C3/CCC Sermon Transcript for August 31, 2008 Do Animals Have Souls? When I was a teenager, I had a pet dog named “Winston”. He was a Miniature Schnauzer who was fiercely protective of me. He growled at visitors, especially girlfriends. He was named after Winston Churchill because when it came to girlfriends “he would bite them on the beaches. He would bite them on the land or on the hand. He would bite them anywhere” if they got too close to me. Winston was insanely jealous. On one particular occasion, we were having a party on our front lawn, and Winston was inside the house. Standing in a group, one person looked up and said, “Look, there’s Winston.” He had his paws up on the window frame, gazing at the party. Then he disappeared from sight. Before we could even look away, he appeared again. He took a running jump and leapt out of the second story window. We stood with jaws dropped as Winston free fell straight towards our group, legs flailing, tongue out, and his eyes looking regretful. If I could have frozen the moment in time and put a cartoon thought bubble above his furrowed brow, it would have said, “Im not so sure this was a good idea after all.” Winston landed in the grass, flat on his stomach. We all held our breath. He lay motionless for what seemed like minutes, but was probably only seconds, then stood up and trotted to my side as if to say “here I am, at your service”. He had fallen maybe twenty yards as if he was a cat expecting to land on his feet, but as it turned out he was fine. Someone joked that we should post a sign warning people to “Beware the flying dog.” Winston died a few months later due to problems unrelated to the flying leap. I was heart sick. This was without doubt the saddest moment of my life. I left my favorite sweater in his cage at the animal hospital. It felt like something I could do to express my connection that might help him transition from this life. I wondered if there was an afterlife, a heaven for animals. I wondered if animals have fears about death. I wondered if animals have thoughts and emotions about life and love, loss and death. I still wonder. The question is often asked, “Do animals have souls?” I don’t have any absolute answers to that question, but I do know that I had a profound connection to Winston. I don’t know for sure that there is a physical, or even metaphysical object called a soul that leaves the body at death. I do know for sure that Winston and I were soul mates. We had a connection beyond language, and so the language I grasp at to describe the connection is mysterious like souls. Maybe you have, or have had, your own intimate connection to an animal. If you have, my guess is that you would say that animals do have souls. Christianity and Souls Christianity has a limited perspective on souls. It is limited because the main influence in the early days of Christianity was Greek thought. The Greeks believed the world was organized hierarchically, with plants at the bottom, then animals, then women a little higher than the animals, men higher still and angels and gods above men. To the Greeks, men were more associated with souls and rationality while women were associated with bodies and sexuality. Souls were a quality limited to humans, and mainly men. The notion that humans have souls, and animals don’t, has been the cause of so much human superiority and abuse of animals (not to mention male abuse of women). What I want to outline here is the connections between we animals called humans and our cousins, the non human ones. My hope is to point out how similar we are, how related we are, how mutually interdependent we are. Maybe soul is a poetic way to describe the quality of a relationship, rather than a measurable thing that any individual creature has. Animals have such a strong sense of relationship; to each other, to other species, to their environment. They KNOW things innately, even without language to describe or explain things. Maybe soulful is a poetic way to explain elephants standing guard over stillborn babies for days with their heads and ears sunk low, sea lion mothers howling and crying while killer whales dine on their babies, dolphins struggling to resuscitate dead infants, a grieving red fox buryingthe body of another who had been killed by a mountain lion. Animals seem to share the human drive to respect death and love life. Hebrew culture had interesting ways to explain the intimate relationship between animals and humans. Do you remember the plight of the Old Testament character, Job? He suffered, and he suffered doubly because he wondered why he suffered. He wondered out loud about everything, and his friends thought they had answers for all his questions. Their view of everything was so neat and tidy and so human centered. They even presumed to know how God thought and acted. Job said to his friends facetiously in one passage: The writer of Ecclesiastes 3 was even more explicit: I said in my heart with regard to human beings that God is testing them to show that they are but animals. For the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and humans have no advantage over the animals; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knows whether the human spirit goes upwards and the spirit of animals goes downwards to the earth? (Ecclesiastes 3;18-21) Of course this was another world with limited scientific understanding. The point here is that because of the Greek influence, Christianity lost the respect for animals that Hebrew culture emphasized. Creationism/ Evolution and Soul We tend to think we are superior to animals because of our technological power, and within Christianity because of a narrow reading of the Bible. We forget how close to animals we really are. They are indeed our cousins. Literal creationism leaves us with the false sense that the earth was created for our pleasure and human use. Creationism is usually presented as a series of finite acts of creation, with humans as the pinnacle of creation. Evolutionary theory challenges us to a new and more relational perspective. Consider this story from Africa that turns around the human centred worldview the same way that evolution does- Two men stood together at a river they were about to cross when they spied several crocodiles. "Are you afraid," one asked the other. We are all descended from the same four billion year old life form. We are all related. Maybe soul is poetic language to describe the awesome process and relationships. Think about it; thumb sucking is a universal primate behavior around weaning time. The wings of a bat, the flippers of a whale and human hands have similar bone structure. Look around at your cousin animals and you will experience the connection, and a word that comes close to the life affirming quality of evolution is soulful. Or else think about it poetically. Maybe soulful is the best word for what Yann Martel captured in Life of Pi, when he described a sloth in South America: Diversity and Soul Another lesson from our creature teachers is the beauty of diversity. Maybe soulful is a word that captures the beauty of diversity. Did you know that-?
Maybe soulful is a poetic word to describe the wondrous and awesome diversity of nature. Normal is only ever a relative term, and life is shock full of mystery. How soulful! Soul and The Golden Rule Let me end where I began, with the lessons of animal loyalty. Maybe the ultimate soulful quality is to stretch beyond the survival impulse and care beyond your species.
close window | ^ top | home |