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Thread: Prayer for a recently deceased animal companion
MI
#8
Dorotheos wrote:
I know that we say that animals don't have souls like we do, and this must be true, but I don't doubt that in the Restoration Of All Things In Christ (Apocatastasis, per St Gregory of Nyssa & Mar Isaac of Nineveh, not Origen) anything we loved will be with us (see the end of C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle, which someone (Mtr Kallistos, I think) said was the best commentary on the Apocalypse in English). I fully expect to meet our beloved animals in the Resurrection, including our cats and my wife's favorite horse, who I have heard so much about, but who died just about the time we got together and I never met. How could God deprive of us this? How this is to be I don't know, but it is part of my hope. Wild animals? Who knows? God is not on a budget.
Prayers? Any prayers of thanksgiving, hope or blessing would be my suggestion. I think the Lord's Prayer might work just fine.
Maranatha! Apocatastasis Now!
dorotheos
According to St. Basil the Great, when God says, \' \\"Grow and multiply, and fill the earth\\" Growth is of two kinds, that of the body and that of the soul. But growth of the soul is progress to perfection through things learned, while bodily growth is development from smallness to the appropriate stature. Thus grow is said to the irrational animals in regard to perfection of body, in regard to the completion of nature; but to us grow is said according to the inner human being, according to the process which is growth into God.\' Taken from On the Human Condition by St. Basil the Great, SVS Press, page 51. My point is not to argue this issue or to cause any of you more grief, but the matter of that fact is that animals are not immortal. They are irrational while we are not. BTW, Origen believed the sun, moon, and stars (which he believed had rational souls) would be reconciled in the second resurrection. This can be found here: [url=http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf214.xii.ix.html]Anathemas Against Origen[/url]
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