Animals and Eternal Rest

Having already done two posts on our pets and heaven, I'll wander away from scripture and the patterns of traditional theology and more into my own spiritual sense of the eternal destiny of the animals that fill our world. It might be a bit too esoteric to share with your typical seven-year old wondering whether Mr. Barky is in heaven...but then again, seven year olds often surprise you with what they can take in.

My own personal spiritual predilections are pretty intensely mystic in character. Those moments of numinous, ecstatic presence that shook me from a position of alternately cynical and hopeful agnosticism into my current faith in Christ and Creator have left me feeling rather differently about the creatures around me. Meaning, no more Vietnamese steak marinated in red wine and rolled in pepper on a bed of lightly dressed salad, no matter how much that thought still evokes a Pavlovian response.

Ultimately, I believe that the existential barriers of self that we perceive as unbreachable boundaries between us mean exactly diddly squat. With Thomas Merton and other Christian mystics, I see our awareness in this life as deeply limited. Though we do not now directly perceive the harms or joys we cause in the same way as the beings with whom we interact, that lack of perception is a limitation of our temporal and material existence. We are, whether we like it or not, all participants in one another. Once we enter into the unmediated presence of God, we come into the wholeness of what the Apostle Paul would have called our "spiritual body." That, as I have come to understand it, is not just the "us" that we know, but the full fruit of our words and actions as they play out across every relationship in which we have participated.

Every joy caused and every harm inflicted is unmediated and fully us, written forever into the fabric of existence. That standard, as I know it through my faith, includes not just our interactions with the homo sapiens sapiens around us. It also includes the creatures with which we share this beautiful and fragile little planet. If I strike or harm another being, that harm is mine, forever scarring me. If I give comfort to another being, that comfort is a part of my place in eternity.

For simpler creatures that lack awareness of self, this interweaving of being is just part of what they are. The lion will know the death throes of the wildebeest, and the wildebeest will know the contented sleep of the full bellied lion. Feel free to start singing that Lion King song, if you must. Creatures that exist moment to moment are simply living as they must live. They have little understanding of themselves as selves, and even less understanding of the other as a self.

As beings grow in sentience and awareness of self and other, they become more...spiritually complicated. But the interconnectedness remains the same. It is to that interconnectedness that the greatest and only law of the Gospel speaks. We are to be aware that we are part of a glorious something that transcends us and our culture and our species, and to love that Glory with all our heart and mind and strength. As a part of that knowledge, we are called to love the Other as we love ourselves.

The creatures around me are part of the great story that God is telling, just as I am part of it. Our destiny is the same. We move into the presence of God as one.

When I come through the door at the end of a long day, and our little puppy comes galumphing up with her tail wagging in unconditional, exuberant joy at my arrival, that knowledge is a pleasure.

The Definitive Teaching About Dogs and Heaven

There's been a little bit of lull in my blogging lately. And my Facebookin'. And, in fact, across much of the other non-essential activities of my existence. The reason for that is the introduction into our household of a little scampering bundle of lickity affection. After forty-one orbits around the sun, and a full year of lobbying from my nine year old, I have a dog for the very first time.

Ellie is an eight week old blend of Golden Retriever and Standard Poodle. She eats, she sleeps, she runs in crazy little circles. I haven't been this focused on feeding schedules and their resultant output since my younger son was a tot. It's not as intense, as she's far lower maintenance than an equivalent toddler. She's tiring, but in an utterly-worth-it sort of way. I am, as the missus puts it, totally smitten.

In one of those synchronous events, one of the blogs I feed pitched out a musing about dogs the other day. It's the blog of a leader of one of the most ferociously hard-core conservative cells within my denomination. Carmen tends to look for things that trouble her in the church, signs of liberality and progressivism and the creeping influence of secular/Wiccan/socialist/French heresies. Here, though, she was "going after" a church that allows dogs in it's services. It seemed tailor-made for harrumphing. Not taking worship seriously! Not showing respect to the orderly praise of the Creator of the Universe! Only, try as she might, she couldn't quite bring herself to get into high dudgeon about it. Because she..well..she loves dogs. It's hard to get all ornery about them, even if being ornery is your favorite hobby.

