On Sunday I drew portraits of cats and dogs in all their furry and wiggling glory, as I do annually before our Blessing of the Animals service held on the Sunday afternoon closest to the Feast of St. Francis, which is today. This raised money for our mission to a school in Pouly, Haiti, which the Cathedral has long supported. You may make a donation in support of the school HERE.
After the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010, at my former church, a woman from Haiti (who eventually became my prayer partner) said to the congregation, “Haiti is a blessing country.” Those were her exact words. While people who had visited Haiti seemed to know what she meant, I pondered. In her speech to the congregation, she said her young son had asked her, “Why?” And the answer she said she gave him was, “Haiti is a blessing country.“
She and her son laid the Haitian flag in a basket on the altar and left it there, walking back to their pew. I noticed she had not called her country “blessed,” something that seemed impossible at that moment. I realized that what she was saying is that Haiti chooses to keep one foot in the kingdom of the blessed. She was speaking of what she experienced the calling of her former home to be. To offer blessing, no matter what, no matter how poor or devastated. This is what growing up there had taught her, and what she wanted her son and her church to know.
How is it possible to bless no matter what? Love can be the only answer. We enjoyed this truth on Sunday with a simple prayer service during which pets were blessed by Dean Harding after we had been blessed with our way of seeing them, and read in the first chapter of Genesis how God saw what God made and called it good.
The creation is good, however much it suffers. However much we have sinned against it and against ourselves as part of it. However much we choose to bless it—however we humble ourselves to protect it or fail to and diminish—creation and its creatures retain God-given goodness.
My friend understood well the God-given goodness of the suffering country of her birth. I imagine this understanding has been the basis for her life of prayer and her work in serving the Church and caring for the sick—work she hoped to do again in Haiti someday.
Some of us need a better sense of our origin as redeemed to begin our work. St. Francis is fabled to have taken off his sumptuous clothing and laid them at his rich father’s feet before embarking on a life with what he called his beloved “Lady Poverty.”
I think those who encountered Francis responded with wonder about the source of his orientation not unlike how I wondered at my friend’s origins in Haiti. What set of spiritual experiences form the bones of an entire life that can point from the lowest place to the highest, where the crucified One is enthroned?
Today, as I read Thomas of Celano’s account of St. Francis’ encounter with the six-winged Seraph with arms outstretched like a crucified man, from whom he received the stigmata, I am touched by how Francis’ visitation with wounds came not only from the spiritual realm but also from the animal world.
Seraphs first appear in the Book of Isaiah, which is the topic of the Dean’s Forum on October 18, and of the Cathedral’s Bible Symposium on November 5. Click HERE for tickets.
For St. Francis who preached to the birds, it seems fitting that the crucified One who was with God at the beginning of creation manifested with wings to call Francis to share the experience of His earthly body, as animals keep us earthed and present to bodily essential goodness, creaturely furry and feathery warmth.
Would you join us this evening on Zoom for the Feast of St. Francis? We are blessed to welcome Franciscan priest Fr. Dennis E. Tamburello O.F.M., Professor of Religious Studies at Sienna College, to lead us in a discussion of the great saint from Assisi. Please click HERE to fill out the form to register if you did not attend the September Dean’s Forums, or send me an email, both before 8PM, to receive the Zoom link.
God’s peace,
Brynna
Director of Cathedral Arts mission