Love What You Cannot Save

A Reflection on St. Francis, creatureliness, and the holy work of loving a world we cannot control

Over the last ten years, St. Francis Day has become a central part of our common life at Christ Church. That was not necessarily inevitable. My first year here, I remember announcing to the Altar Guild and the wardens that we were going to celebrate St. Francis Day outside, on Sunday morning, with the Blessing of the Animals incorporated into our principal liturgy. I was met with more than a few raised eyebrows and sideways glances.

That reaction was understandable. In many Episcopal parishes, the Blessing of the Animals is an optional afternoon or evening service, a lovely secondary liturgy alongside the principal worship of the parish, especially for pet owners, children, and those with a particular affection for animals. At Christ Church, though, we have intentionally done something different. We bless our animals, and more recently we have invited our children to bring their beloved stuffies to be blessed as well. We include those blessings within the Prayers of the People, not because blessing pets or stuffed animals is the whole point of the liturgy, but because they are outward and visible signs pointing us toward something much larger.

We understand symbols like this instinctively in other parts of the Christian year. The lights shining from a Christmas tree are not the meaning of Christmas, but they can point us toward the Light that has come into the world. Water is ordinary, but in Baptism it speaks to us of cleansing, death, resurrection, and new life. Bread and wine are familiar things placed into our hands through which we encounter a mystery far greater than themselves.

So too, on St. Francis Day, the creatures we love and even the worn-out stuffies clutched in the arms of our children can point beyond themselves. They remind us of companionship, comfort, joy, belonging, dependence, fragility, and love. In other words, they can help remind us of what it means to be creatures ourselves.

I think we do St. Francis—and ourselves—a disservice if we reduce his life and legacy to a sentimental celebration of pets. Yes, Francis loved creation. Yes, the stories surrounding his life reveal an extraordinary affinity with animals and the natural world. But Franciscan spirituality has something much more difficult, and much more necessary, to teach us: we are creatures, too.

We do not stand outside creation looking in. We are not its masters, and we are certainly not its saviors. We inhabit this world alongside everything else God has made: dependent, vulnerable, limited, mortal, and beloved. That is why I think St. Francis Day deserves a place in the rhythm of our common life year after year. The Church returns annually to Bethlehem because we need again to contemplate the mystery of God becoming flesh. We return to the cross because we need again to confront suffering, sacrifice, sin, and redemption. We celebrate the saints because we need again to see what holiness can look like in a human life. Francis gives us an opportunity to consider the world in which all of this happens—the earth beneath our feet, the creatures alongside us, the communities we inhabit, and the limits of our own creaturely lives.

Anyone who has loved a pet already knows something about those limits. One of the great gifts of a dog or a cat is the remarkable abundance of affection they can give us. They greet us as though our return home is the most important event of the day. They sit beside us when we are lonely. They become woven into the rhythms of our households and, before we quite realize it, into the story of our families. Their companionship is real, their comfort is real, and the grief when they are gone is real too. Most of us who love animals will eventually discover the painful truth that we will outlive many of the creatures we love.

But their mortality does not make loving them foolish.

Their companionship is not less valuable because it is temporary. If anything, knowing that our time together is limited teaches us something about the nature of love itself. We love not because we can make something permanent, but because it is worthy of love now.

Perhaps the same is true of the stuffy dragged into church by a child. Adults may see fabric, stuffing, frayed ears, and a tag worn nearly smooth, but the child knows something else. This is the companion that has survived thunderstorms and bad dreams, long car rides and unfamiliar hotel rooms. It smells like home. Its familiarity says, in its own small way, you belong; you are safe; you are not alone. Of course the stuffed animal is not God, nor is the comfort it provides infinite. But the longing it answers points toward something profoundly human: our desire to be held, known, comforted, found, and loved.

All of these things are limited. So are we.

