In rural Kansas, we are privileged to live with many animals nearby. Cattle, hogs, sheep, goats, chickens, alpacas. . . People care for these animals, sharing in the cycles that make up the pattern of all life. There is a sacredness in the ordinary.
Saint Francis of Assis (1181 or 1182 – 3 October 1226) is noted for his patronage of the animals. Through the example of St. Francis, churches began to bless the animals on or near his feast day of October 3. This tradition continues today in many churches around the world.
Here is a poem by Galway Kinnell (1927–2014) speaking of a sow, a mama pig, nursing her babies. The line about “reteaching a thing its loveliness” speaks to noticing and appreciating the miracle of farm animals.
Saint Francis and the Sow
The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on the brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing; as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch blessings of the earth on the sow, and the sow began remembering all down her thick length, from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken heart to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
--Galway Kinnell
“Saint Francis and the Sow,” from Mortal Acts, Mortal Words by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 1980, renewed 2008 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted by permission of Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
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