"Animals as Spiritual Teachers"

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The Rev. Suzelle Lynch
August 8, 2004

Many years ago, when I was young and living alone for the first time, I met a powerful spiritual teacher. She was small in stature, and beautiful in an unusual way. Her hair was dark and her nose prominent, and her eyes were quietly luminous. She needed a place to stay, so I said she could live with me for a while. It was interesting to have her in my home – while she had very few possessions, and her needs were simple, she was very talkative, though she mostly spoke a language I couldn't understand.

There were some other drawbacks in our cohabitation. She had rather strange habits. She slept excessively, and the foods she liked were stinky. And she left hair all over everything. But despite all of this, I found that she had much to teach me. Each time I followed the spiritual path she embodied, I returned to my daily round of work, study and other activities renewed and refreshed.

Who was this spiritual teacher? By now some of you have figured out that I'm talking about Goldie, my dear, sweet old cat. I met Goldie, whom I named after Golda Meir and Goldielocks, at the Humane Society in Seattle nearly nineteen years ago.

Goldie is gone now; as some of you know, she died in May. She was twenty years old – and very weak. Letting her go was very, very hard for my family and me, and we miss her.

When Goldie came into my life all those years ago, I didn’t think I was looking for a spiritual teacher. I thought I was looking for a pet, an animal to share my small studio apartment.

Choosing a cat at the Humane Society was very difficult. There were so many animals there, small and large, old and young, all colors, all kinds. And all were crying for release, throwing their bodies against the wire of their cages as I passed. At first I wanted to take them all home, and then, after holding and petting cat after cat for hours I nearly left, because none of them seemed right.

And then I saw Goldie. She had been held at the Human Society for more than a month. She was not one of the cats who wailed and flung themselves at every passer-by, no, she seemed to have lost all hope. She was curled up quietly at the back of her cage, alert, but resigned.

And yet when I opened her cage door, she uncurled, stretched elegantly, and slowly came forward to meet me. She was a tortoiseshell cat – mostly black with tan and brown and red mixed in; a small tuft of white on her chest, and a striking golden nose. I thought she was the most beautiful animal I had ever seen. In motion she was like sunlight through leaves, dappled and dazzling. As I held her, she cuddled close, nestling her head against my neck. In that moment I knew that she was my cat, even though she was dirty, skinny, and shedding large clumps of fur. We had connected on a deep level.

But even with that deep initial connection, for our first years together Goldie was just a pet. I owned her, like a piece of furniture.

In our culture we have a long history of regarding animals in this way – as objects, tools, commodities, resources – essentially as things. So says my colleague the Rev. Gary Kowalski in his book “The Souls of Animals.” He writes, “We raise and slaughter them for food; we dissect their bodies for research; we study their anatomy with detached interest. (We sentimentalize them, anthropomorphize tem; we attribute to them thoughts and meanings they do not own.) We regard other creatures as means to our own fulfillment, not as ends in themselves.” (p. 139 – material in parentheses added by Suzelle.) Since the time of the philosopher Descartes (17th century) “animals … have been looked upon as biological machines. They are considered not merely non-human but sub-human, programmed by instinct to react in rule-bound and predetermined ways. Only human beings, in the Cartesian view, possess consciousness, free will, or moral and aesthetic sensibilities.” (Kowalski, p. 73-74)

This attitude toward animals, though, is a historically recent phenomenon. Throughout time and across all cultures, animals have inhabited our myths, fables, proverbs and stories. In ancient Egypt, animals were revered and admired for their qualities of strength or intelligence, and gods and goddesses were often depicted in animal forms. The original Native American peoples viewed all life as sacred; animals were ancestors and relations – and this way of being is still alive among many contemporary Native Americans. St. Francis of Assisi, the 13th century Italian Catholic monk, held animals in such high regard that he addressed them as brothers and sisters, and he brought them into the church and blessed them.

Even the heritage of those of us whose ancestors came or were brought to these shores, once held animals in higher regard than we do today. Paul Shepard, a leading thinker in human evolution and ecology, describes something of how we moved from awe and reverence to relative disregard in this passage from his book, “The Others: How Animals Made us Human,”(1995 --excerpted in Utne Reader, Feb. 1996.) He writes:

“We believed ourselves until recent centuries to be continually in the proximity of a multitude of wise animal elders. … Wild animal life was a major focus of human attention, establishing the expectation of a rich, surprising, meaningful, and beautiful diversity of life around us. Some animals were sacred. All were conscious, unique, and different in spiritual power. During most of human history, people had easy access to livestock and wild animals. Even after industrialization, towns and their margins were occupied by an abundance of small wild animals: birds, insects, fish, and amphibians. … Even in cities, until the 20th century, rabbits, chickens, ducks, and geese were still kept in backyards, local fairs … had large livestock sections, draft animals were still abundant, farmers drove pigs and cattle to market down the streets, and knackers butchered them in alleys. … Dogs and cats ran freely…. But now even the shambling domestic forms that pulled wagons, laid eggs, or turned our garbage into sausage have been removed from sight. The artifacts of industry and media, all the human mob and its distractions and therapies, do not make up for the loss. Only pets remain, a glimmer of that animal ambience, sacredness, otherness.”

