The Sacred Bond
The Divine Link between Dogs and People
Dogs are not people. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story that I am going to relate.[1] Dogs are not people but we act as if they are; we call them our fur babies and count them as members of our family. We dress them up in people clothes and feed them people food and sometimes even carry them around in purses or packs. Not that there isn’t anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld would say. I myself am not immune from see my dogs as family but recreating dogs in our own image does them, and us, an injustice. It diminishes the wonder and mystery that two entirely different species would share their lives together.
I prefer to see dogs as dogs, not people, so that they can open my eyes to see the world with heightened senses. The most pronounced of the five senses in a dog is the sense of smell. If you’ve ever had the privilege of watching a puppy be born then you would know that they don’t look so much like a puppy as they do a gerbil. And yet this “gerbil” will immediately use its nose to find its way to his mother’s nipple to get that first taste of life giving milk. Dogs have thousands of more receptors in their nose than humans do, which means that they have thousands of more things to explore and share with us, if we let them.
This morning I took Jack and Kelsey for a walk. We had a thunderstorm last night and it was still drizzling when we went out. Gene Kelly notwithstanding, I usually try to stay inside when it is raining, rather than sing, but Jack and Kelsey had important business to attend to. Business taken care of, they were on the hunt. Kelsey followed the trail of the ever elusive chipmunk, frequently seen but never captured. Jack was on the trail of something larger and led me to a large impression left in the wildflowers lining the yard. Something big had slept here last night. A deer? A moose? My dogs didn’t have the language to tell me or, more to the point, I didn’t have the capacity to speak their language, but they showed me their finds by leading me to each place that I would not have seen on my own. That is just one aspect of the magic of inter-species communication, one that could never be experienced if we just hauled around our dogs in baby carriers rather than allowing them to show and share their world with us.
I don’t think it is a coincidence, to use that well worn phrase that Dog is God spelled backwards. God wants so much to show us this world that God created but we want to limit God, contain God. Over fifty years ago J. B. Phillips wrote a book whose title says it all, Your God is Too Small. Its been said that God made humanity in His own image and that we have been trying to return the compliment ever since. It is nothing new to want to reduce God to something that we can carry around with us in our back pocket. But to do so reduces the wonder and majesty of God’s relationship with us. God chose to clothe Himself in humanity, to be one of us, so that He could lead the way, saying, “Look, your missing this path. Or, did you notice this wonderful impression over here that was left last night? What do you think it is? What do you think it could mean?” That is just one step from saying, “Did you notice the wonderful impression I have left on your heart? What do you think it could mean?”
Dogs are not people. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story that I am going to relate. And people are not God. Let dogs be dogs and God be God and see what wonderful things can come out of their Story.
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