I found “The Story of the Pelican” on the insightful blog, Ad Dominum.
The post appeared on September 21, 2008 shortly after Hurricane Ike. It wove the story of the pelican victims of the hurricane with Catholic religious symbols, including a stiking image on a priest’s chasuble of a pelican feeding it young. 
“Many people are surprised to learn that the pelican is a very ancient Christian symbol. It is a symbol of our Redeemer and of the atonement. In those days, people believed that the pelican would wound itself to feed its babies when it could not find food elsewhere.” 
“Thomas Aquinas even mentioned pelicans in his Adoro Te: ‘Pelican of mercy, cleanse me in thy precious blood.’”
“We now know that this myth that developed around the pelican is not factually true. Pelicans do not feed bits of themselves to their babies, but there are good reasons for people to even mistakenly have believed that they did. One reason for this belief is that sometimes pelicans can suffer from a disease that leaves a red mark on their chests. Also, it may look as if a pelican is stabbing at itself when it puts its beak to its chest to fully empty its pouch.”
“Our Pelican was born, lived, and died with all of us in mind, even us two thousand years later. He showed us how to live in love, and he showed us love in death. And like a mother pelican, he will stay with us even when the sky is dark and the wind is blowing, because that is his love for us.”
Thanks to Thom for this wonderful post.
“According to Bernadette, the apparition asked for a church to be built, and today a vast basilica rises above the shrine, visible testimony to the wealth and power of the institutional Church.”
“Yet the spiritual life of Lourdes is focused on the grotto and its surroundings beneath the basilica, and this topography acts as a metaphor for the relationship between the religious institution and the powerful undercurrent of faith that it can never fully control.” 
“The rocks around the grotto have been worn smooth by the touch of millions of hands, and there is a sense of something visceral, pagan even, about the way in which Catholic devotions and prayers melt and mingle with the…mystery of a God both veiled and revealed in earth, wind and fire, in rocky wildernesses and the untameable persistence of nature in the face of all our civilizing and controlling impulses.”
“Surely, an incarnational faith is one which situates itself in such a space of encounter between the sublime and the ridiculous - between the inscrutable majesty of God, and the often foolish muddle of our human emotions.” 
From “An Immense Maternal Presence,” an article by Tina Beattie in the September 13, 2008 edition of The Tablet.
Today is the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi. It is a day when old and young bring their pets to church to be blessed. 
My old parish in Brooklyn got the usual (dogs, cats, hamsters, parakeets) and also the unusual. Someone once brought a wounded toad they found on their street. Someone else brought their boa constrictor. A boy came with his pet tarantula. A toddler brought his teddy bear. The best was a praying mantis–very appropriate for a Catholic event.
“St. Francis was a lover of nature and animals,” said Fr. Moses Campo, a priest at the Immaculate Conception Church in Queens, New York. “The blessing of the animals has been a practice of the Catholic Church for hundreds of years.”
This rite can sometimes provided unintended comedy. “When I went to bless the horse with holy water, he jumped up and got scared,” said NYPD chaplain Msgr. David Cassato. “He thought I was going to hit him. Some of the police dogs start barking at the other dogs. It’s always funny.”
The Blessing of Pets usually goes like this: “Blessed are you, Lord God, maker of all living creatures. You called forth the fish in the sea, birds in the air and animals on land. You inspired St. Francis to call all of them his brothers and sisters. We ask you to bless this pet. By the power of your love, enable it to live according to your plan. May we always praise you for all your beauty in creation. Blessed are you, Lord our God, in all your creatures! Amen.”
Pope Benedict XVI may go down in history as the greatest papal advocate for the environment, but Pope John Paul II started things off. He made statements in support of creation, but his major contribution is his example–he loved nature, and found God there.
My favorite image of Pope John Paul II is a snapshot during a camping trip. A vigorous and robust man, he liked camping, hiking and relaxing outdoors. 
His nature experiences found their way into his poems. The Poetry of John Paul II: Roman Triptych: Medications begins with “The Stream.”
