I’ve had a lot of nice comments about last week’s Pet Service, many of them from people who don’t usually attend St. Mary’s. I hope that this Sunday’s Pet Service in Tinwell also manages to reach people we don’t often see. Pets are very good for teaching children how to love and care for a living thing, and the relationships we form with our pets remind us that love isn’t limited to our own species, we can form a deep connection with our pets. Our pets remind us that we are deeply connected to all of life.
The American Trappist monk, poet, and social activist, Thomas Merton, wrote “the true self should not be thought of as anything different from life itself”. Interesting, but what is this “true self”? Fortunately, Merton provides an answer, “Love is the reason you were made, and love is who you are”. This, I think, is what we mean when we say that we are “created in the image and likeness of God”.
Love can be hard work, through love we feel things more deeply, this opens up our souls to the world and to each other, we experience joy, but also pain, more deeply. No wonder we’re often tempted to create divisions, not least within ourselves. But we know that creating these divisions ultimately leads to loneliness, or even worse, to conflict and disconnection from our world, and ultimately from the God who is love, as well as from “our true selves”.
On Sunday we’ll be looking at the Parable of the Sower, a story which has multiple meanings for us, and perhaps one of them is this, “we reap what we sow”. Do we sow love and grace? Or do we sow something else? The answer is the choice between recognising and creating heaven on earth, where we build connection and recognise that “love is who we are”, or simply just waiting for our own personalised heaven at the end of our days, which, in my opinion, sounds a bit boring, is definately a waste of all that love, and ironically, places us in danger of losing our true self, which is life itself. Perhaps that’s the reason we keep pets; through them we catch a glimpse of heaven.