And thus for most people, the view of animals as lesser beings prevails. When I was taking an undergraduate course in Humanistic Psychology, one of the professor's guiding questions was “Do dogs think?” His answer was answer was no, of course, they don't and he did everything possible to convince us that thinking required human consciousness. Animal behavior, he taught us, was simply a collection of conditioned reflexes.

Actually, the question of whether animals have souls never came up in that class, but I’m sure my professor would have said they don’t. And at the time, I would have agreed with him.

But in the quarter-century since then, there's been a great deal of research into how animals behave, think, and feel. Books about the emotional lives of animals have been written by notable psychologists, and the work of primatologists and zoologists has been pivotal in understanding the human animal as well as our primate and other cousins.

At the same time, at least here in the United States, the nature of our relationships with animals has changed significantly, especially our relationships with pets. In his recent book, “The New Work of Dogs,” John Katz quoted a 2002 Humane Society statistic that there are 68 million pet dogs nationwide, up from 51 million just eleven years before, encompassing forty percent of U.S. households. Katz writes, “I don’t think it’s coincidental that the explosion in the American dog population occurred at almost the same time that TV usage (and other entertainment technologies) also began to skyrocket.” (p. 10-11 – material in parentheses added from a subsequent sentence.)

In writing his book, Katz came to realize that in an increasingly fragmented and disconnected society, dogs are often treated not as pets, but as family members and human surrogates. “…In the interviews I’ve had with dog people,” he writes, “(some say) they got their dogs for their kids, … But many acknowledge they were lonely and wanted to get out more, that they felt isolated in their marriages or after a divorce or a layoff, that they were anxious to nurture, save, or love something, that they felt disconnected and were in need of emotional support, that they just needed a living thing to take a walk with.”
“…. during many interviews, it seemed that the people I was talking to had holes of one sort or another in their lives; they were hoping that a dog might fill it.” (p. 13)

We also hear a great deal today about the ways in which animals, as companions, help human beings. "The important role of pets as friends and healers is widely accepted, and research documents that pets can literally … reduce stress (and blood pressure). Cats, dogs, and birds have made a big difference in the lives of emotionally disturbed children, withdrawn patients with mental illnesses, lonely nursing home residents, and isolated prisoners. (From "Spiritual Literacy," p. 169, M. and F. Brussat, eds.)

Many of us know about this in a personal way through our own pet animals. We know that loving and being loved by a pet can be wonderful, helpful, even life-saving.

When I was in seminary, one of my colleagues who had been a psychotherapist spoke of one of her clients. This young man, as a child, had often been shut in a small closet for hours at a time by his parents. As it turned out, the family cat liked to sit in the same closet. When my colleague asked how he knew about love when there'd been so little of it in his family, the young man replied, “I learned it from the cat." He said that when the cat looked at him, he knew it loved him, and that gave him hope.

While my own circumstances were never that extreme, I know my Goldie was a powerful comfort many, many times over the eighteen years that she was with me. She was there for the highs and the lows. She moved with me across the country and back. She accepted my husband when he came into our lives. She even learned to love my daughter Grace, whose advent meant so much less attention would come her way. Actually, Goldie was such a key part of our family life, the first word Grace spoke was "kitty". Not “ma-ma,” not “da-da,” but “kee-tee.”

But as I said earlier, Goldie was more than a pet – she truly was a spiritual teacher. How can that be? What kind of spiritual wisdom did I learn from my cat? Let me explain.

Paul Shepard alluded to what I mean. He said, that of all the ways in which we humans used to be connected with animals, “Only pets remain, a glimmer of that animal ambience, sacredness, otherness.”

The great Jewish theologian, Martin Buber, agrees with this intuition of sacredness we find in animals. "It was through his rapport with a horse he befriended on a visit to his grandfather's country estate when he was eleven years old that (he) first awakened to (what he wrote of as) the 'immense otherness of the Other.'"
"The barn, filled with the warmth and closeness of other living beings became a temple for … young (Martin), where he sensed the presence of the ineffable. When he stroked the horse's mighty mane and felt the life beneath his hand, (he said) 'it was as though the element of vitality itself' bordered on his skin. There was a bond of understanding between him and the mare, as if they both, without saying, knew that the other had glimpsed the same wonderful secret, or heard the same murmuring currents of being." (Kowalski, p. 138)

“Such experiences are not uncommon," writes Gary Kowalski. "For many children … it is an animal that first introduces them to the sanctities of birth and death and invites them to ponder what it means to be alive.” (p. 138) And for adults, too, awakening to the “personhood” of our companion animals can be a powerful experience.