That may be one of the hardest lessons of the spiritual life. We cannot prevent every illness, repair every broken relationship, protect the people we love from every sorrow, undo every mistake, satisfy every need we encounter, or heal every wound in the world. We cannot pour forever from an empty vessel, and most of us cannot imitate Francis by surrendering every possession and wandering barefoot into the countryside. We continue to strive, seek, hope, pray, serve, give, and love, and still we eventually encounter the boundaries of what we can do.

Christian faith does not ask us to pretend otherwise. In fact, our creatureliness may be part of the point. We were never meant to be God. We were meant to be human, and perhaps one of the great spiritual disciplines of becoming fully human is learning to love what we cannot save.

That is not indifference or resignation. It does not mean looking at suffering, injustice, loneliness, sickness, or a wounded creation and shrugging our shoulders because we cannot solve it all. Quite the opposite. Once we surrender the illusion that we must save everything, we become free to discover what has actually been entrusted to us.

Our impact may be local, but it is tangible. It is journeying alongside someone in friendship long enough to know where they actually hurt, so that when darkness comes we can speak hope specifically into their life—not with platitudes or motivational posters, but with the Good News discovered through a life lived together. It is caring for the little corner of creation entrusted to us even though we cannot heal the whole earth. It is feeding someone who is hungry even though hunger will still exist tomorrow, visiting someone who is sick even when we cannot make them well, forgiving when we cannot undo what happened, and planting something beneath whose shade we may never sit.

It also means risking enough vulnerability to let other people discover that we are still figuring this out too. We have limitations and weaknesses. We grow tired and frightened. We make mistakes. We wander off. We lose our way. Sometimes, if you will forgive the rather earthy Franciscan image, we are not unlike the beloved dog who occasionally poops on the carpet. Sometimes we are more like the favorite stuffy that has somehow fallen behind the dresser: misplaced, dusty, and seemingly forgotten.

And yet the Gospel insists that being lost is never the end of the story.

The shepherd searches for the sheep. The woman searches for the coin. The father watches the road for the child who has wandered away. Again and again Jesus describes salvation in the language of finding, returning, embracing, and rejoicing. There is joy in heaven when what was lost is found.

That is the hope underneath all our creaturely limitations. We fail, and God continues to redeem. We wander, and God continues to seek. We exhaust ourselves, and God restores us. We discover the boundaries of our own capacity to love, and God surrounds us again with a grace larger than anything we could manufacture for ourselves.

Perhaps Francis understood this so profoundly because he knew that he belonged to creation rather than standing above it. The sun and moon, wind and water, earth and fire were not possessions to Francis; they were brothers and sisters. Near the end of his life, sick and nearly blind, he could even speak of “Sister Death”—not because suffering and death had somehow become good, but because even mortality could not place him beyond the providence and love of God.

Francis could love a world he could not save because he knew that it already belonged to God.

And so do we.

That does not release us from responsibility. It is what makes faithful stewardship possible. We tend what has been entrusted to us precisely because we know it is God’s and not ours. We care for the garden and the creature, accompany the suffering, repair what we can, confess when we fail, receive forgiveness, plant what we can plant, and love what God has placed before us. Then, at the boundaries of our own power, we entrust to God what only God can redeem.

Maybe that is why we need St. Francis Day every year at Christ Church. The animals are wonderful. The stuffies are wonderful. The barking during the prayers, the restless creatures tugging at their leashes, the children proudly carrying a beloved stuffed friend whose fur has been loved nearly away—all of it is part of the joy.

But underneath the delightful chaos is something much deeper. For one Sunday, creation itself interrupts our carefully ordered worship and reminds us who we are: creatures among creatures, beloved and limited, fragile and hopeful, dependent upon grace and entrusted with one another for a little while.

And perhaps we can learn something from the creatures and companions we bless. We can offer comfort when someone is afraid. We can make another person feel that they belong. We can greet one another with joy. We can remain near when someone is lonely. We can become faithful companions along the road, offering in our own limited and imperfect way an outward and visible sign of the limitless love of God.

We cannot save everything we love, and we were never asked to.

We were asked to love it.

Pax et bonum! (a Franciscan blessing)

Fr. Ben