There’s probably no need to preach to this choir about the power, the healing, and the grace bestowed by love – we in this virtual room have enough love pouring forth to welcome even other species into our households, sharing our food, our time and even – some of us- our beds- with cats and dogs, birds, mice, lizards, turtles, rats, and so on. We do our level best to keep them from harm, to feed them nutritiously, amuse them, provide medical care and even occasionally clothe them. We love our animals.
We do our very best to love, often going that extra mile for a new toy or the expensive dental cleaning. But in this, the month dedicated to the muddy and transcendent work of love, the Islamic mystic and poet Hafiz challenges us – yes, even us- to “Make a new water-mark on your excitement/ And love.” (from The Subject Tonight is Love - versions of Hafiz by Daniel Landinsky)
In the setting of campfires and mending, a flowers scent and a hillside, he tells us to abandon our sense of Self to the point of flooding ourselves with passionate involvement with life and to let love fill us so that it pours over the banks of our ego. This flood of selflessness carries our egos along with it- it spills out into the world raising high new marks on the walls of our existence.
This is a frightening invitation, but it’s one I believe that our engagement with our fellow animals opens us to. If we can open our hearts to another being, we can welcome, forgive, be merciful and love all beings.
I want to share with you two stories about love that I think illustrate the radical nature of what Hafiz says so beautifully:
The first is a story that we are all probably familiar with: the recent terrible slaughter of 49 exotic animals released by their owner Terry Thompson who, in a fit of revenge that spilled into madness, let them out of their cages - . “Among the animals killed were 18 Bengal tigers, 17 lions, six black bears, one baboon, two grizzly bears, three mountain lions and two wolves.” Six that were unharmed were taken to zoos.
What we may not have considered is how Thompson and his wife started down this path: they began with what at the time looked and felt like love – a love of wild animals. Perhaps they began with one – interested and committed to caring for it as best they could. They had the space, so they acquired more of them, convinced that they were doing a good job and the animals were better off with them than in the unpredictable and dangerous environments they came from.
And then what may have started off as genuine caring grew into something we now know is a form of hoarding – collecting for the sake of having, stoking an ego that loved the idea of love, not the actual ego-less love that is life giving. The couple’s marriage fell apart; they did not keep up with the feeding and care of the animals. Even one leopard which was saved had to be euthanized the other day because it couldn’t survive an accident with the cage door – an accident it might have lived through is it hadn’t been weakened in bone and body by years of malnourishment.
So what does the love that overflows the narrow banks of ego, raising our engagement with the world to new heights, look and feel like?
Let’s look at the life of Louis J. Camuti (August 30, 1893 – February 24, 1981). According to Wikipedia, he “was a New York City cat veterinarian who made house calls for over sixty years. He was the first veterinarian in the United States to devote his entire practice to cats. His autobiography, ‘All My Patients Are Under the Bed: Memoirs of a Cat Doctor.’
He once told an interviewer that when he was 11 and ill with typhoid, a fire had broken out in his home and his cat hopped on his chest and breathed in his face. Too weak to leave the bed, he interpreted the cat’s behavior as follows: ‘As if to clear away the smoke and protect me from the fire,’ he said, ‘the cat stayed on my chest until my mother rushed into my room.’ "
Here is a life in which passion and love overflowed – he dedicated his life – and we’re talking weekends and nights of leaving the dinner table, leaving the kids’ stories unread, etc. -to the animals he cared so deeply about that his own comfort was secondary. Don’t get me wrong- we’re not talking about martyrdom here, and neither was Hafiz. No, the opposite; we’re talking about a heart so opened by love that commitment and joy became one. How do we know? Because he practiced well into his 80s. He set a high watermark for us all.
May we too be flooded with the All Powerful Mystery which is Love.
