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To Love Impermanent Things

Shelley Denison

Sermon for the Feast Day of St. Francis of Assisi

Scripture: Job 39:1-18



In the year 889 AD, a 17-year-old Japanese emperor named Uda received a cat as a gift. Historians are pretty sure that cats arrived in Japan from Egypt via the Silk Road, and Uda’s cat was likely one of the first in the country. Uda wrote this in his personal diary:


Taking a moment of my free time, I wish to express my joy of the cat. It arrived by boat as a gift to the Emperor. The color of the fur is peerless. None could find the words to describe it, although one said it was reminiscent of the deepest ink. Its length is 5 sun, and its height is 6 sun. I affixed a bow about its neck, but it did not remain for long.


In rebellion, it narrows its eyes and extends its needles. It shows its back. When it lies down, it curls in a circle like a coin. You cannot see its feet. When it stands, its cry expresses profound loneliness, like a black dragon floating above the clouds.


By nature, it likes to stalk birds. It lowers its head and works its tail. It can extend its spine to raise its height by at least 2 sun. Its color allows it to disappear at night. I am convinced it is superior to all other cats.


I, for one, am delighted to know that for at least the last 1,100 years, cats have always been cats and cat people have always been cat people.


I have been excited for months to give today’s sermon. I love how the stories of St. Francis that have been passed down through Christendom show us how God reveals themself to us through our loving and caring for animals. I had so many ideas swirling around in my head for what I wanted to talk about.


And, because I am unapologetically a cat person, I was going to talk about cats.


But, the truth is, I almost didn’t give this sermon. 16 days ago, I noticed my 13 year old cat, Hypatia, having issues with her coordination and her ability to hold her head up. She had been living with kidney disease for a few years which we were managing with a prescription diet. However, on this Friday a little over two weeks ago, she was showing signs of sudden kidney failure. We immediately drove her to the emergency vet where they assessed her, ran blood tests, and told us that at that point, the only compassionate decision was euthanasia.


We were Hypatia’s humans for almost 12 years. If you’ve ever had the experience of having an animal as a soulmate, then you will know what I mean when I say that Hypatia was my soulcat.


I still often find myself thinking I see her out of the corner of my eye. I still find myself expecting her to greet me at the door whenever I come home. And each time I remember that she’s gone, our apartment feels all the more empty.


For all of the things we are blessed to learn from animals, I think the reality of impermanence is the hardest. To Buddhists, impermanence is one of the three core characteristics of existence. Everything is constantly in a process of formation and dissolution. And it is a fundamental fact that every material thing in this world will, one day, no longer be here.


One of my favorite poems by the Episcopal Church’s unofficial poet laureate, Mary Oliver, talks about the paradox of love in a world of impermanence. It’s called In Blackwater Woods:


Look, the trees

are turning

their own bodies

into pillars


of light,

are giving off the rich

fragrance of cinnamon

and fulfillment,


the long tapers

of cattails

are bursting and floating away over

the blue shoulders


of the ponds,

and every pond,

no matter what its

name is, is


nameless now.

Every year

everything

I have ever learned


in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side


is salvation,

whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world


you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it


against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.


Hypatia loved sunlight. If there was a patch of sun shining through the window, she would be laying in it. We would joke that she was solar charging. As far as I could tell (and as far as we know about feline cognitive capacity), it never bothered her that her patch of sunlight would only last a few minutes. She knew how to enjoy it while it was there. And when it was gone, she didn’t mind.


Our reading today in Job was, as is often the case with the constraints of the lectionary, a little out of context. We’re all familiar with the story of Job. He suffers. A lot. He loses everything, and his friends tell him to give up on the whole faith thing. Even his wife tells him to curse God and die. Chapter 39 is part of a speech given by God to Job. This speech is part of a longer back and forth between the two in which Job asks over and over again why suffering exists, and in which Job is, over and over again, unsatisfied with God’s answer.


And instead of giving a direct answer to Job’s question in this chapter, God’s approach here is to spend 24 lines talking about animals. The larger context here that many scholars of the Bible have landed on is that God is leading Job to acknowledge the wonder and awe that exists in the world around him as a response to the question of suffering.


There’s this concept called spiritual bypassing, which is when we use spiritual or theological or metaphysical explanations for suffering as a way to dismiss or minimize the emotional and psychological experience of suffering.


But I think both things can be true: we can take the spiritual lessons and honor the sadness at the same time. We can acknowledge that things change, that people and animals leave, that we can never go back. And we can grieve.


But what a gift it is to know that the grief is only as deep as the love. What a gift it is to live in an impermanent world and to love impermanent things.


To live in this world


you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it


against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.


Amen.

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