Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,
I woke up on Friday morning intending to write a meditation on the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, since this Sunday I plan to preach on 1 Corinthians 12–31a, that famous passage wherein St. Paul writes, “just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” But as soon as I had made the bed, Anne came down from the children’s floor to inform me that she had found our daughter’s beloved pet mouse, Brownie, dead. It’s a terrible thing when a parent must wake up her child first thing on a Friday and convey such sad news.
Brownie was a confirmation gift. The usual gift, of course, is a Book of Common Prayer, but Margaret wanted to adopt a brown mouse that she had seen at the pet store the day before, when we had gone shopping for cat food. During the car ride home, I tried to put her off by speculating that we might have some difficulty getting a pet mouse into Canada, but before we had gotten home, she’d already pulled out her iPad and looked up the official regulations on the Government of Canada’s website and informed me that I was quite wrong.
She undertook further research on caring for mice and presented her case most emphatically. Anne suspected that she, not Margaret, would be the one who ended up taking care of this unwanted and unwelcome mouse, but nevertheless, on the afternoon of May 30, 2021, the Day of Pentecost, following the laying on of the Bishop’s hands that morning, we adopted a mouse to celebrate Margaret’s confirmation.
Despite what one might think, Brownie was not named in honour of his colour, or after the delicious baked good of the same name. He was in fact named after a type of fairy known as the Brownie. At bedtime, Anne had recently read aloud to us an entertaining story from 1884, entitled The Adventures of a Brownie by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, about this spritely creature, and it had clearly captured Margaret’s imagination.
Brownie the Mouse quickly captured our hearts. We did not expect to fall in love with a mouse. When I was in grade eight, I had kept three colonies of mice as a genetics experiment for science class, and I still had my journal from my adventures in mouse breeding. Back then, I was fond of my (many) mice, and certainly had my favourites, but I wasn’t particularly emotionally attached to any of them. For her part, Anne had no goodwill towards them at all. Nevertheless, because Margaret was concerned that Brownie would get lonely while she was at school, Anne began to allow Brownie to roll around in his orange ball in her home office, and she soon grew fond of his companionability. Not only that, but Margaret showed a surprisingly conscientious dedication to his care and feeding. She also began to train him to do tricks, using small lengths of uncooked spaghetti as treats.
Soon, Margaret could stroke Brownie’s cheek until he looked dreamy and leaned against her hand and put the thumb of his little paw in his mouth. Have you ever seen a mouse suck its thumb? If such a sight did not melt your heart, I would begin to doubt your humanity. As soon as Margaret stopped stroking his cheek, he would spring into action again, running, playing, and sniffing at everything and everyone. Margaret was a veritable Mouse Whisperer.
When Bp. Jenny Andison and her husband, Tim, came to dinner with their youngest daughter in mid-October, Brownie turned out to be the life of the party, delighting the Bishop by licking honey off her finger. (It was even revealed that the Bishop had been the proud keeper of a pet mouse when she was a child.)
Brownie was only with us for just under eight months. But in so short a time, who knew that a little mouse could teach a family so much about love? And yet, that’s what companion animals do, for families and for individuals. Theologians and Biblical scholars have debated the place of animals in the spiritual realm. Do animals have souls? Do all dogs go to heaven? For my part, I have no well-developed theology other than what I would say to my students back when I was a school chaplain. A girl from the nursery school once asked me what happened to her cat after the cat died, and I simply replied that all life comes from God, and all life returns to God. In the meantime, it is up to us to love the lives that God entrusts to us.
Of course, loving always entails loss. Love is not simply a risky bet, it is a losing one, because the odds are 100 per cent in favour of death. Every person and creature we love will die (as will we), and sometimes our love dies even before the other being dies, or their love for us. But we still choose to love. Is it because we cannot help it? Is it because we are fools? Or is it because life and love and loss are inseparably intertwined?
Our children’s grief was so raw that we felt they needed to stay home from school that day. (Thankfully, it was the last day of the school semester for Margaret, and all that the teachers and students were planning was to watch movies as a reward.) Margaret decided that Brownie could never be replaced. But she needed a connection to nature in this urban jungle, and Brownie was that connection for her. Later that day, having decided she wanted to risk loving again, Margaret went online and found a pet store about an hour away that had female mice available for adoption. So even though we warned her that she might find herself in a vale of tears again eight months from now, and if not eight months, then certainly one day, likely within the next two years, she decided that she wanted to adopt again. So we made a three-hour round trip to Milton and back (I had called all the Toronto stores but they only had males), to pick up two very dainty mice whom Margaret named Cinnamon and Pepper. One is blonde and a bit fluffy, and the other is sleek and has markings like a brown-and-white cow. After we brought them home, Anne said that she wasn’t sure she personally could go through this sort of thing every eight months. These past two years have brought so much loss of human life, so why should we add more gratuitous opportunities for grief?
Anne and I once heard an interview in which a woman described the experience of parenthood as giving birth to a part of one’s heart that then went out into the world without her control or protection. We give parts of ourselves away to those we love, despite the knowledge that in the end we will all come to grief. But Christian hope gives us an assurance that all life comes from God and all life returns to God, and that in the end, it is love, not death, that has the final say. And so we live in hope, and when it comes to remembering those whom we have loved but see no more, we pray that God will give us the grace to find at the end of grief a sense of thanksgiving for the lives from God that have touched our lives, whether mediated through another human being or through an animal. And in that thanksgiving, we indeed find that loving, even in the midst of loss, is always worth it in the end.
Yours in Christ’s service,
N.J.A. Humphrey+
VIII Rector