn't received well then either. From Costello's point of view her friends, her family - all of us are blind to the horror of our treatment of animals and unlike the holocaust - which had a beginning and an end - this one goes on day after day, year after year.
Initially one doesn't know what to make of Costello. Does Coetzee believe in her analogy or is Costello just a dramatic way to show the alienation many feel in our world?
The academics who attended Coetzee's lecture and then had to comment on it for publication in the book for the most part failed to confront Coetzee's painful vision. A professor of literature discusses Coetzee's technique in this fiction cum lecture rather than the content. A professor of ethics and expert on animal rights says that Costello has gone too far; our obligation is to minimize pain in the animals we slaughter. But a primate anthropologist who has lived with baboons, chimpanzees, and gorillas says definitively that those creatures are more like us than different. And she goes on to write movingly about her dog - for her an independent, wise, and loving companion.
5) The observations of Old Tent Sheets
Some of you remember the Thomas Berger novel, Little Big Man and the 1970 eponymous film with Dustin Hoffman and Chief Dan George. After vigilante whites overrun the peaceful Cheyenne camp on Sand Creek, Jack Crabb's adoptive father, Old Tent Sheets, explains to Jack that Indians believe everything in the world is alive - the four leggeds, the feathered creatures and the creepy crawlies, and even the rocks and streams. The white man, the chief continues, believes that everything is dead, even the two leggeds called human beings.
6) And that takes us to Descartes
You remember Descartes, of course, the father of modern science, mathematics, and philosophy and the author of that catchy phrase, cogito ergo sum; I think therefore I am. Descartes' holds that nothing in the material world is really alive; plants and animals are machines. The human body is a machine too but humans differ from animals in that they have conscious minds somehow connected to the body through the pineal gland. Because animals do not have consciousness they can feel no pain. Therefore, one needn't hesitate in doing experiments or in slaughtering them without anesthetic.
A bizarre theory that surely no one holds to be true today? Well, agribusiness and the pharmaceutical industry seem to like it just fine The National Society for Medical Research, a lobbying organization devoted to blocking legislation that would in any way place restrictions on biomedical research regularly argues that animals feel no pain.
7) The wisdom Jacob Trapp and St. Francis
In past talks I've sometimes talked about Jacob Trapp, a Unitarian minister and poet who Yvonne and I got to know after he retired from his church in Summit New Jersey and moved to Santa Fe. Almost 40 years ago today he presented a moving sermon on donkeys and dogs that the repeated to our Boulder, Colorado congregation in 1985. I'd like to share a bit of that talk with you.
Jake says:
My most vivid memories of Italy and of Greece are of people and donkeys. On a paved highway in the Peloponnesus, on the way to Mycenae, one passes more donkeys than automobiles. They carry baskets of grapes, or a man bigger than his burro, or a woman (side-saddle) with a patient, resigned expression and no flicker of apparent interest in the passing tourists. Standing on what used to be Agamemnon's fortified hilltop above Argos, nothing but rocks now under dark and bare mountains, I watched, fascinated, a lone woman on a donkey coming down a dirt mountain road above us; the only other living thing to be seen up there was a herd of black goats.
You see a donkey carrying a burden so heavy you'd think his back would break. You see him under a huge bundle of hay, or great bundles of sticks being taken home for firewood. In Delphi, where people live on steep slopes, we saw a man showing his donkey down the stairway into or through his house.
I had my arm around the neck of one myself in Athens-a small one who had crossed the street before me, and stopped to look through the glass pane of a tavern door, where doubtless his master sat within, drinking with other men. There's something about these patient, willing donkeys that tugs at your heartstrings.
It was in Italy, in Siena mostly, that I read a novel translated from the Italian of Carlo Coccioli, called the The Little Valley of God. One of the chapters was entitled, "Concerning the Death of a Dog Called Fiorella." A boy named Toni had a female setter he would have to kill. It was a little pearl-gray animal with white soulful eyes who had been savagely bitten by a mad dog. So Toni had an order from the vet to kill his dog.
