Farm animals are walked down the aisle and blessed by church officials during the "Blessing of the Animals" at the Christ Church United Methodist in Manhattan, New York December 7, 2014.Elizabeth Shafiroff/Reuters
It should be possible to promote a global religion, and set the course for a nice holiday that remakes shopping into an altruistic act of gift giving, without involving herds of gentle beasts. And yet the wildly colourful story of the nativity – the commemoration of Jesus's birth in humble barnyard surroundings that quickly expanded beyond the spare reportage of the Bible into the many-sided sacred and secular celebration we now observe – suggests you can't have a world-changing religious event unless there are animals around to give it deeper resonance.
Christmas underscores the emotive power of the lively creatures we need to share our world and bear witness to our experience. Or is it vice versa? They are always forcing their way into domains humans claim as their own, whether it's cat videos taking over the Internet, four-legged creatures dominating the subject matter of ancient cave art, an orangutan being granted the right to be freed from a Buenos Aires zoo this week or the recent frenzy about whether dogs can nuzzle their way into a people-centred heaven – based on a disarmingly casual statement by Pope Francis that "the fulfilment of this wonderful design also affects everything around us."
Prompted by animal-thronged representations of the nativity scene, Christians are increasingly reassessing the theological role of animals, and how it can be made to fit the disproportionate, often disarming part they now play in our everyday experience.
"The birth of Jesus isn't just about humans but about all of God's creation," says Michael Bourgeois, professor of theology at Emmanuel College in Toronto. "If having cows and donkeys and sheep in nativity scenes and Christmas pageants helps encourage and reinforce this line of thinking, so much the better."
Of course, you don't have to be Christian to undertake this kind of animal-prompted soul-searching. However much we treat ourselves as a breed apart, whatever arrogance we bring to our relationship with the natural world, we can't resist the bond we feel with these endlessly mysterious and familiar beings. They mirror human values better than many humans, often seem to know us better than we know ourselves and live beautifully complex lives beyond our control and understanding – consider this week's astonishing viral video that shows a clever, compassionate monkey tenderly and expertly reviving a companion who'd suffered an electric shock on an Indian train line.
"We're drawn to animals and look at them with such fascination because we're so very much the same in the way we live, reproduce and die," says Laura Hobgood-Oster, professor of religion and environmental studies at Southwestern University and author of Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition. "We try hard to make ourselves different – by saying we're the only ones who use tools, or sing, or whatever. But all those things fall by the wayside, and essentially the last thing left to mark us off as different is religion. Everything else is lost."
And even religion no longer seems so clear-cut a distinction, as animals and their advocates are expanding the place of equality granted once a year in the Christmas story. St. Francis of Assisi, the animal-loving medieval mystic from whom Pope Francis took his name and mission, understood the strength of this symbiotic sense of wonder (his feast day in October is now used for highly unsolemn blessing-of-the-animal ceremonies in many churches). The 13th-century friar who referred to animals as his brothers and sisters is credited with creating the first nativity display in 1223, turning the Bible's restrained annotations into a living, breathing, noisy, smelly tableau that made the far-away Christmas story a vivid experience.
The effect became powerful in the history of religion and belief – the presence of a donkey and an ox alongside a contemporary version of the Bible's Holy Family made the distant abstractions of faith more intimate and in the moment.
Fast-forward eight centuries to the Gateway Church in Winnipeg, where every December hundreds of congregation members mount a massive crowd-pleasing re-enactment called Bethlehem Live! – a living nativity that comes complete with chickens, ducks, goats, sheep, a horse, dogs, cats and a braying donkey named Molly who takes pride of place right beside the baby who plays Jesus.
"Molly is sometimes quite noisy," says Heather Nolan, a church worker who oversees the production's fragrant spice-filled market. "You sometimes can't hear the angels singing because she likes to sing louder than them."
Such animal intrusions and imperfections are what make the nativity so appealing and persuasive to the church's visitors. "It adds to the authenticity of the event," Ms. Nolan says. "People are looking for meaningful tradition – they want to know if Christmas is more than the malls, more than the gifts. As soon as they walk in, they're sucked into the story."
The four Gospels that tell the story of Jesus make no mention of animals being present at his birth. Authenticity at the animal level is something humans add to connect with a narrative in danger of moving beyond their reach. "It's life as it is, and not just symbolic" says Prof. Hobgood-Oster, who counts a dog-themed nativity scene among her proudest possessions (Mary is a black Lab, Joseph a German shepherd and Jesus a Westie). "Animals are portrayed in the artwork and show up in the stories because we can't live without real animals being there."
The entire menagerie attending the newborn Jesus is embellished from brief hints that he was born in a humble stable, or laid down in a manger (i.e., a feeding trough), that angels announced his coming to shepherds (cue the sheep) and that admirers from far away known as the Magi (or the Wise Men) brought exotic gifts.
In almost every representation, an ox and a donkey are an essential part of the picture, the guarantors of the nativity's down-to-earthness. Officially, they symbolize the democratic, universal message of Jesus, whose reach extends beyond a favoured few to encompass all creation. But their essential animalness, and what that means to susceptible human viewers, is always in the forefront – even theological dogma has to start in a place of strong feeling, the automatic sense of kinship that our ties to our fellow creatures dependably generate.
Sometimes they're looking on adoringly in pre-Internet versions of those "awww" moments that animal-video fans can appreciate even without an added layer of theology. Or the artist captures them at the very second when they blithely turn away with an indifference to our high-pressure preoccupations – the donkey's ears perk up at a sudden distraction, perhaps the whinnying of a nearby horse, because he doesn't know he's supposed to be venerating some future Messiah. Or maybe they're just going about their animal business, eating and breathing and even snuggling up to the baby in the manger with the spontaneity of creatures who don't play by the inhibited human rules governing holiness.
And that's just the beginning for the animal world's appropriation of what might easily have been an exclusively human story – at least in the anthropocentric minds of older theologians who couldn't tolerate animals butting their way into the God-human relationship and challenging established hierarchies. Thanks to the opportune mention of the Magi, the elaborate nativity scenes were able to reflect the richness of the world to medieval and Renaissance patrons.
And so the Holy Family of Christianity increasingly got to share their humble birthplace with processions of horses and flocks of sheep, troops of camels and attentive dogs, darting doves and parading peacocks and exotic cats and even the occasional monkey. The manger scene evolved from a messy, chaotic household with animals underfoot to a kind of petting zoo, and finally to an over-the-top tribute to the wonders of the natural world – humans being humans, we can't help but go overboard at Christmas-time, and maybe miss a bit of the message in our happy self-indulgence.
At the same time, Christmas (like the Bible's animal stories of the Garden of Eden and Noah's Ark) encourages us to see the brighter moments of our relationship with animals, and temporarily omit the darker side of confinement and killing. The Christmas manger scene is an idea of perfection, the peaceable kingdom of all creatures living together in harmony that exists more in our hopes and beliefs than in the cruel world we inhabit.
"It's a beautiful thing that the birth of the Christian saviour takes place with animals," says Randy Malamud, professor of English at Georgia State University and author of Poetic Animals and Animal Souls. "But it would be great if people looked at the nativity scene and said, 'Why is it only for this one day?' Animals are introduced equitably in the story, but only as a foil, as a precursor for their later inferiority and exploitation – they're there for us to dominate. But maybe we could work with the idea of the manger, when people lived in closer contact with animals, and nothing more sinister happened. There's a germ here that could be nurtured."