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In his book, The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis writes of a great journey through Heaven and Hell in a manner similar to Dante’s Inferno. As they enter heaven, the visitor observes a woman enfolded in the glory of the divine energies surrounded by animals. The visitor is awed–thinking this is the BVM.
When he finally gets up his courage to ask the bus driver about the woman, the driver responds that no, this isn’t the BVM, but some humble woman who had rescued all of these creatures of God, and in her care, they became fully themselves. I would take Lewis a step further, in relationship with these animals, the woman also became more fully herself as well. They were her companions in prayer and life.
- From the blog, Bending the Rule
A Dominican friar, Etienne de Bourbon, was sent as an inquisitor to Sandrans, a small village north of Lyon. He relates his findings in the work, De Supersticione. It was published in 1240 A.D.
One of the sections is called De Adoratione Guinefortis Canis, or, On the Worship of the Dog Guinefort. It relates the tale of the brave and loyal greyhound, Guinefort, or saves his master’s son from a snake who attempted to get into his crib. 
Guinefort defended the baby and tossed the snake across the room. The snake bit the dog, and there was blood all over the dog’s head and nursery floor. The mother and the wet nurse came in to find the bloody scene. They screamed, bringing the knight in with sword drawn, who killed the dog.
Finding the baby safe and sleeping peacefully, they looked around for an explanation for all the blood. They discovered the snake dead and torn to pieces.
Realizing what really happened, and what they had done, the knight and women were filled with remorse and inconsolable regret. The dog was buried in a well, and his grave covered high with stones. Trees were planted around the site in the manner of a sacred grove.
The manor was abandoned by the family and the estate became wild land.
“The local peasants,” relates de Bourbon’s account, “hearing of the dog’s conduct and of how it had been killed, although innocent, and for a deed which it might have expected praise, visited the place, honored the dog as a martyr, prayed to it..” when their children were sick or needed help.
Infuriated to find “St. Guinefort” was a dog, the friar preached against his veneration. “We had the dead dog disinterred, and the sacred wood cut down and burnt, along with the remains of the dog.”
The tragic story seems to end there, but the French film The Sorceress (Le Moine et la Sorciere, 1987), written by Boston College medievalist Pamela Berger and directed by Suzanne Schiffmann gives it a new twist. 
The premise of the movie is this: in a town near Lyons village people venerate Saint Guinefort, a greyhound who once saved a child from a deadly snake. When a Dominican friar repesenting the Church’s inquisition comes to town, he is outraged by what he sees as a mockery of the Christian institution of sainthood.
The friar destroys the grave of the holy dog and cuts down a tree nearby that the townsfolk believe to have healing powers. Later, however, he comes to regret his actions. As sort of a compromise with the villagers, the friar builds a chapel on the site of the sacred tree, and reinvents Saint Guinefort as a man-saint with a dog companion.
The shrine of Saint Guinefort continued to be visited for another 700 years, through the 1940s. Perhaps it still exists.
As the sun rises, a slight, gray-haired woman emerges onto the worn plank porch of her house and pours a glass of water out onto the sandy soil, lifts the cup to the sun, then drinks the rest of it.
In this daily ritual, artist Meinrad Craighead rebaptizes herself, making a short prayer to God as Mother: “You have given me life. This is my daily prayer. You’re going to take care of me.”
Her work portrays in vivid color both an active visual dialogue with God and a keen sense of the brooding, watching, beckoning power she finds in the land around her, in the sky above, the earth below, in the animals, in our dreams.
Her first real religious experience, at age 7, was not in church but in nature, with her dog, she said. She had retreated from the heat of a summer day to the shade of some hydrangea bushes. Under the flowers’ blue dome, she found herself gazing into her dog’s eyes. “They were as deep, as bewildering, as unattainable as a night sky,” she said of the eyes, and as she stared she felt a rush of water coming from deep within her. 
“I listened to the sound of water inside, saw a woman’s face, and understood: This is God. Soon after this I came upon a photo in a book of a statue of a woman. The recognition was immediate, certain: I knew this was the woman I’d heard inthe water and whose face I had seen in the dog’s eyes. This discovery brought a sense of well-being and gratitude, which has never diminished. Because she was a living force within me, she was more real, more powerful than the remote ‘Father’ I was educated to have faith in.”
