One week ago I received an e-mail from the mother of one of my students. Here is what Martha said:
"At our church in South Acton we are having a service of Blessing of the Animals next Sunday at 4:00 pm."
Martha wanted to know if she could use some of the photos I'd taken of her wonderful son, Tim, with my horses. That would be a resounding yes from me. But then she had added:
"Of course you are invited if you'd like to come, and to bring any creature you would like. All four-foots and two-foots welcome."
After a few more e-mails and phone calls were exchanged, it was arranged. Kip the pony, Brit the mule, and Rufo the pit bull-mix would attend, led by their devoted friends Amalia, Jenna, and Jon. I can't say I didn't have a few moments of trepidation prior to the service. Kip and Brit had enjoyed a lot of Natural Horsemanship training and generally comported themselves very well in-hand. But in a church--a small church, at that, whose congregants would be comprised not only of humans but an undetermined number and mix of other critters? Added to that, there would be music--piano, guitars, and humans "lifting up their voices to the Lord." If they were unhappy or anxious, they could express those feelings in a powerful and potentially destructive way.
And what would Rufo, the recently adopted pit bull-mix, make of this--well, mix? Until a few weeks ago, for twenty-two hours a day he'd spent six of his seven years in a cage at the Yonkers Animal Shelter in New York. There might be a lot of dogs there. Would he be overwhelmed? Was it unfair to ask him to be there?
And then--most importantly--there was our own wonderful and heroic thirty-six year-old daughter Marleny. At the age of twelve she had been sexually assaulted by her Sunday School teacher when we lived in Groton. Since then she's only been to church once--a Christmas service at a church in Concord when she was fifteen. She shook the entire time.
We all agreed on a solution--an evacuation plan, actually. If anyone, human, child, dog, pony, or mule seemed unhappy, or in any kind of distress, we would simply see them to an exit. Jon would take Rufo home, and anyone else could wait in my truck or trailer.
The night before the service, just before nodding off to sleep, I had visions of flying chalices, shattered stained glass, a galloping pony and mule, and weeping children. And last, but certainly not ever least, manure.
The day before and the morning of the service, I placed a small tarp in a paddock and practiced leading Kip and then Brit on and off. We use tarps a lot in training. As many of you already know, horses, being prey animals, are naturally frightened of anything that moves, makes a noise, or just plain looks weird. So, we will put a tarp down in the round pen and move the horse around--usually at the walk or trot--using a long whip until she gets close to that scary blue crinkly thing with the teeny tiny metal rings that flash in the sun.
Horses--being no different in this respect than many humans (myself, included)--are happy to stand still and chill-lax when the pressure's off. So, that's done by lowering the whip and giving praise each time they get near the tarp. Often they will move to the shiny blue sheet as soon they enter the round pen. Basically, the meaning for them has changed: from fear and sensing something to escape to a place of security and R & R.
At the same time, while becoming adjusted to the oh-so-scary tarp, they begin to learn that they don't have to run from what their DNA tells them to, after all. For instance, if I leaned a bicycle up against the pen theoretically it should take the horse less time to get up-close-and-personal with it than the tarp. If you continue resolutely along this path, your horse will ultimately become, quite literally, bomb-proof and you can sign him up for your town's annual 4th of July parade.
But back to Kip and Brit. They both remembered their tarp training very well. I added another element they would need in order to be at their Sunday best: standing on it for a long period of time. After five or so minutes, Kip and Brit particularly, got antsy and moved all around. Crunching up the tarp with hooves was verboten: it would have rendered its other and very necessary role, that of port-a-potty, useless. So, I would center them again on the tarp and, when they were still, reward them with a bit of carrot. They soon learned that if they stood nicely they got something good. Gradually, they were trained to stand at longer lengths. I quit when I got each girl up to fifteen minutes (a pretty long time, actually). I had other horses that needed tending to. Besides, when I ran the Honolulu Marathon (twenty-six miles and two hundred and eighty-five yards) back in 1978, the longest training run I had done was eighteen miles. I just had to believe that the remaining eight-plus miles were do-able for me. And now I had to believe that an additional forty or so minutes would be do-able for Kip and Brit.
