Working in animal rescue, you learn that everyone espouses disorganized religion.

Do not tell them I told you that. The word would launch liturgies of protest. These are not “religious” people. Even “spiritual” twists their tails into question marks.

They have, to a stunning degree, been wounded by people in collars, people with fanged truths, people who correct other people: “I’m not lucky, I’m blessed.”

They have no stomach for that.

What they have are celestial hearts and cast-iron bellies welling with wonder. “God” tastes like gravel in their teeth, but grace is the only language they can sing. And these are people fervent with song.

They sing by scouring the earth for its most wretched, the zero-eyed cats and the thatched wet dogs who stink and growl and shriek and try very hard to die. My friends are mercy-missiles for broken beasts, trawling for drowned innocents fathoms below underdogs.

Their chanteys are unrelenting, for the animals are as endless as blood. The unloved and the unseen and the underloved and the underwater are ever with us, and this is why my friends can’t believe in a Glinda-the-Good-Witch God.

They believe a great deal, though, even when their hearts are broken, which is essentially all of the time.

They believe that the one matters, today’s one tuft of silk and soot. It’s “just a cat,” just one cat, but my friends’ mystic eyes see the spheres. All the meaning is massed here, a neutron star of need.

They believe that they are powerful, deadlifting death by loving its prey. They ride their pegasus herd into impossible night, saving even the ones they can’t save, bearing witness with kisses and tears and drained bank accounts and stories.

They believe in each other, from depression’s depths to blithering heights. No experiment is too risky, no impediment is too ghastly, no self-understanding is beyond understanding. In the kingdom of the kind, everyone is safe. In the cathedral of compassion, the pews are soft.

And when the news is grim and every knee trembles, the liturgy keeps them on their feet: “I’ll keep a good thought.”

I used to get a twitch in my eyebrow every time I heard it, and I heard it constantly. No feline illness, no dire diagnosis, no bleak prognosis could be spoken without the call-and-response: “I’ll keep a good thought.”

Buckled too tightly into my own “blessedness” back then, I heard it as a peckish anti-prayer, a hunger to have it both ways. Give us grace without God. Give us help without a healer. Give us comforting rhythms from our own drums.

I didn’t give them enough credit, much less grace.

“I’ll keep a good thought.” Their tongues were on fire, their faces ashen. No desert mother ever wanted sanctity more than my friends wanted life for the broken. No powers of hell could help but shiver in such light. No saints and angels could turn away from this agnostic anguish.

No one but God could give such love.

No one in her right spirit should take away from such mystery.

And when the good thoughts gave way to grief, my Valkyrie friends gulped grace, passing the canteen in deep desert. When they could breathe again, they rose to the sacrament.

The lost had to be found in death. My friends formed a rose window, ringing the fading cat and gripping each other’s arms like altar rails. Song stretched into doxology now, rapid-fire memories across the choir.

“Remember how she would gallop like a goofus?”

“Remember those tiny tortie paws? They looked like pinto beans.”

“Remember how she would let you shnoogle her belly?”

“Remember how she would let you give her squeeze-chicken?”

“Remember how she would let you tell her anything?”

Maybe those were the words that stopped my twitching: “she let you.”

What my friends loved was permission to love.

What they grieved was a singular chance to be kind.

What they believed was that they were changing the world.

What took years to realize was that the entire enterprise was prayer.

What takes my breath away, on each of the terrible “todays” that will come as long as we love, is the final benediction.

“Until we meet again, baby girl.”

“We were so, so lucky to know you.”

“I’m so glad you were ours.”

“Thank you, sweetheart.”

They keep a good thought, beyond the reach of thoughts. And now I know: they’re kept by the Good God who is unworried about our words.

I’m glad I’m His, and theirs.

I’m not so organized myself anymore, with my feathers and tenets all over the floor. It’s a big sky outside the pigeon hole, and you just might see a pegasus in the sky, or a thought that thunders like prayer.

Someone just might let you love, even if your heart is broken, even if that’s essentially all of the time.