I. The Stream
Ruah
The Spirit of God hovered about the waters
1. Wonderment
The undulating wood slopes down to the rhythm of mountain streams.
To me this rhythm is revealing You, the Primordial Word.
How remarkable is Your silence
in everything, in all that on every side unveils the created world around us..all that, like the undulating wood, runs down every slope…all that is carried away by the stream’s silvery cascade, rhythmically falling from the mountain, carried by its own current–carried where?
What are you saying to me, mountain stream? Where, in which place do we meet? Do you meet me who is also passing–just like you.
Read the poem here.
One spiritual task I perform every weekend is to walk up and down my block and pick up litter. 
Discarded cigarette packs, Arizona Ice Tea and beer bottles, Vitamin Water empties, junk food wrappers, styrofoam clam containers, candy wrappers, nickel and dime bags, ripped out school notes and assignments, half-eaten apples, broken Bic lighters, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, gum wrappers - I collect it all.
Most of the trash is from high school kids–boys and girls–black, Hispanic, and white, that are too lazy to put it in the trash can by their school. They just drop it when they finish it. Most of the crumbled up cigarette packs are from one Newport smoker.
I pick up trash to keep my block clean. The dirtier it is, the more people feel free to throw stuff on the ground. When the ground is litter-free, at least some people think twice before dropping an empty cup.
A few months after I started picking up, I noticed that some other people were taking care of the street, too. My next-door neighbor has started picking up trash, and so has a woman down at the end of our street.
Picking up litter is a small but tangible way to respect the land and neighborhood, and keep it a beautiful place.
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.
The 37th prayer listed “for special occasions” in the Catholic Sacramentary, the official Catholic worship book, is the prayer “to avert storms.” The text reads:
Father, all the elements of nature obey your command. Calm the storm that threatens us and turn our fear of your power into praise of your goodness.
When floodwaters converged on Iowa City in early June, Fr. Jeff Belger, director of the Catholic Student Center, said he started to say the prayer at daily Masses. “It was the first time in five years as a priest that I’ve had to use that prayer.”
I’m sure some people are saying it now, as Tropical Storm Fay approaches the Florida Keys. I am glad to know it, and will have it at hand, in my home out on the East End of Long Island once hurricane season gets underway.
Weather-related prayers - for rain in time of drought or protection from violent storms - are based on a concept of God as the one who controls nature. In many cultures, including our own, people expect priests and religious leaders to petition God for favorable weather, a good harvest, a safe voyage through the storm.
Some might say these prayers in times of terror and stress originate from the child within us. But a very famous scene in the Gospels - Christ rebuking the wind and calming the sea (Mark 4:37-41) - reinforces the belief God will intervene to save us, our loved ones and neighbors, our pets and property as the storm descends in fury.
If not, then to give us the strength to face what we must, and adapt with courage to the circumstances we are given, and trust that, whatever happens, we are always in God’s hands. 
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.
Benedict XVI will be praying this month that all may be more aware of the gift of creation.
The Apostleship of Prayer announced the August intention chosen by the Pope: “That the human family may know how to respect God’s design for the world and thus become ever more aware of the great gift of God which Creation represents for us.” 
Nicknamed “the Pope’s own prayer group,” since the 19th century popes have asked the Apostleship of Prayer to pray for specific intentions each month. Members pledge to pray for them every day.
I had never heard of the Apostleship of Prayer before finding them on Google yesterday. After reading their mission statement, and reading the August reflection for the environement, I joined. I was pleased to see the Prayer for the Month is St. Francis’ Canticle of the Sun, the prayer of this blog.
Their mission is straightforward: “Whatever your walk of life, the Apostleship of Prayer offers you a simple, profound way to live it. We ask you to pray every day for the good of the whole world. That’s our whole mission. We believe prayer is the way to hasten the Kingdom of God on earth. Even if we don’t understand how it works, prayer itself changes things for the better. We also know that those who pray open themselves to loving service of others.”
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