“Streams of Mercy”

by Mary Rose O’Reilley

Editor's Note: This article from September/October 2000 Weavings was the winner of the award for Best Devotional Article from The Associated Church Press in 2000.

Illustration by Michael McCurdy

It’s been my blessing to live among the unfashionable animals—sheep, rabbits, ducklings, mice—first as an agriculture student and now as an apprentice in wildlife rehabilitation. In this humble world, I am learning to forget the great and complicated names of God. When I was studying spiritual direction at Shalem Institute, Tilden Edwards gave us a retreat exercise—to sing out the word for God that came most naturally to us. “Mercy,” I sang. As we get older, perhaps, we shed ideas and concepts until only a few simple words remain. Mercy remains. The rehabilitation clinic—this abandoned corner of the universe, with its filth and cockroaches—has become my cloud of unknowing.

“We save everything we can,” I explain to a group of friends gathered for an afternoon music rehearsal who have asked about my life as a wild-animal rehabilitator.

They are thinking, I soon realize, of prestigious wildlife, the sort our governor occasionally releases to great fanfare on state occasions: the hawk, the eagle, the peregrine falcon—manly birds, if I may put it that way. These animals are tended at a beautiful, well-funded facility, the Raptor Center, across the street from where I work. But in our underfunded world of wildlife rehabilitation, a “release” may mean packing up a crate of eastern cottontails, driving them into the country, and watching their panicky break for freedom. No television crews show up for that.

When I tell my friends about the squirrels with neurological damage or the crows needing their feathers reseeded, they are astonished. “You save everything?”

Everything. My job last evening was to carefully tuck a mash of fruit and “zoo biscuit” behind the broken teeth of a woodchuck who had been hit by a car. Intubating Canada geese (a four-handed job), chucking pills past the serrated bills of mallards—these are the jobs of an apprentice wildlife rehabilitator.

Back in the human world, I gather with my friends on Sunday afternoons to sing the old gospel repertoire of shape-note music, the texts of Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and their company. We are always crying, in four-part a cappella harmony, for God’s mercy.

     Beneath the sacred throne of God
     I saw a river rise;
     The streams of peace and pard’ning love
     Descended from the skies.[1]

I wail the alto. I think about how I’ve learned to read the pain of animals, often a shrinking that the brain commands, though the body cannot obey. The caged woodchuck, incisors broken, jaws misaligned, is denied the pleasure of bite. He fears me; in a certain sense he hates me—or thus I interpret the white, terrible shriek he lets out when a few calories hit his nervous system and he gathers himself to let me know what he thinks of suburban life, automobiles, and me.

As I feed him, a couple of the veterinary students who direct my work gather around, trying to decide how much suffering is too much, whether the animal is beyond help or too crippled to survive in the wild. Rehabilitate and release is the ethic I’ve been taught. Sometimes we can place a hopelessly damaged animal—one who is deaf or blind, for example—in a zoo or wildlife sanctuary, but typically space is at a premium for “common” animals. They must be euthanized.

“But we can’t save everything, really,” I tell my music friends.

The faun, about the size of a two-year-old child, but lighter, rests in my arms. Its weight leans into my flesh. It snuggles out of fear rather than comfort. I know it will not be able to live. A young woman sobbing hysterically had thrust the faun, wrapped in a bloody blanket, at me as I came out the front door for a break. As I fold back the blanket I see that the deer’s foreleg hangs by a thread.

“Someone hit it with a hay mower,” she sobs. “Can you help it?”

If only I could offer her a cup of tea. She is pale and as shocky as the faun. “Why don’t you sit down and in a minute I’ll bring you some paperwork, but now I’ll take the deer back to the doctors.”

Jim, a vet student, responds to my soft call. “This animal is badly hurt,” I tell him.

“What’s wrong?”

“Leg amputation.”

“He won’t make it then. Why don’t you sit back there with him while I find Mark.” Mark is our supervising veterinarian.

I hold the placid faun and try to memorize it, as the Navaho teach their children to do. At the clinic, we have been trained like monks in custody of the eyes, in silence never to startle or disturb the animals. “I love the wild no less than the good,” Henry David Thoreau wrote of the woodchuck that crossed his path.[2]

Yet it seems fair to make an exception and ponder this beautiful animal. In my other life, studying ceramic sculpture, I am experimenting with a wash of glazes in brown, deep red, black, and sand—the background against which all life but our own hides and rests from the human explosions of color and noise. Be still and know that I am God.

Mark materializes and lifts the faun from my arms. As he unwraps the blanket, the deer’s leg comes away. I’ve worked in hospitals and homeless shelters where there always is a lot of fuss and exclamation from staff and client alike, as though the duty of humankind were to comment and keep up running analysis. But here we learn our discipline from the silence of animals. My daughter said to me recently, “I must be getting deaf. I can’t hear you when you talk any more.” We speak as little as possible at the clinic, and we take our cues from the green heron, coyote, and terrapin. Cradling the deer, Mark carries it to the gas tanks in the corner and slips a mask over its face. The deer looks puzzled and sleepy as its spirit slips under. Its spirit is, as Thomas Merton wrote of a wild encounter, “the deerness that sums up everything and is saved and marvelous.”[3] I go back to the woman in the outer office, busy with forms. “Will it be okay?” she wants to know.

