Animal Blessing Ceremony

May the animals in our lives

– indeed, in our world –

reveal to us deeper relationships,

life answering to life;

causing us to revere Life's Spirit

in all manifestations:

in the intricate and beautiful

Web Of Existence, yes,

but even more

through myriad fellow creatures –

especially those companion animals –

whose presence bless us daily.


[The animals and their friends paraded down and around the aisles, then together stopped.]

With intention, compassion, and abiding affection,

we pause to hear the murmur of life

in this hallowed room

as we contemplate

the meaning and presence of our fellow creatures

in sacred silence.

[after the silence]

Say aloud the names
you have given your companion animals.

Now everyone say with me:

“We are all in this together.”

An Emergent Animal Ministry

A few years ago I edited a collection of poetry and prose, In Praise of Animals under the Skinner House imprint.    While the collection was proposed by my editor at SH, I'd long been interested in Animal Rights.  For a couple of decades I'd been calling Animal Rights "an ethical frontier," the next step in a progressing ethic of respect and reverence.

Within Unitarian Universalism Animal Rights has become a more sophisticated movement as ethical treatment thinking has transformed to an animal ministry perspective.  I think this represents, in part, a distancing from a secular animal rights activism.  The emergent Animal Ministry movement looks more to moral suasion  than to confrontational coercion.

I've prepared a Reader's Guide to my In Praise of Animals collection.  I think it is an apt means for the uninitiated to begin to explore what is now being called "multi-species" relationships--our appropriate relationship with our animal kindred as well as the web of life that embraces us all.  My guide is a resource for individual reflection.  But it would also work well in a readers or book discussion group.

Animal Rights is no longer a frontier.  It is a realm of ethical being that is rich and fulfilling.  It is, in my estimation, a coming home for the human species.