“God the Mother came to me and, as children will do, I kept her a secret. We hid together inside the structures of institutional Catholicism. Through half a lifetime of Catholic liturgies, during my school years, in my professional work as an educator, for 14 years in a monastery, she lived at my innermost center, the groundsill of my spirituality.” 
Read the whole, glorious article, Art and Spirituality: In the name of the mother, by Richard Heffern here.
Psalm 103.
25 So this is the great sea, which stretcheth wide its arms: there are creeping things without number: creatures little and great. 26 There the ships shall go. This sea dragon which thou hast formed to play therein. 
I love the sea. I love dinosaurs. I love mystery monsters, especially sea monsters. I have all three with the Leviathan. What was it?
Biblical scholars and others have numerous theories about what it was, what it could have been, and what it represented.
I think it might have been an extra large Nile crocodile; but it could also have been an imaginative literary creation based on the discovery of the bones of an ancient marine reptiles. It possbily could have been a living creature of legend, much like the Loch Ness Monster.
Depending on the translation, it can be read as “whale” or “coiled.” If the Leviathan was more whale-like, then I would say it resembled a dunkleosteus or liopleurodon. If “coiled” then a mosasaur or sarcosuchus.
Walking along the beach at Orient, NY I came up this driftwood sculpture. I named it “Leviathan” for its open, roaring mouth and stare across the sea. 
A native of Wales, Carantoc is said to have become a monk at an early age. For a time, he lived in Ireland, preaching the faith there.
In his missionary labors, he was accompanied by a white dove that the people took to be an angel in visible form. This gentle creature remained with Carantoc after he returned to his native Wales. When Carantoc attempted to settle in a cave, the dove indicated by fluttering back and forth that it wanted to lead him elsewhere.
Carantoc followed the bird through the forest to a place of level ground, where the dove settled down. The monk chose this spot to build a church, a place later known as Llangrannog.
He subsequently established a monastery at a place called Cernach, governing it as abbot. Carantoc also traveled to Brittany. 
A legend connects Carantoc with King Arthur, claiming that the abbot subdued a large serpent by throwing his stole around its neck. He then led the vanquished beast to the court of King Arthur, where it freed it after commanding it to never harm people and livestock again.
Cooperative breeding, in which an animal assists in caring for offspring not its own, is often found in nature. But researchers in Hawaii have recently discovered a case involving long-term pairs of unrelated birds of the same sex.
Lindsay C. Young of the University of Hawaii and colleagues studied a colony of Laysan albatrosses on Oahu from 2004 to 2007. These birds are monogamous, and both parents participate in raising a single hatchling. The researchers reported in Biology Letters that nearly one-third of the 125 pairs consisted of two unrelated females, and half of these stayed together for the duration of the study.
The researchers note that for female-female pairing like this to occur, usually there has to be a surplus of females in the population. For same-sex pairing to persist, the researchers say, both females should have opportunities to reproduce. They found evidence for that: for some pairs that produced chicks in more than one year of the study, at least one was from each female.
Male and female He made them, but female and female raise the chicks.
Mark Stoll, a history professor at Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, Texas, argues that Catholics have not been prominent environmentalists in the past because their religious worldview encouraged a sense of sacredness among a community of people rather than with nature.
In a paper entitled The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Environmentalism, Stoll writes, “Religiously-minded Catholics dedicated themselves in service to the Church, or to the poor, or to the unconverted – to society, in other words…and by and large left nature writing to Protestants, alone in the woods with their God.” While Catholics have always appreciated the natural world, their passion for ecology has usually been an afterthought to their commitment to social concerns.
But, as Stoll points out, ecology is becoming a social concern. In his statement for the World Day of Peace in 1990, Pope John Paul II said, “the ecological crisis is a moral issue (that) has assumed such proportions as to be the responsibility of everyone.” In response, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued Renewing the Earth, in which they insist that “the ecological problem is intimately connected to justice for the poor.”
“How,” they ask, “may we apply our social teaching, with its emphasis on the life and dignity of the human person, to the challenge of protecting the earth, our common home?”
I took this photo of St. Kevin at Our Lady of Knock Shrine in Ireland when I visited in early April 2008. Somehow, the setting of just-budding trees was perfect for the saint who was reputed to stand still until a nest of birds had hatched in his hand.
Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s great poet, wrote a poem about it – St. Kevin and the Blackbird:
”Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life
Is moved to pity; now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the rain and sun for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.”
