Rabbi,
I have watched you participating with birds and squirrels, and yesterday, I observed you spending 15 minutes helping a small black spider free herself who had become trapped between the screen and the glass. The animals come to you. Since all things belong and are one as you teach, and the human-kind is charged to care for and protect all She birthed, can you help me with our proper relationship to all the other kinds?

First, let me say that we need to re-image the word other. All kinds are one, and while being the human-kind does carry with it a certain natural responsibility that other kinds may not bear, it is not a license to consider ourselves separate from or superior to any other kind. Francis’s connection with all created kinds is the stuff of legends, literally. For him, each order of being was sister or brother since we share a parent. Remember “brother sun, sister moon?” Also, when Rabbi Jesus taught the followers to pray, he began with, “Our Father?” The parent we all share is the Great Spirit.

Anne Dillard, writing about her experience of the Gallapos in Teaching a Stone to Talk, wrote, “You sit down, and the animals come to you.” They have no natural fear of the human kind at all. They invite relationships as they should.

• • •

The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity—then we will treat each other with greater respect. Thus is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective.

—Unknown

Shamar

Passerby.
The Spirit’s mandate to humans to tend, keep, guard, and protect (Shamar) all the works of Her hands means ensuring that, enabled by human-kind, this magnificent creation—inclusive of all of its diverse residents—is permitted to fulfill their created purpose. Genesis 2:15. We are the partners of God with the responsibility to ensure that all She created is able to fulfill it’s created purpose without interference. When we human-kind come into the right relationship with all things, the Creator Spirit and the cosmos, including all the little ones, will know and generously respond to us, each according to their kind. The relationship is always two-way.

Fulfilling our created purpose, shared by all human-kind, to be Lovers of and for Her, and fulfilling the terms of our partnership with the Spirit, we must, by necessity, include our practice of, and participation in, the love and compassion that She has for all that She created.

I’m thinking of the judgment narrative in Matthew 25, in which ‘the Nations’ are being judged for the quality of their care for the “little ones.” “These little ones”, I am certain, include all the little feathered, scaly, finned, and furry brothers and sisters with whom we have an equal share in this splendid creation. And for that matter, every leafy, twiggy, slimy, sandy, dirty, rocky, and wet come under our purview of care and concern as Her partners in this grand story. The Spirit is the energy tickling the ribs of every atom of everything She has made. Not from without…from within.

Passerby, as you may know, that profession makes me a pan-en-theist.

Jesus says,

I tell you, whenever you did this for one of the least important of these followers of mine, you did it for me!

Paul wrote in Romans 8,

all creation is groaning, suffering as if in childbirth, from which all will be released when the beloved of the Spirit [that includes us] come into a right relationship [with Her and with one another] and so begin to exercise our vocation.

All creation is depending on us.

Have I told you my Bunny story? This one almost got me thrown out of seminary. Perhaps a story for another time.”