After a sleepless night he went with a heavy weight in his stomach to see the local priest, Don Marcello, and stammered, "I must kill Fiorella." The visit was a keen disappointment. The old priest was insensible of the boy's agony. And when Toni finally managed to ask him whether dogs had souls, the priest angrily shouted, "No!" Toni, very pale and still seeing Fiorella's white eyes in front of him, rose and said stiffly, "Good-bye, sir." And he went away.
He returned home, took his shotgun, and whistled to Fiorella. The dog came joyously to heel. They took a path across the fields, away from the road. The boy was numb with misery, and soon his dog sensed this and followed along depressed. Finally he sat down on a boulder, called the dog over, and with tears flowing from his eyes, stroked her gently. Then he rose, took his gun, and put the barrel against the dog's head. She raised her soft eyes, and as she looked at him she began to tremble. He closed his eyes and blindly pulled the trigger.
Two days later, not having slept and desperately in need of help. Toni called on Silvano, the young writer who had come to live in the little valley of God in an effort to know and draw close to its people. Silvano immediately sensed the boy's dumb agony. They walked out to the woods together, and sat down. And there Silvano drew forth, from this boy with pain and despair and helplessness in his voice, the story of what had happened. His first comforting assurance, elicited with a question, was that Fiorella died instantaneously and didn't suffer perhaps.
Then Silvano said, "Who knows where she is now?" And Toni was given courage to ask again whether dogs have souls. Silvano said, "Perhaps at this moment Fiorella is chasing golden partridges." It was not this pleasing fancy so much, we may be sure, which comforted the boy, as Silvana's compassionate understanding. "Every time I look at a dog," he said, "I see what he's fond of. I see his soul."
When asked directly by Toni, "Do you believe that dogs have souls?" Silvano had answered quietly, "Of course they have. All living creatures have souls."
So donkeys have souls too.
And birds and worms and fishes and all living things.
Human beings, too, and very complicated ones.
Said Albert Schweitzer, "The most immediate fact of man's consciousness is the assertion: 'I am life which wills to live.'"
It is natural and honest, says Schweitzer, for a person to affirm the will to live. We do this instinctively, but when we bring it up into consciousness, when we think about it, we do not simply accept our existence as something given: "we experience it as something unfathomably mysterious." Then life-affirmation, says Schweitzer, "becomes a spiritual act, in which one ceases to live unreflectively and begins to devote oneself to one's life with reverence, in order to raise it to its true value."
"At the same time," Dr. Schweitzer adds, "the person who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give to every will-to-live the same reverence for life that one gives to one's own." It's another way of saying what Silvano said: "All living creatures have souls. "
At the center of creation stands the cross: life sacrificing itself and being sacrificed for life. And Schweitzer knows this-that life gives to life and takes from life; that life feeds on life; that only by the dying of some can others live. Nevertheless, says Schweitzer, have reverence for life, the life of individual creatures, and the one life in all. "Whenever my life," he says, "has given itself out in any way for other life, my eternal will-to-live experiences union with the eternal, since all life is one. This is the living spring that keeps me from dying of thirst in the desert."
"Thoughtless injury to life," Schweitzer rightly says, "is incompatible with real ethics. . . Those who have been touched by the ethic of reverence for life, injure and destroy life only under a necessity which cannot be avoided, and never from thoughtlessness."
The original sin is cruelty, or perhaps the pride that made human beings think of themselves as the only creatures into whom God had breathed the breath of life, so as to become a living soul.
The original sin is cruelty. And animals, especially those who served and helped human beings, have suffered a lot of it. And to be able to be cruel to the least of these can help one to be cruel to others. Or, again, the original sin is pride-the pride that says, "Only I have a soul, and these other animals or dumb beasts are mere things." Since we are animals too it's only a short step further to think of people as things and numbers.
In evolution there is no separate creation of humanity or of the human souls-the one life flows through all.
To have reverence for life, a sense of kinship with all creatures, is also to be more human.
To love donkeys and dogs is, to that extent, to be a better human being.
And since love is the greatest thing there is, since happiness was born a twin and the only true joy is sharing, it is those who serve rather than those who master that lead the way into Paradise.
What do you think?