And that is what happened to me.

One night, about a year after Goldie came into my life, I had a compelling dream. In the dream, Goldie and a duck were walking side-by-side down a path around a small lake in Seattle that was near my apartment. It was a path I walked at least twice a week at that time in my life, usually accompanied by a bird-watching friend. The dream duck and cat seemed odd companions, but there they were, walking together in the twilight. Then their paths parted, and suddenly I was seeing through the cat’s eyes as she stalked through the bushes toward the edge of the water. I saw branches and grasses parting before my face, felt them brushing my sleek sides.

I could smell the water, and the earthy, oily smells of small birds and rodents. I moved -- gracefully, powerfully, muscles strong and fluid beneath my skin – I was hunting. Then my body was poised to pounce, all my senses sharp and alert, my vision keen in the semidarkness. I was cat, following my own path, living my own purpose, my own universe.

When I woke from the dream, Goldie was sitting on the pillow next to my head, gazing at me intently. It was almost as if she knew what I’d been dreaming. Almost as if she knew that I suddenly knew that she was NOT just a thing, not just a pet, but a true being in every sense of the word.

That dream was my awakening into a sure belief that animals and humans share the quality of soul. After all, “the word ‘animal’ (itself) comes from a Latin root that means ‘soul.’ To ancient thinkers, soul was the mysterious force that gave life and breath to … the earth’s creatures. Some even spoke of a ‘world soul’ or anima mundi that enlivened the whole of nature.” (Kowalski, p. 136)

My colleague Gary Kowalski says that for him, soul resides at the point where our lives intersect with the timeless, in our love of goodness, our passion for beauty, our quest for meaning and truth. In asking whether animals have souls, he says we're inquiring whether they share in the qualities that make life more than a struggle for survival… (p. 16)

In the stories I spin for my daughter Grace at bedtime, she can speak the language of cats and understands their mysterious and sacred powers. Until the day when those stories come true, and even then, we may never know if animals share the mysterious soul element that makes us more than simply the sum of our parts, more than flesh and blood, more than collections of synapses and reflexes.

Truly, though, we do not need to know if animals have souls. What we need, instead, is to understand deeply that they show us how to be human.

This was the greatest spiritual lesson from my Goldie. Beginning with the dream, over our long relationship she showed me time and again that while I am human, she is cat, and that those two very different ways of being are equally valid. Through her, I learned “the great otherness of the Other,” that my way of being is only one of many, that there is a great mystery embodied by other beings. And I learned that my greatest task is to remember that my kind – humankind – needs the animals much more than they need us. For while animals have inhabited a world without humans, we have never lived without their companionship, example, and aid.

But there is other wisdom I gained by having Goldie in my life. When I found myself feeling self-righteous and important, she helped remind me of my own connection with the earth and all living things – she helped me remember my own essential wildness. Knowing her led, too, to a deeper awareness of other animals – the tiny finches nipping seeds from the tangle of thistles by my garage, the squirrels leaping branch to branch, the spiders who weave their daily webs in the most inconvenient places, my new neighbors' large and quiet dog.

And this is important – to come to appreciate animals -- wild and domesticated -- for the selves that they are: not because they purr when we stroke them. Not because they seem like family members. Not because they are helpful or useful. If we only see animals in human terms, as creatures that we seek out to satisfy our own needs, to fill the holes in our lives, then we are missing their true beauty and purpose, and we are diminishing ourselves as well. For animals, with all their loveliness, cannot replace human relationships.

Goldie, in her last weeks of life, gave my family one final lesson: how to love, and then to let go. Though months have passed, we're still mourning. The new house and new neighborhood we have just moved into with delight are the first place I have lived without Goldie in what seems like forever. The other day, I visited a cat-owning friend, and realized, as I stroked her sleeping pet, how cat-starved I am. But I'm not ready, not yet, to let another furry, four-footed creature leap into my heart, or onto the sunny windowsills of our new home.

Animals have much to teach us, if we will only let go of the illusion of our separateness, our superiority, and open our minds and hearts. "Ask now the beasts and they shall teach thee," we read in the Bible, "and the fowls of the air; and they shall teach thee. Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee, and the fishes of the earth shall declare unto thee." In Hinduism, animals, like humans, are viewed as manifestations of the one Great Eternal Spirit. And in the Koran we read, "There is not an animal on earth, nor a flying creature flying on two wings, but they are people like unto you."

People like unto us -- the fishes and the fowls, the cats and dogs and horses, the birds and bugs, indeed, all creatures that fly and crawl, that leap and swim and burrow on this earth. Let us pledge ourselves, this day and every day, to listen with eyes and ears and fingertips, with hearts and minds, for what these spiritual teachers might have to say.

Amen.