Jon arrived an hour early so Rufo could play with our seven-month-old puppy Clem. This, we hoped, would siphon off some of Rufo's energy and, hopefully, decrease any anxiety.
Amalia arrived with her parents some thirty minutes later. (You will remember Amalia from another blog entry as the inventor of the "Mother Stroke.") Then it was on to church for one and all. As soon as we unloaded, I handed Brit over to her favorite rider, fifteen-year-old Jenna. Kip was led by Amalia, Rufo by Jon and Marleny, and I stood ready to help if anything out of the ordinary happened. Wait, this was out of the ordinary! How many kids in Massachusetts or even in all of New England get to say they went to church--in church--with a pony and mule?
We walked up the disabled ramp and through the front doors. It was just a few minutes before the service, so most congregants were settled in the pews or sprawled out on the floor when we walked in and onto the tarp laid out in a back corner. It was rather tight. See for yourself:
Then out came cameras in all their forms--iPhone, Androids, cellphones and "real" ones like I use. You know the kind, you look right at it and it visually replies: "Yes, I am a camera, a dedicated camera." Flashes abounded. Many horses find those akin to lightning bolts and are very fearful, but over the years I've flashed at Kip and Brit ad nauseam, so they were just fine. In fact, over the years Kip has gotten so much attention that I wouldn't have been surprised if she'd expected to be walked down the Hollywood Hall of Fame to impress her hoof print. Unfortunately for Kip, but fortunately for us, she didn't get to impress her hoof on anything or anybody that hour.
Brit, to my knowledge, has never been in a building other than a small barn. At my place she has a stall but she is free to go in and out at will. So I was pleased with her tolerance of a very new situation. This was no small part due to the trust she has in Jenna. Here they are again with Kip off to the side:
Rufo followed Jon right up the aisle to a pew. Here they are:
We were warmly welcomed by Reverend Katrina Wuensch and then came the hymn, "All Creatures Great And Small." Skipping ahead, the Prayer of Confession was a call to recognize the destructive dominion over which we have governed and ruled animals, and a call to increase our fellowship with them and recognize them for the sentient creatures they are, that they, too, are entitled to savor "the sweetness of life."
Well, I was right on board with that. When I was eight my aunt--a Maryknoll nun--urged (understatement here) my father to get us baptized and into religious instruction. I thought that was a very good idea. All the kids in the neighborhood had gravely informed me that since we didn't go to church and since I ate hot dogs on Friday (I refused to eat the codfish cakes my mother made) we were bad Catholics. In fact, one particularly nasty boy named Anthony DelGado--who, a year or so earlier, had cut off the front paw of a stray kitten with his Boy Scout knife--reported to me that his mother had said my whole family was going straight to hell. A few decades later, though for different reasons, I came to agree with Anthony's mom, though mine was a more metaphorical reading on what constituted my family's pathway to hell.
I and three of my brothers were baptized. (My older two brothers had apparently been baptized sometime before I was born.) I got a set of godparents who gave me rosary, a pink catechism book, and a small cross with a skinny sad man with a beard hanging from it. Then the priest dribbled some water onto my head. My infant brother was up next. The priest took him from my mother's arms, held him over the baptismal fount, and dribbled water onto his head as well. My brother--his face now beet red--screamed and cried in absolute terror. His terror became my terror and I wanted out of there.
In a few minutes we were, but the next week it was on to religious instruction. All the kids who left school early on Wednesdays for these classes took the bus to St. Martin's of Tours, but not us. Since I was already eight and my brother nine, and since we were lamentably behind in knowing the words of Jesus (as interpreted by the men who wrote the Bible, which was interpreted by the Catholic Church, which was itself interpreted by the nuns and priests of our local parish), special arrangements had to be made. We were to receive private instruction at the hands of that same man who had scared my baby brother to death--Father Cafferty.
