Prefer the animals in the story

In 2001, the Canadian author Yann Martel published a book that would become a New York Times bestseller. The book was titled, The Life of Pi. It follows the grand adventure of a teenage boy from the city of Pondicherry on the southeast coast of India. After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, 16-year old Pi finds himself stranded on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific ocean. There are four survivors from the wreck aboard the lifeboat with him: a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orangutan—and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger.

Now, here’s the part where I spoil the ending, so plug your ears if you need to. When Pi is rescued from the shipwreck and recovering in a hospital in Mexico, two officials from the Ministry of Transport come to interview him. Pi tells them the story of the animals aboard the lifeboat, but the officials don’t believe a word of it! So, Pi offers an alternate version, in which he is adrift not with zoo animals, but with a sailor with a broken leg; the ship’s cook; and Pi’s own mother. 

After hearing both versions, the Transport officials conclude that the animals symbolize the people aboard the lifeboat—the hyena is the cook; the zebra, the sailor; the orangutan, Pi’s mother; and the tiger, Pi.

Pi then “asks the officials which story they prefer: the one without animals or the one with animals. They choose the story with the animals.”

“Pi thanks them and says: ‘And so it goes with God.’”

I wonder, when it comes to the stories in the Bible—the ones with the animals and the ones without—which stories you prefer? 

The St Clement’s Wednesday morning Bible story has taken on an unique challenge this summer. We are reading stories from the Bible and instead of focusing on the human figures, we’re asking the question: “Who are the more-than-human characters in this story?”

We are, if you will, preferring the stories with the animals and taking note of the more-than-human habitat they find themselves in, as well.

So far, we’ve been learning about the bitumen and reeds used to put together the basket that Moses was placed in by the river Nile, and the sheep that brought shepherds to that same river when the shepherds came to draw water for their flocks. We learned about the 350 thousand species of beetles (among other insects) spoken about in Genesis 1 when God creates “everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind.”

We considered David’s Psalm of Thanksgiving in 1 Chronicles 16, and what it might sound like for all the creatures of the sea to “roar” with thanksgiving to God. We imagined that roar as the hundreds of sea lions sprawled out on Second Beach in Powell River every year while on vacation from their Southern breeding grounds in California and Mexico.We considered the sound . . . and the smell!

We’ve talked about crows in Luke 12, herons in Jeremiah 8, bats in Deuteronomy 14, and toads (well, frogs) in Exodus 8. Next week, we get to talk about moths in Matthew 6!

The exercise of preferring the story with the animals, or rather, preferring the animals in the story, has brought rich, spiritual insight. Take, for example, this excerpt from priest and amateur naturalist Laurel Dykstra’s book, Wildlife Congregations. After a brief, somewhat underwhelming search for the Burilla bats on Deas Island just off the southern arm of the Fraser River, Laurel writes this:

My friend Rose Berger . . . once interviewed a lifelong practitioner and spiritual elder on the subject of prayer. After fifty years of prayer, he characterized God as ‘mostly silent.’ Reading these words, I felt a deep sense of recognition: much of what I experience as prayer is proximity to profound silence. The early Christians called this sense of divine absence the via negativa. Sometimes the best answer we get to human suffering and anguished questions is a mute scribble of bat wings against the sky.

So, today, I want to send you away for the week with a bit of homework. Consider it your summer school for the year. Take the readings from the bulletin home with you and read each passage from the Bible in the context of the whole chapter that it comes from. And, instead of asking, “Who are the main players, who are the main humans in this story?”, ask yourself, “Who are the more-than-human characters?” What animals are taking part in this story? If the trees or plants or other parts of God’s creation were given speaking roles, what would they say?

If, for example, you were to consider the story of King David in 2 Samuel 7, you might reflect on it neither from the perspective of the king, nor the prophet Nathan, but from the perspective of the cedar trees used to build David’s house, or from the perspective of the sheep David left behind to become “prince over God’s people.”

Or, if you were to read Psalm 89, you might consider: what would it be like to witness something (an act of courage? an act of kindness? an act of violence) as often as the moon and the sun witness the closing and the beginning of each day?

Or, the foundation stones, the cornerstones in Ephesians 2. What foundation stones have you laid? Which ones have you seen crumble? A reading of Ephesians 2 from the perspective of the cornerstone might prompt you to reflect, for example, on the fall of the Berlin wall, or the stones with foreheads pressed against them at this very hour at the Western Wall (sometimes called the wailing wall) in the Old City of Jerusalem.

Finally, if we were to consider the “deserted place” that Jesus calls his disciples to in today’s reading from the gospel of Mark, when he calls them to come away and rest for a while, if we were to consider this deserted place not from the human characters’ perspective, but from the perspective of the habitat of this deserted place, what would we learn? Would we learn, for example, that contrary to popular belief, this deserted place is not in fact a parched wasteland with tumbleweeds blowing through it, but land that in Jesus’s time was unoccupied by the Roman Empire, land that hadn’t yet been colonized? The deserted place that Jesus called his disciples to was rich in wildlife and vegetation. It was land where they could go and find rest-oration—physical, emotional, spiritual. 

It's been my experience when listening to Indigenous folk living in cities talk about going away for a while to rest that they're often speaking of land where the habitat, the natural environment still bears some markers of their ancestors, land that in some shape or form has remained uninhabited by settlers.

I wonder, if Jesus were to call you away to a “deserted place,” what wildlife and vegetation might you find there?

May you go forth this day to prefer the animals in the story and see what wonderful things come of it.

Amen.

Works referenced: 

Blue Letter Bible, “Eremos.” Accessed online.

Laurel Dykstra, Wildlife Congregations (Hancock House: 2024).

“Life of Pi” in Wikipedia. Accessed online.