Kirkepiscatoid

Ok, I woke up this morning thinking about how dogs’ relationships with us are not that far from our relationships with the divine.

It started as part of my New Year’s resolution to “get to know the Book of Common Prayer better.” Well, I thought an easy starting point was just to read all the prayers and collects and hear the poetry of them and think about the deeper parts of that poetry.

Last night, I was reading the prayer “for knowledge of God’s creation” (p.827, BCP) and there was this line in it, “Grant that, as we probe the mysteries of your creation, we may come to know you more truly...” So I must have slept on that somewhat.

So, this morning as I am letting the dogs out and bringing them back in and making “dog breakfast,” and drinking coffee, I got to thinking about the “morality of dogs” and how communing with humans is their way of “stepping beyond just the simple rules of their society’s morality.”

Dog morality is pretty simple:

1. Eat and drink when you’re hungry or thirsty.
2. Sleep when you’re sleepy.
3. Mate when your pheremones and some other dog’s pheremones say that is a good thing to do.
4. Companion with other dogs to the extent the other dogs don’t interfere with the other three, or benefit you (hunting in packs would be a good example of this.)

Where dogs step “out of the box” and go beyond themselves is in their companionship with people. Sure, people feed them and give them comfort, but that is not all of the relationship. They enter in a relationship that both pleases them, and pleases us. They don’t simply come up to you to be fed. They come up to be petted and played with even when they are not hungry. They do not understand our ways. I think about how I can’t sit on the floor and read the newspaper b/c little Eddie sits on it and stares at me, or my friends N.&R.'s dog Darby watching the other dogs on TV, or when Mr. Boomer just comes up and puts his chin on the couch and stares up at me lovingly. I think about this guy in Macon who lived alone with his dog and when he died and the dog was given to someone else, he would now and then run off and go to the cemetery and sit at the guy’s grave even though he did not see that he was buried there.

But something in a dog brain millions of years ago clicked and said, “there is a benefit beyond your morality for this relationship beyond your basic biological needs.”

So, to me, in that sense, what dogs do with us, is very similar to what we are trying to do in our relationship with God—go beyond just simply “our morality” into something bigger and not well understood with the brains we have, but we know that it pleases us, and we at least sense it pleases God. Whoa! That is a huge thought!

As humans evolved the first thing they figured out is they need rules as a society. But as humans developed higher thought, they realized there was some sort of benefit beyond their biology and physiology to have a relationship with this unseen entity we call God. This relationship (well, if you’re not a fundamentalist, anyway) does not directly benefit “enforcing the rules, per se” (although it certainly can be used in that regard) but at least, to me, is simply a sense that I want to be loved and petted by this entity, and my doing the things that make up my “spiritual discipline” give me the sense I am being “petted” and it pleases me, as well as it giving me the sense it pleases God. Sure, I could be doing it simply b/c I am trying to "obey the rules as I understand them," but with so many denominational versions and dissent about "the rules" that can't possibly be the only reason.

Now, I don’t understand this entity any more than little Eddie understands what reading the newspaper is. I’m sure he looks at me and wonders how looking at a piece of paper makes me laugh, or grumble or react. But he knows it gets in the way of him being petted! Well, that is true with us and God, too. There are lots of times we are more or less “obeying the rules” but there is that little niggling that something “isn’t right” with us, and we derive comfort from just the simple act of getting the Sacrament, or hey, reading p.827 of the BCP! We discover that by engaging in the things my priest repeatedly refers to as "the disciplines of our faith", with no thought at all to outcome or no intent to "make us feel better," we become deepened and challenged in this relationship.

So I am convinced that understanding my dogs is a secret window to understanding some things divine. How many other secret windows are out there, d’ya suppose?