My father dropped my brother and me off at the rectory. There a nun escorted us into a dark, wood-paneled room where Father Cafferty waited. He beckoned us to sit in his lap, enclosing both of us in his arms as he read from a little illustrated book about the woman who got to ride a donkey while going to town called Bethlehem. I still remember the beautiful blue of her robes.
"Father Cafferty, do animals go to Heaven?" I asked.
"No, animals have no souls, only humans go to Heaven."
That was it--the deal-breaker with me and the Catholic Church: "Then I'm not going. I'll stay here."
"I pray we will all be in Heaven." He pulled me closer.
That's when things went from highly unsatisfactory to soul-splitting terrifying. I was eight, and having lived one full heathen year past the age of reason, I suddenly found myself in the hell the kids on my block said was my destination (though not quite in the manner they conceived it). My brother, having lived one and half years, was right there in the conflagration with me and would have to stay longer.
Father Cafferty, it turned out, was the devil in disguise, intent on claiming us as his own in a very horrific way. I jumped off his lap and stood under the clock. The message, I thought, should have been clear: this "lesson" with Ainslie and her brother was over! He snapped open his black-cassock covered arm and beckoned me back, but I refused. He got up, opened the door, and gestured towards a bench, advising me to sit there. He then turned, shut the door, and returned to the matter of my brother's religious needs. That was the last time I went to catechism. When I got home I shrieked, screamed, and yelled that I wasn't going to "retard catechism" ever again, and that I hated being Catholic.
For some reason, my parents didn't make me go back. My father, who brought his own malignant pathologies to bear on me, and I believe, all my brothers, for some reason said I didn't have to go. Maybe he was afraid I'd spill the beans on a certain brotherhood he shared with this man of the cloth. My poor brother was not a ranter like his sister, and returned to "class." While I was in high school Father Cafferty became a Monsignor. Some forty years later, I called the Rockville Center Diocese to see if he'd been caught. The administrator there spoke of him in warm, loving terms. It had been several years since his death, she said, and the entire diocese was still in mourning.
In the many years that have passed, I've learned that, like Glenda and the Wicked Witches of the East and West, there are good priests and bad priests, good congregations and bad ones. And the South Acton Congregational Church is definitely a good one. Kind, loving fellowship abounds. Here's a short You Tube I made from the Flip video I slipped into Marleny's hands a few minutes into the ceremony.
Please forgive its poor quality. First of all, Marleny was standing behind the last row of pews next to our well-behaved, but nonetheless, distracting animals. And then there is the shaking caused by Marleny's laughter when the chicken someone brought in gives a huge squawk! Now that was the most wonderful moment of the service for me. Fearful association of the past was absent. Marleny delighted in being in this church with its welcoming, animal-loving environment. As I listened to Katrina's sermon, the chicken, and Marleny's and the other congregants' laughter, I got teary and my heart swelled.
Then a heart-warming "Lighting of the Candles" followed. Animal friends, and photos of departed precious animal friends were brought forward. Jon walked up with Rufo and lit a candle for Robbie, his first rescue dog who had died several years ago:
I lit a candle for Bo, my dear shepherd mix. (You may have read about her in a previous blog entry: "A Great Dog" Oct 5, 2011.)
More music! The choir sang the upbeat children's song "All God's Creatures Got a Place in the Choir." It was charming. I didn't know the song, so I did a little research online. The composer is Bill
Staines, whose songs have been recorded by various groups including Peter, Paul and Mary. He's one of our own-- born in Medford ("Meh-fid"), and raised in Lexington. He's on the coffee house circuit, so look him up!
Then came the actual blessing. Amalia led the way with Kip, followed by Jenna and Brit:
A closing prayer, a song, and it was over. However, such an experience will live on with all of us who were present. Those other animals who attended either in person or by photo all have their own stories and their own families who love them dearly. All animals and humans were blessed and content. But most of all the Bible expressed my feelings that day better than I ever could: "My cup runneth over!"
Blessings on you all and thank you for reading The Windflower Weekly--
Ainslie Sheridan
Note: In the first photo of Kip you may wonder about the heart that is on her hindquarters. I did this with a clippers this past autumn as her winter coat was beginning to come in.
