Mary Lou Randour - Animal Grace: Entering a Spiritual Relationship with Our Fellow Creatures

With rare passion and insight, Mary Lou Randour invites us into the company of other animals, where essential and neglected parts of us can come alive. She shows us how not to be afraid of the suffering we encounter there, and how shared pain can open us to live more responsibly and more joyously.

People of every faith will be inspired to new appreciation for animals and challenged to greater humanity by the learning, eloquence, and personal passion contained in Mary Lou Randours Animal Grace.

Surrounded by the ills of the world, our hearts long for connection. We hunger for something that can sustain and affirm our compassion. Mary Lou Randours Animal Grace is thoughtful, heartful, and soulful. In it she reminds us that our fundamental reality is one of relatedness and points the way to a spiritual relationship to all our fellow creatures.

[P]sychologist and activist Randours book moves beyond theological and moral assertions of the worth of animals to show how animals can help us heal from illnesses, learn to love, and deal with death itself. Randours method is more narrative and anecdotal than advisory, but her ardor should be persuasive to many readers.

In language both clear and passionate, [Randour] suggests that by opening ourselves up to both the suffering and joy of our fellow creatures we can enrich our own lives.Within the chapters that compose Animal Grace, and using personal experience, stories, and scholarly research, she is by turns factual, philosophical and practical. And always, always very lucid and honest in her writing. It is her gift to us.

NEW WORLD LIBRARY
NOVATO, CALIFORNIA

Copyright 2000 by Mary Lou Randour
Cover and text design: Mary Ann Casler

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, or transmitted in any form, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Randour, Mary Lou.

Animal grace : entering a spiritual relationship with our fellow creatures / Mary Lou Randour ; foreword by Susan Chernak McElroy.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographic references and index.

ISBN 1-57731-141-8 (perfect : alk. paper)

1. Animals Religious aspects. 2. Human-animal relationships Religious aspects. I. Title.

BL439.R36 1999
291.212dc21

First printing, February 2000
First paperback printing, May 2002
ISBN 1-57731-141-8
Printed in Canada on acid-free, partially recycled paper
Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West

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T his fall morning in Wyoming is cold. Low clouds touch the tips of the quaking aspens and a heavy, glass-like dew bends the yellowed grasses in our pastures. I pull on a thick sweatshirt and a canvas hat, call the dogs, and head out for the chicken shed. When I pull open the henhouse door, a dozen hearty banty hens spill out, pecking eagerly at the earwigs holed up in the rickety doorframe. The colors of the small hens are brilliant: gold and black, white with coffee-brown speckles, mottled grays and silvers, and my personal favorite a tiny Rhode Island Red the color of polished mahogany. In the moments I take to watch their morning rituals of stretching, preening, and dust bathing, I feel my breathing deepen. The hens focus, and their utter attention to this moment, becomes mine as well.

Up at the barn, the donkeys are honking. The sound is like a truck engine that wont quite crank over. Polani, my tiny gray donkey, always ends her braying with a plaintive, choking sob. Her sister Aurora brays like wind moaning through sailboat rigging. When the dogs and I get to the barn, the sobbing and moaning is in full chorus. Good God, youd think I only fed them once a year.

The pastures are still productive, but everyone wants hay. Im happy to oblige. I love the sound of animals eating hay. It is a sound that says, at least within the confines of this small barn, that all is right with the world. By the time the hay is in the mangers, my old mare has shuffled into the corral. I pull down a bucket full of grooming tools and go to work on her, focusing completely on the richness of her brown coat, the smoothness of her muscles, the feel of her coarse, black tail and mane. She is eighteen years old and creaky with arthritis. One bum knee has taken some of the grace out of her stride, yet I can easily imagine her as the racetrack princess she once was. Back then, an up-and-coming superstar, she was pampered and treated like royalty. Now, her pampering is in my hands and fussing over her is my joy. Not because she runs like the wind. She doesnt. But she once ran like the wind and has now put all that behind her to live her elder years her years of most inspiring dignity with me. To spend time with an old animal is to know wisdom firsthand. I treasure my mornings with this mare, delighting in the comfort and security I can bring to her last, full years.

Yesterday when I entered the barn, it was filled with magpies. I love these birds that remind me so much of flying orcas, with their splendid black-and-white plumage. One young bird was perched on Polanis behind. Two more cackled in the loft. Three sat atop a huge nest of twigs and small branches woven into the barn rafters, where all six had hatched last spring. I remember locking the barn cat in our house as those babies grew, determined that Sammi would not get his claws into them. When the young birds left their nest one by one and plopped onto the barn floor, I gently carried them to a small stand of aspens where they would be safe from the foxes and weasels that hunt around our corrals. Twice, their ferocious magpie mother bloodied my head as I carried her babies to safety. Now, the whole family had returned home, bolder than I ever imagined them to be. Not one budged as I passed beneath them and grabbed three flakes of hay, stuffed the mangers, and then began flinging manure into the garden cart. Instead, they watched me intently, muttering what sounded like almost-human whispers. To see them in all their robust, juvenile glory was an unexpected blessing. I chose to imagine they had come back to say hello and to let me know that all of them were doing just fine, thank you.