What to Give the Dog-Lover Who Has Everything Except a Dog which You Can't Give Him Anyway

The photo above shows my back-to-school present: a paperback copy of Kin Platt's YA (the industry term for "young adult fiction") novel Sinbad and Me. For some bizarre reason this gem of a book is out of print so Becky purchased it for me online at enormous expense (enormous enough that she still refuses to tell me how much) as a back-to-school present because she has often heard me speak of how much I love it.

I love this book for many reasons. For openers, of course, it's a good book - an engaging and funny mystery that involves the mob, ghosts, pirates, long-dead sea captains and buried treasure, all of which converge on a small town in New York in the 1960's. Then there's the nostalgia: I came across a copy in the library at Royal Palms Elementary School in Phoenix during the spring of my seventh grade year and re-reading it always invokes that ethos. But perhaps best of all - or at least most pertinent to this blog - it was Sinbad and Me that gave birth to my lifelong (and as yet unrealized) ambition to own an English bulldog.

You see, I read a lot of mysteries - Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe, Peter Wimsey, Rumpole of the Bailey - but not in order to match wits with the author in sleuthing out a who-dunnit. I pay minimal attention to the clues - all those dropped handkerchiefs and left-handed men and varieties of cigar ash. The attraction for me is the characters. So, for me, Platt's book is less a mystery than the story of a twelve-year-old boy and his faithful canine companion. Sinbad and Steve sleep together, have regular nose-to-nose conferences on the living room floor, and generally hang out together. Reading the novel made me want a bulldog of my own, that's true; it also made me enjoy my own dog - a black-and-white mutt named Pal - more. I started taking him with me as I threw my paper route, for instance, and discovered his remarkable ability to memorize the various turns. (Well, when I say "memorize," I mean "pee on a succession of landmarks." Still. . . .) In fact, when I think of the dogs I have owned since - Macho the German shepherd, for instance, and Joey, about whom I have written elsewhere in this blog - I realize that a good deal of my enjoyment of them has come from the inspiration I first discovered in Sinbad and Me.

In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis describes a beatified woman whose large heart automatically mothered everyone she encountered.

"Every young man or boy that she met," the narrator's heavenly cicerone, George MacDonald, explains,

became her son - even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter."

"Isn't that a bit hard on her own parents?"

"No. There are those that steal other people's children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives."

I think that's how I feel about Platt's book: his lovely descriptions of the specific quirks and characteristics of one breed did not make me scorn my own mongrel by comparison, but made me prize him more because I could not begin to appreciate his special breeding and personality.

The next step in Lewis' story is that the narrator notices dozens of cats, dogs, and other animals following in the sainted woman's train. He asks if she kept a zoo, to which MacDonald replies that "every beast or bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ form the Father flows over into them."

Kin Platt gave me, at a young age, my first whiff of this sort of animal-mysticism and started me on the lifelong gift of getting to know dogs. If you do not have the good fortune to be married to an incredibly sensitive and generous wife, I suggest a visit to your local library. If they don't have the book, try inter-library loan. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who reads the novel as a result of this blog, or who has read it already (though the latter should beware of plot spoilers).

Dog-Walking and Spiritual Dyslexia

"'Yes,' said Father Brown, 'I always like a dog, so long as he isn't spelt backwards.'" - "The Oracle of the Dog" by G. K. Chesterton

Chesterton's Jesuit super-sleuth got it, I believe, exactly right: we do well to make much of dogs but we do better not to make too much of them. This is on my mind as I near the end of my second month as a volunteer dog-walker at the Gulf Coast Humane Society here in Corpus Christi (http://www.petfinder.com/shelters/TX476.html). They are wonderful folks here, but a bit . . . I don't know, "earnest," perhaps in the same sense that the defenders of Masada were "earnest." I don't mean this as a knock. Zealots make me nervous, but without zealots nothing ever gets done. The monomaniac's fixation on his chosen cause creates a sufficient slip-stream to drag smaller souls along in his wake. Twice-a-week dilettantes like me would have no opportunity to put in our time if someone else didn't discern eschatological (and apocalyptic!) elements in the care of stray canines.