The conversation that followed among her commenters surfaced the classic question asked by every earnest 12 year old: Does little Barky go to heaven? One of her readers said no, for reasons that probably have to do with having presuppositional apologetics beating in their chest where their heart should be. But the majority (true-believing conservatives all) said, um, maybe. Probably. It'd be nice if they did. That's not a good enough answer, though. In my capacity as the Pastor Who Spends Way Too Much Time Thinking About Things (tm), I will now offer up the definitive Christian answer to that question: Yes.

Why yes? Well, let me elucidate. First, from scripture.

The Bible doesn't spend a whole heck of a lot of time talking about the eternal lives of canines, felines, gerbils, and hamsters. For some reason, this probably didn't seem like the highest priority for an ancient Semitic people. But as we look at how creatures are directly approached in the Hebrew Scriptures, it's clear that there are some moral and spiritual obligations towards the animals in our care. From the Torah, we hear in the 10 Commandments that the Sabbath is to be kept sacred by all. A day of rest is to be given not just to those who are part of Israel, but also to the stranger in the land and the bondservant...and to the animals. This assertion of care for the well-being of domestic animals is repeated in the Exodus teachings about the value of the Sabbath. Critters get included in.

Now, some might say this is simply utilitarian. You got to keep 'em rested, so they can work harder and/or taste better. There is no spiritual component to this, some might say. But in the Writings, the Teacher of Ecclesiastes speaks directly to the question of the spirit behind the inscrutable eyes of your cat. The answer, from this wisest of the wise souls in the Bible, is that there is no difference between humankind and animals. We are all creatures of earth. We are all animated by the same breath.

So on the infrequent occasions that the Bible teaches directly about the non-human beings around us, it seems to point to the strong possibility of animals sharing in whatever our eternal destiny may be.

But there are deeper Christian theological principles at play here too...which I'll deal with in my next post.

Save the Whales

Every Sunday on my way to my bitty church, I pass my local up-and-coming independent mini-mega church. They've been running a sermon series for the last month or so on heaven, and the question posed on their signage today was a simple one: ANIMALS IN HEAVEN?

The purpose of such a question is rather simple...will there be a doggie door on our heavenly mansion for Mr. Barky? Anyone who has a pet to which they've had deep emotional ties really doesn't want there to be any question: Captain Fluffykins will be there forever and ever.

Of course, I tend to find that way of understanding heaven a bit simplistic, but when you get right down to it, I think...sure. Yes. Of course animals are there. If you're OCD about scriptural references, it straight up says so in Ecclesiastes. Not the cheeriest of prooftexts, but hey, it answers the question.

Animals, of course, tend to be simpler creatures, and one could argue that they're considerably less aware than we are of their surroundings. As beings that have less self-awareness, they aren't prone to the type of destructive self-seeking that defines human sin...and therefore they'd just automatically get in. That, I would think, would be the theological position that a thoughtful pastor consoling a churchgoer at the loss of a companion animal might provide if pressed.

There's a deeper fuddle to this, though. Not all animals lack self-awareness. Higher primates like chimps and orangutans and gorillas clearly demonstrate memory, awareness of themselves as selves, and are even capable of grasping and expressing certain forms of human language. They can show compassion towards one another, and are also capable of intense brutality. But can they sin? If they have self-awareness, the answer would seem to be yes. If so...then are they somehow inherently unsaved according to the evangelical rubric? Koko the Gorilla never signed that she had accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior, after all.

A solid counterargument would be that even the brightest of the "lesser creatures" are like children, and thus not fully culpable for their actions. But...what about creatures that aren't meaningfully "lesser" than many folks who've responded to an altar call. Elephants have fairly sophisticated infrasonic language, and have brains and vocabularies that meet or exceed those of most reality TV stars. Cetaceans are clearly our equals, although the forms and structures of their intellects are very different from ours. That doesn't matter, though.

If they have sentience, and they have will, and they are aware...then from the basic underlying assumptions of orthodox theology, they should be capable of sin. But they don't know nor can they know Jesus, as they're not able to read the tracts we earnestly press up against the glass wall at SeaWorld.

Does this mean they're inherently damned? Or just that the contemporary evangelical understanding of sin and Christ's purpose isn't quite adequate to the task of explaining it's way through this conundrum?