(Sermon presented at the First Unitarian Church of Providence, June 2005)

One of the cornerstones of Shamanism, both in ancient times and modern, is the art of shape shifting.  This is known to practitioners in cultures around the world, throughout thousands of years of magical practice and across many seemingly different religions.  Unlike fantasy horror films that show a man dramatically changing his body into a wolf under the full moon, his mouth painfully elongating into a muzzle, his fingers stretching out to include long claws, shape shifting is a technique used within Shamanic trance work. It is going deep into oneself to greet the wild ones within, and by doing so, tap into the traits and powers associated with those creatures or elements.  Whether a wolf or a hawk, a salmon, or a thunderstorm, the shaman utilizes the borrowed traits to safely travel the Otherworld in search of answers.  When done with skill and experience, the meditation is so complete and so strong as to feel as if one has indeed, for a brief time, changed into another being.

In the fairy tales of Merlin and young Arthur, the Druid wizard leads the boy king into Shamanic journeys to change into a variety of creatures, fish, bird and mammal, to give him different perspectives on life.  Would that all humans could experience such enlightenment, taking ourselves out of our own narrow skins and feeling the joys and sorrows of other beings. Thoreau said, “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”  This was written in the context of his support for abolitionism, but I would like to place his comment out of context for a brief time, and say, “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through another creature’s eyes?”

I spent years of my life in Virginia horse country, riding the wrong side of a fence in the debate over hunting.  My neighbors chased the foxes, and I healed them.  And this is why.

Imagine, if you could, being a young vixen with a litter tucked deep into a den on a damp spring hillside.  Your kits’ eyes are closed, their mewling sounding in your ears, their tiny paws kneading your body as they nurse.  Hunger growls within your belly, but your mate has not returned for days from his hunting.  Perhaps he has been the prey and not the predator.  You get your kits settled, and take a chance.  It is early morning, the fog just lifting from the hillside that is your home.  Outside, the low-pitched sounds of field mice scurrying through the brush reach your sensitive ears.  Your whiskers pick up movement in the tall grasses.  Your belly propels you forward.  You must eat in order to provide nourishment for your young.  Now imagine that suddenly you hear the baying of hounds, and the thundering of hooves.  Predators!  You cannot let them find your kits, so you must run, lead them away.  You run as fast as you can, away from the den, your heart pounding with adrenaline, your legs going numb with fatigue.  Why do they chase you?  Do they eat your kind?  You can’t comprehend the reasons you are cornered against a large oak, dogs advancing on you.  Your last thought as their teeth tear into you is your kits.  Will they survive?  Why did this happen?

We humans know we do it for blood sport.  However civilized we claim ourselves to be, our fellow men and women still hunt for no other reason than tradition, sport, the satisfaction of a contest whose prize is to be smeared with the blood of the kill, perhaps be the receiver of a gorgeous plumy red tail.  We do this with no thought to the terror that animal feels, or the pain.

Many of the orphaned litters were unknowingly left to die.  And some, discovered by riders hours or days later as they began to wander out of their dens if they were slightly older, more adventurous and more desperate kits, were brought to people like me to raise them to young adulthood.  Oftentimes by the same people who had contributed to the death of their parents.

I would receive the fox kits.  They were often wet and cold, always frightened.  I remember one in particular, who came in alone, no brothers or sisters to curl up against, no understanding of why he was there.  He looked at me with wariness when I approached the cardboard box into which he’d been placed, and growled slightly until I scruffed him gently and deposited him into my lap, where he promptly peed.  But we sat there together, he and I, my lap damp but warm, my hand stroking his head.  He relaxed his body, realizing I wasn’t going to hurt him.  His head still had the dark grey, boxy look of a fox kit; his eyes were still blue-green.  He was not the plumy red fox his neighbors wanted to hunt.  Just a lonely, rather pathetic little kit.

It was another two months before he was fully weaned from a baby bottle to a bowl, and another month beyond that before his body lost its baby fat and his legs grew long and delicately thin, his black socks startling against the now red of his fur.  He spent more and more time digging into the hay of a horse stall that a friend had let me use, venturing toward his food or water bowls only after I had stepped away, developing the wariness of humans that might later save his life.  I wanted desperately to burrow my nose into his fur or hug him or pepper his muzzle with the ridiculous kisses that I gave my friends’ dogs, but knew I could not.  I wanted to help him, but I could not become his friend.  When I am rehabilitating wild animals, I can only offer them a sort of tough love from a distance.  When the day came to relocate him to the woods that would become his home, I had to lure him into a carrier as he no longer fully trusted me.  In the woods of Loudon County, I opened the carrier and expected him to dart out.  I had set down and filled a large water bowl near the carrier, and sprinkled dog kibble, to give him something to come back to if he needed it.  To my surprise, he didn’t immediately run but stayed instead to sniff at the food, and then delicately lap at the bowl of water.  I took a chance and let my hand slowly snake out, just for a moment gently dipping my fingers into the thick softness of his fur.  I looked down at the bowl and saw his reflection and mine, merging together in a blur of identity, and then he darted away.  Several minutes later, he stopped and turned his head.  He gave me one long look through his catlike amber eyes, and then he was gone.

When Charles Darwin dared to voice his theory of evolution, educated people exploded into uproar.  Religious implications aside, to give credence to his theories would be to acknowledge a link between human beings and the animals we dominated, exploited, scorned, and hunted.

And when Henry David Thoreau dared to voice his theory that divinity was immanent in all beings, the same reaction occurred.  Transcendentalist beliefs of the time, such as those written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, stated that though the world of the soul was paramount, it was necessary to recognize the truth and beauty of God’s creation in the natural world.  Thoreau took that one step further, arguing in Walden that the divine exists not just in all people but can be perceived in all of nature.  Finally, someone was acknowledging that God could be found in the eyes of a fox.

Yet, within himself and all mankind, Thoreau perceived two struggling natures ­ one a wild, animal nature and the other a spiritual one.  So although divinity was inherent in all living beings, he implied, man still held superiority in his spiritual self over the lesser, “wilder” beasts unable to access such sophistication of thought. This seemed a paradox to me.  My fox didn’t contemplate the nature of divinity, and yet he was a sacred being.  When he bounded away that day, never to be seen again, there was a sense in my mind that I had completed a divine task, and that he was my test.  And the connection to the sacred was not in the understanding I held as a Superior being, but the connection I felt as a fellow creature.

Chief Seattle said, “What we do to the earth, we do to ourselves…What we do to its creatures, we do to ourselves.”  One of the fundamental beliefs in any nature-based religion, whether Native American, Druid, Wiccan, and in the more enlightened attitudes of Unitarian Universalists over the last 30 or 40 years, is that divinity is in all living things, the earth, the sky, the waters, and all its creatures.  One of Wicca’s strongest laws is that we harm none.  For in harming the earth or its creatures, we are showing the basest form of disrespect to the God and Goddess.

So perhaps in helping or healing the earth and its creatures, we are honoring our own vision of Divinity.  I choose to think so.  When I care for the dozens of raccoons and other animals that come through my clinic each spring and summer, animals that have become orphaned or injured mostly due to man’s intervention, I am not only reaching out to brethren creatures who share the same spark of divinity that we all do, I am also honoring my own deities in the best way I know how.

Emily Dickinson, a Transcendentalist poet, wrote, “If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain. If I can ease one life the aching, or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain. “

Maybe at the end of the day, divinity might turn out to be more about compassion than anything else.