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At the first church I served as a priest, a parishioner told me the story of how she had first found the Episcopal Church. She hadn’t necessarily been looking for a new church or searching for a particular theological tradition or liturgical style. What caught her attention was something much simpler: we blessed animals to celebrate the Feast of St. Francis.
She loved that the church would make room for something so ordinary and so important to her. Her pets were part of her family, and the blessing of animals in a church setting communicated to her that the things we love and care for in our everyday lives are not separate from our life with God. They belong here, too.
I think that is part of the particular gift of our celebration of St. Francis. We gather to bless our animals, and in doing so, we are also reminded that God’s blessing is not confined to the things we usually think of as “religious.” God is present in the ordinary: in a dog’s exuberance in being reunited with her owner, a cat curled up in a sunny window, the companionship of an old animal, the delight of watching birds, the work of tending a garden, the beauty of the natural world.
St. Francis understood creation not simply as something God made for us, but as something with which we share our lives and our praise. He could call the sun his brother and the moon his sister, because he recognized that all creation belongs to the same household of God. His radical simplicity and love for the poor grew out of this same vision: that we humans are creatures among creatures, dependent upon one another and upon the God who gives us life.
And perhaps that is why the blessing of the animals can be such a meaningful act of worship. We bring before God the creatures who comfort us, make us laugh, demand our attention, frustrate us, and teach us something about love. We bring the parts of our lives that can seem too mundane or too messy for church, and we discover that they were never outside God’s care in the first place.
On this coming Sunday, St. Francis’ Day, we will bless our animals at the 9 and 11 a.m. services. And perhaps, through them, we remember that God is blessing us, too: blessing the ordinary lives we actually live and inviting us to recognize the sacredness already woven through them.
-The Rev’d Kira Austin-Young
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