A Dog's Life . . . in the Spirit

When you hide your face, they are lost. When you take away their breath, they perish and return to the dust from which they came.  When you send forth your breath, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth.  (Psalm 104: 29-30)  The Psalm were, verses sung to the accompaniment of harp or lyre, like the folk songs of the day, like country music. 

God’s face was a really big deal.  Look at it and you would die.  Hide from it and you are lost.  Somewhere between the insolence of equality and the flaccidity of indifference lies the Life in the Spirit. 

My two daughters have married dog husbands.  I don’t mean that badly; they’re great guys who love our daughters and because of their love of dogs have given me a gift of putting canine faces on this really basic theological nugget.

Cleveland was (and remains, as the Jews would say, “in beloved memory”) a Chesapeake Bay Retriever.  He had this way of being present to you without looking directly at you.  He’d sit next to you, not in your face but maybe three feet away, and yet there was no doubt that he was all about YOU.  He was like the waiter in a really good restaurant who would not hover or distract you, but at the moment’s slightest sign of desire or need, would be there – to refill your water, clear an empty plate, or bring more butter or bread.  He was big and strong and absolutely loyal.  By the time that Margie met Jeff, Cleveland was already in his prime, and by the time Kathy and I got to know him, he was an old guy, with aches and dignity.  But his attentive loyalty was ageless.

Puck is Amy and David’s Labradoodle, one of those mixes that is not supposed to shed but does.  They’ve had him from a pup, and trained him by the book – some monks wrote it, honest.  He is well named – by our granddaughter Nadia, I suspect, for the energetic trickster/jester in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  And those monks must have been inspired, because somehow all of that puckish energy is channeled, focused, on his attentiveness to David, Amy, and the girls.  “Puck, Place!” and two things happen.  At the sound of his name, he’s all ears and eyes.  If he could speak, I suspect he’d say “Yezz, Boss?”  He looks up, looks right at the one of the four of them calling him, intently listening for the command.  “Place” means back to your rug.  “Do it” brings smiles to the girls’ faces, because it means he’s out the door and answering nature’s call in that place in the woods next to the driveway where he does his business. 

Oh, that I were as good a Christian as Cleveland and Puck are dogs.  That I would be as attentive, that I would hold my energy and strength and cleverness in suspended service, watching the face of God, listening for my name, attentive to the emptying bread basket, the water glass half-full. I have a friend Aimee, a former student, who sent to her friends an email sharing her grief over her departed dog.  I struggled interiorly as I read her describing her Mya as if she had been human.  And yet I think of Cleveland and Puck, and think how those of us who look in books for answers to the questions of God’s nature and our relationship with God miss something that dogs can show us. 

When you hide your face, they are lost. When you take away their breath, they perish and return to the dust from which they came.  When you send forth your breath, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth.  

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.