“The vet is with him now” is my evasive reply.

“Can’t a deer live with three legs?” one of the new volunteers wants to know.

“Hoofed stock,” Jim begins formally, “put so much pressure on the digital phalanges that the bones of the remaining feet would begin to protrude above the hoofs and it would be very painful. Sheep can do well on three feet, but deer cannot.”

    Come thou fount of ev’ry blessing
    Tune my heart to sing thy grace;
    Streams of mercy never ceasing ...[4]

Several years ago, when I was raising sheep, all of us workers, mostly Evangelical Lutherans, used to ponder the imagery of the Good Shepherd. As former farm kids, you’d think we’d have had enough of Psalm 23, but it remained an icon and a puzzle to us. In the Buddhist tradition, the Boddhisatva of Compassion is often imaged with a nest of rabbits at her feet. The same year I raised sheep, I studied at a Mahayana Buddhist monastery, Plum Village, where I was given the dharma name “Tending of the Source”—a koan offered me to think about forever, in recognition of and challenge to my shepherd’ work. “May all beings be brought to enlightenment,” Buddhists pray.

We try to save everything. Even the unfashionable animals. Streams of mercy, never failing.

Merton again, on quail: “Signs of life, of gentleness, of helpfulness, of providence, of love.”[5]

Pure intelligence, framed in a silver triangle. Predators have to be smart, wildlife biology teaches me, and I reflect on this fact as I peer into the gray fox’s cardboard lair. She has already trained us to put dog food in front of her—no mice, thanks. The fat rodents we fed her yesterday remain in her dish and I remove them from the right like a good servant. This fox came to us after jumping off the sixth floor of a parking ramp downtown while being pursued by an animal control officer. The fall, or flight, did her little apparent harm—in fact, she is pregnant—and she will soon go back to her native habitat. But where might that be? Sixth and Wabasha in downtown St. Paul? The rules of our shelter dictate that animals be returned to where they were found if possible, so they can reconnoiter with family groups. But where is her den? I imagine her travelling by night, past the public library, Mickey’s Diner, a shadow making it up the river bottoms from points east.

If predators are pure intelligence, prey gets to be foolish. I tent the rabbit’s thin flesh with thumb and second finger and inject her with steroids. She gives me a rabbit’s perennial red-eyed multiplex stare. Rabbits have almost 360 degrees of vision, the better to anticipate trouble from all directions—as you have to do if you are at the absolute bottom of the food chain. Next to me a blond clinic worker, braids wrapped around her head, is feeding grubs to a nighthawk that she has wrapped in a soft washcloth (what we call a “nighthawk burrito”). My own next task will be feeding infant bats. It’s hard to remember that these intricate little demons are in fact mammals, and we feed them formula through a tiny flexible tube that they suck greedily.

“Bats?” my music friends question. Some confess to hitting them with tennis rackets. In the dark neighborhoods around us, robins bounce off the hoods of cars, squirrels turn to leather under our wheels. What’s a bat or a rabbit in a nation that’s recently bombed Yugoslavia?

    “Mercy, O thou Son of David!”
    Thus poor blind Bartimeus prayed.
    “Others by thy grace are saved.
    Now to me afford thine aid.”[6]

People speak of the problem of suffering: how could a good God permit the conundrums of violence? By contrast, I am obsessed with the unfathomable problem of mercy: how could a fallen world unspool this golden thread? In dark alleys of our city, people hurt and maim, while in our clinic, people line up to save things. Merton, in his last journals, struggles with the relentless dialogue between action and contemplation, retreating deeper into solitude to find God in a migrating flock of pine siskins. He senses “total kinship with them as if they and I were of the same nature and as if that nature were nothing but love. And what else but love keeps us all together in being?”[7] A tattooed biker comes in with eight mallard chicks he’s retrieved from a millrace. He fills out the paperwork with barely literate concentration and buys a T-shirt. A yuppie-looking man brings in a half-dead fledgling, donates fifty dollars, and demands a full report in the mail—his eye, too, is on the sparrow. Here is a young girl with the face of a born saver. She does not want to relinquish a newborn bunny she has gotten away from a cat. I explain to her about the impossibility of aiding it without extensive equipment, about the dangers of tularemia, and finally, regretfully, I tell her that it’s against the law to raise wild things without a license. Along with her paperwork, I give her signup forms to volunteer. “You’ll have to have a series of rabies shots ...”

She’ll be there at eight a.m.

“We try to save everything.”

She nods.

What else but love?

1. The Sacred Harp, comp. Hugh McGraw (Bremen, Ga.: Sacred Harp Publishing, 1991), p. 569.

2. Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience (New York: Penguin, 1983), p. 257.

3. Thomas Merton, Dancing in the Waters of Life: The Journals 1963–1965, ed. Robert E. Daggy (San Francisco, Harper, 1997), p.291

4. The Sacred Harp, p. 56.

5. Merton, Dancing in the Waters of Life, p. 313.

6. The Sacred Harp, p. 56.

7. Merton, Dancing in the Waters of Life, p. 162.