Dear Saints in Santa Fe and other far-off places,

Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ.

A blessing of the animals.

Renowned Celtic teacher and writer John Philip Newell, who helped us in the formation of our Wednesday Celtic Evensong service, often tells the story of a woman he met during an Iona pilgrimage week.  She was around seventy years of age and over dinner she told John Philip about what happened to her some fifty-five years earlier when she was in church with her family.  A dog wandered into the sanctuary and moseyed up the center aisle and as it got closer to the front of the church it sniffed the air around the altar, then turned around and walked out.

“It didn’t like what it smelled,” she said.  “It didn’t smell right.  It didn’t smell natural.”  This woman, a young girl at the time, got up and followed the dog out of the church, never to return.

Worship didn’t smell right.  It didn’t smell natural.  This story was not told with pride, John Philip said, but with a deep sense of sadness.  For all those years this woman did not have a community with whom to pray, to share her life with, to laugh and shed tears, to be supported and to support others, to sing hymns and be lost in the beauty of music, to celebrate moments of joy and mourn those times of grief and loss.

She is just one of many, seemingly more each day, who live without a community of faith, of support and transformation, who like the dog have walked out of sanctuaries and away from worship.

So, this Sunday we are bringing back the dogs, and any other animals you may have, to be blessed.  We hope they will be well-behaved, and they need not have written a faith statement or even thought it important to have one, or been in worship before, or indicated that they liked it, or showed any inclination to the spiritual life (though I strongly believe it is rich and deep).  Just for the record, our two dogs, Pippin and Skip sit patiently and expectantly through a prayer before they gobble down their breakfast and dinner.

Bring them to our Acts II Adult Ed class in-between services where Linda Raney and I will be talking about all things worship.  Come with your questions and ideas, and perhaps even a willingness to help us plan our worship experiences going forward.

Back to John Philip and the woman’s story.  At a presentation John Philip was giving at a Scottish Cathedral he told the participants to walk around the grounds to get a sense of the sacredness of the earth.  What he had failed to notice before that directive was that all around the cathedral were signs that read “No Dogs Allowed.”

We should have signs that read “Dogs are welcome!”  They just might help us understand what smells right, what is natural and authentic about what we do, what is meaningful and awesome, and that by blessing them we know how much more they bless us.

Grace and peace,

Harry