No, it is only for myself that I offer this meditation, this word of caution not to over-estimate how much it matters to God that I log my time.

And I do think it matters. After all, there is some (minimal) Scriptural precedent for this sort of thing. "A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel," Proverbs 12.10 runs. God even tells his curmudgeonly prophet Jonah that if the notion of one hundred and twenty thousand dead Ninevites doesn't tug at his heartstrings, he might at least consider the animals. (Jon 4.11). Of course, this is the same God who mandates hamstringing enemy horses (Jos 11.6) but that's a hermeneutical problem for another time and blog.

But maybe Jonah is a good case in point. The Lord is arguing here from the lesser to the greater, something Jesus will later do using the same referents (Lk 13.15-16, 14.1-5). Beasts have value as God's creation, but not on a level with human beings created in God's image. At my training for this pooch patrol, I heard the instructor say more than once that by signing up for the gig I was "saving lives." Indeed, the speaker insisted, "That's what we do here every day: We save lives." True, in a sense. Canines left penned up, even with adequate food and water, develop something called "kennelosis," a real (though unscientific) term used by vets to describe the disorientation and aggression that result from isolation. It can, in extreme cases, be incurable and require that the dog be killed.

Still, "save lives"? I read about the flooding in Pakistan and I wonder if I dare employ such a phrase. And if I was hip-deep in mud in the Punjab I imagine I'd read about Haiti and ask a similar question. That being so, can I ever feel good about anything? Will I run in the red for the rest of my life . . . and forever?

William Willimon tells the story of a church meeting at the end of a three-day push to assist various causes. One speaker took the microphone to decry the fact that one additional tragedy (left-over land mines, I think it was) had received no attention. "An already deflated meeting," Willimon recalls, "rolled over and died."

Look at us. We were so busy eradicating killer diseases, curing malaria, raising $3 million to solve AIDS, funding the pensions of suffering African pastors and sending water purification systems to Haiti that we missed the one good work that could have certified us as a church that really, really cares.

"Certified" - that's an important word, and one that may help me understand my own angst. Charitable actions (and I use that word in the King-James-translation-of-1-Corinthians-13-sense) hold only frustration or self-righteousness when undertaken as an attempt to avoid the need for grace. I think this could be why I often have a negative reaction to people who are doing such very good things. They give me the feeling that (this may not be their real motivation; how could I know?) in fighting against abortion or feeding the homeless or demonstrating against nuclear power plants or fill-in-the-blank, they have discovered THE one activity that squares them with God's books and obviates the need for grace. It reminds me of a great poem by John Betjeman:

Not my vegetarian dinner
Nor my lime juice minus gin
Quite can drown a faint conviction
That we may be born in sin.

Eat less and give the excess to the poor? Not good enough! What about sweatshop eggs laid by battery hens and hormone-stuffed cows in slaughterhouses and the veal that definitely does not come from contented cows and pate de foie gras manufactured from force-fed geese? Go vegetarian? Still not good enough! What about butter from steroid-amped udders and honey from slaving bees? Vegan? Still not good enough! How many food-miles does your tomato have on the odometer? The carbon footprint on that cucumber would shame a Sasquatch. Turn locavore? Ah, but migrant laborers still pick the local produce, and then there's the whole business of nitrogen in the fertilizer washing into the estuary and killing the salmon.

The point is that we all live in a constant state of mutual dependency. Those who scorn the Christian doctrine of redemption because it makes no sense that one person's death could satisfy another's penalty simply haven't put any thought into that Big Mac they munched a couple of days ago. Animal, vegetable and mineral all told, my existence for twenty-four hours deals enough death to make perfect sense of Calvary.