St. Kevin has a lot of animal stories attached to his legend: the boar that came to him for protection against hunters; healing the pet goose of the King of Glendalough; the otter that brought him a salmon for dinner every night; and having a doe and then a she-wolf wet nurse Faelan, the infant son of King Colman of the Faelain. The king blamed evil spirits for the deaths of his other children, but the one entrusted to the saint and the animals grew up healthy and strong.
The great connection of ancient Irish saints to nature, their wondrous relationships with the earth and its creatures and the miracles they inspire, is part of Celtic Christianity. It is also a part of their time, when people lived close to the land and relied on it for sustenance and spirituality.
By the same token, today’s saints and blessed individuals generally seem to be cityfolk primarily interested in politics. Their lack of connection by grace or inspiration with animals and the natural world is indicative of just how much connection to creation Catholicism has lost.
The works and life of Br. Thomas Merton, Sr. Dorothy Strang and the strong commitment by Pope Benedict to environmental protection are hopeful signs for Catholic environmentalists to take heart we may be experiencing a renaissance in creation-centered spirituality.
The British group Catholic Concern for Animals has enlisted British TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and another celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver, to persuade the bishops of England and Wales to promote their dioceses as “free-range” users.
The animals rights group – whose members include Bishop Malcolm McMahon of Nottingham – wants all parish, rectory, school, convent and retreat centre dining halls to use only free-range poultry and eggs.
A talented writer, broadcaster and campaigner, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is widely known for his commitment to seasonal, ethically produced food. His books, journalism and television series have earned him a huge popular following. He is also a strong supporter of the rights of local farmers and principals of fair trade.
Determined to start growing and rearing some of his own food, in 1998 Hugh started living in the original River Cottage farm in rural Dorset. His steep learning curve was documented in the Escape to River Cottage series (1999) which won him a big audience.
Originally a collection of mucky cow sheds, the property was transformed into a rustic, welcoming venue with a professional kitchen, thriving vegetable garden and small collection of livestock. It became the location for a range of River Cottage events and courses designed to promote the “grown your own” philosophy and provide an environment where people could dicuss, eat and learn about really good, well-produced food.
The man who became Saint Modhomhnoc (or Modomnoc) came from the royal line of Ui Neill of Ulster.
He wanted to be a priest and so he left Ireland and went to be educated under the great Saint David at Mynyw (Menevia, now Saint David’s) Monastery in Wales. All those who resided in the community were expected to share in the manual work as well as the study and worship; Modomnoc was given charge of the bees and he loved it. He cared for them tenderly, keeping them in straw skeps in a special sheltered corner of the garden, where he planted the kinds of flowers bees loved best.
Every time they swarmed, he captured the swarm very gently and lovingly and set up yet another hive. He talked to the bees as he worked among them and they buzzed around his head in clouds. It was if they were responding to his soothing words.
His years of study ended, and Modomnoc had to return to Ireland to begin his priestly ministry. While he was glad to be returning home, he knew he would miss his bees. On the day of his departure, he said good-bye to the Abbott, the monks, and his fellow students. Then he went down to the garden to bid his little friends farewell.
They came out in answer to his voice and never was there such a buzzing and excitment among the rows of hives. The monks stood a distance watching the commotion in wonder. “You’d think the bees knew,” they said. “You’d think they knew that Modomnoc was going away.”
Modomnoc resolutely turned and went down and boarded the ship. When they were about three miles from shore, Modomnoc saw what looked like a little black cloud in the sky in the direction of the Welsh coast. He watched it curiously as as it came closer, he saw to his amazement that it was a swarm of bees. It was a giantic swarm – all the bees from the monastery hives followed him out to sea!
Twice Modomnoc had the boat turn back and brought the bees back to their garden. On the third time his boat set sail Modomnoc prayed ferverently that the bees would stay in their pleasant garden rather than risk their lives at sea. But, for the third time, he saw the black cloud rise over the coast of Wales. This time, the boat did not turn back. Resigned to the will of God and the persistence of his faithful friends, he coaxed the swarm into a sheltered corner of the boat. There, much to the relief of the sailors, they quietly remained throughout the voyage.
When Modomnoc landed in Ireland, he set up a church at a place called Bremore, near Balbriggan, in County Dublin, and there he established the bees in a happy garden just like the one they had in Wales. The place is known to this day as “the Church of the Beekeeper.”
My thanks to Catholic Ireland and Irish Culture and Customs for this lovely story.
