How your pet can help you tap into a sense of spirituality

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Your love for an animal can help you connect to something bigger than both of you.

It’s completely involuntary. As if my heart’s defenses are swept aside by a giant wave of compassion and I’m left unnerved by the intensity of love that I feel: raw and a little foreign.

I wonder about this because I’m not a big animal guy. There’s no desire in me to own a pet; I’m allergic to cats and I will actively do what I can to avoid meeting your dog. (Sorry! It’s the nonconsensual licking! The crotch jumping! No thank you.) And yet, there I’ll be: leaning over a fence, arm outstretched to let the donkey nuzzle my open hand, feeling a sudden and desperate sadness.

It’s happened so often that I wonder if these encounters point to something precious. The tears suggest that there’s a mismatch between the way I’ve been taught to understand animals as separate from myself and the connection that actually exists between us. Our paradigm of anthropocentrism distinguishes us from the natural world and puts us on a pedestal of worthiness, forcing us to look at the whole of nature as somehow less real than we are. Each animal and plant, the land and the water, the very air we breathe — all are resources for us to use rather than beings to be in relationship with.

Even if those sad Eeyore-like eyes don’t make you emotional, you have probably experienced some version of it. For many pet owners (and notice how that language of ownership emphasizes the idea of separation!), it may be a creeping uncertainty about the validity of the love that they feel for their pet. You might ask yourself, “Am I crazy to love an animal this much? Is this feeling of mutual friendship and understanding actually real?”

This week, dear friends of mine had to put down their dog. Like most dog owners, they understood their pup to be a part of their family. And so the intensity of their grief — and the heavy burden of having to decide whether the time had come to say goodbye — opened up not just emotional questions, but spiritual ones, too. Is it wrong to euthanize a family member you love? What happens to a dog when it dies? Does your dog have a soul?

Your deep connection to your animal companion might also make you question your relationship to and understanding of other animals: How is it that my beloved has a soul, but a pig or a cow or a bird does not? To kill one animal but to love another demands significant mental gymnastics. The modernist, mechanistic view of the world where humans are separate and death is the end doesn’t hold true to my experience. And so perhaps it is wise to look at spiritual traditions that affirm the ways the animate and inanimate are connected.

The idea that animals are not equal to humans is rooted in a dominant refrain in Christian theology — which David Clough, chair in theology and applied sciences at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, says has done great disservice to animals. Significant church figures like Thomas Aquinas and the philosopher René Descartes have argued that animals don’t have an immortal soul. Other doctrines like predestination (where some people are chosen for salvation and others are damned) have further broken the world into separate spheres. This stratification of significance, where humans sit above e

But this particular Christian worldview isn’t the only way to think about a spirituality of animals.

Indeed, says Clough, in the first centuries of Christian life, theologians like Irenaeus and Origen imagined a very different ordering of the world. Rather than envisioning a judgment that separates us, these early thinkers believed God would regather the whole of creation in what Clough calls “a comprehensive redemption.” Here, because God created the world, all of life will one day be regathered together, including the pets we love and the places we live. At the end of time, the thinking went, all of life will be embodied once again, but free from pain and suffering.