So where do I wind up? I can keep walking dogs, mostly because I like to do it and I'm semi-hooked on the oxytocin rush. I can offer my activities to the God who (as C. S. Lewis' Screwtape keeps complaining) is prepared to take the clumsiest attempt at goodness and morph it into an acceptable sacrifice. I can see the average stray dog as God's creature and, therefore, God present to me in even a Matthew 25-ish sense. What I can't do is opt out of Calvary or regard the Lord's Supper as an even trade where I pay my own tab.

And I think I prefer it that way.

Closing a Gap in the Universe

"Man with dog," writes C. S. Lewis in The Four Loves, "closes a gap in the universe." Or perhaps just in one's own pursuit of a relationship with the Creator of the universe.

Datum: Ever since I watched Franco Zefferelli's "Brother Sun, Sister Moon" in a seminary philosophy course I have been taken with St. Francis of Assissi. Of course, as a happily married Baptist, it was never likely that the Lord would call me to life in the Friars Minor. Still, through that initial connection I have grown to admire much about the monastic orders as I studied their origins among the desert fathers of the fourth century. I feel a consistent yearning to incorporate more of that contemplative spirituality into my own very active spiritual tradition.

Datum: About twelve years ago my son received a puppy for his eighth birthday. I was not happy about it. I did not feel that our family was ready to take on a dog. But my child's delight and my wife's wiser counsel prevailed. They went to Peewee's Pet Adoption World way out on Saratoga here in Corpus Christi (http://peeweespets.com/) and came home with Joey, a shepherd/lab/husky mix. A little less than two years ago, Joey did - rather suddenly - of a tumor. The terms of my on-campus apartment, while generous in many ways, do not permit me to replace him. (The board had very kindly agreed to grandfather Joey when we moved in.) This left me to discover how powerfully, in the decade-long interval between the dog's arrival and his death, I had grown to appreciate and benefit from his presence.

While pondering these two data recently I hit on a possible solution: why not volunteer at a local animal shelter? Accordingly I emailed the Gulf Coast Humane Society (http://www.gchscc.org/) where Cody Rice, the Director of Volunteers/Education, received me with kindness and enthusiasm. After a two-hour training and orientation, I was ready to roll. So for about a month now, I have spent an hour, two days a week, strolling around the GCHS grounds with various canines.

So where does St. Francis come in?

Well, after all, he did convert the Wolf of Gubbio, which had fallen into the regrettable habit of eating the locals. And, as everyone knows, the domestic dog - canis familiaris - is nothing but the wild wolf - canis lupus- converted. While protestants - to say nothing of skeptics - scoff at the story, and while I don't insist on its historicity, it has a certain New Testament flavor to it. After all, as C. S. Lewis has pointed out, miracles "do close and small and, as it were, in focus what God at other times does so large that men do not attend to it." So the God who is always turning water to wine through the normal (and, when you think about it, amazing) process of rain and sun resulting in bursting purple grapes, simply does the same thing on an expedited schedule at the wedding feast in Cana. The God who constantly takes a few kernels of wheat and transforms them into a field of grain fit to feed a multitude, makes an entire crop in the course of one prayer at the feeding of the five thousand.

In the same way, the story of St. Francis and the wolf shows us God domesticating in a moment an animal that he designed all along with the genetic capacity for infinite malleability for human purposes. A common human being housebreaking an average mutt is engaged in the same sort of miracle (if not on the same scale) as the Little Holy Man curing a ravening wolf of a taste for raw peasant. As the old cook says in his sermon to the sharks on Moby Dick, "You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned." And if we govern the wolf in the dog, he can truly be an angel unaware, for all angel (if we take the story of Lucifer's fall seriously) is nothing more than the shark well governed.

At any rate, Francis has become the patron saint of animals and ecology and so it seems to me that in spending a couple of afternoons now and again consorting with a few of Gubbio's shirttail relatives - some of whom still, I admit it, need a measure of converting - I am both feeding my pet-jones and, if this isn't going too far, growing closer to Christ.