We love our dogs because they love us. They open us to the Beauty of God’s creation in a way that is very real.
Dogs and the Hidden Life of Trees
Who are these dogs, these animals? They reflect the Logos Himself through their being, through their behaviours. All things are filled with God. Thus all things contain what St Maximos described as logos, reflections of Christ Himself. St Maximos the Confessor …
Every being–every blade of grass and cloud and animal–possesses its own individual, unrepeatable logos, the specific ‘thought-will’ of God that constitutes its being and meaning and identity, while at the same time mirroring the eternal Logos of God (Quoted from The Noetics of Nature, 194).
When we look at nature, at creation in such a way, we see these patterns of Beauty and Love. In the Hidden Life of Trees: What they Feel, How they Communicate–Discoveries from a Secret World, Peter Wohlleben, a forester, began noticing patterns of behaviour in trees that proved to him not just an order but a special logic of being that was very similar to our we as humans take care of each other, and the way animals take care of their young. One day while he was touring people through the forest he noticed a stump that had massive lumps all over it. He didn’t know what those lumps were until he probed further and found them to be full of chlorophyll. He realized that the surrounding trees were pumping this stump full of chlorophyll so that it would–in their ‘minds’–grow into a tree and be adequately sustained. He saw trees caring for their young by feeding them; he saw how trees would warn other trees through vibrations in their roots of threatening bug infections; he learned how trees would communicate directly with insects and vice versa.
Wohlleben …
But the most astonishing thing about trees is how social they are. The trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive. Only some stumps are thus nourished. Perhaps they are the parents of the trees that make up the forest of today. A tree’s most important means of staying connected to other trees is a “wood wide web” of soil fungi that connects vegetation in an intimate network that allows the sharing of an enormous amount of information and goods. Scientific research aimed at understanding the astonishing abilities of this partnership between fungi and plant has only just begun. The reason trees share food and communicate is that they need each other.
A Dog’s Purpose is the Love and Be Loved
I read somewhere in a book by a dog expert that the main goal or purpose of a dog is to love and be loved. And in the case of our dog Tikka and the other dogs I’ve had in the past and encountered this observation is very true.
The author of the book (whose name I can’t recall and the book I have lost somewhere in my library) tells the story of a man in the 19th Century who found his dog to be too burdensome. He had somehow grown to disdain the dog and wanted him gone. So he took the dog in his rowboat, sailed out into the Seine, and threw the dog into the water, and proceeded to push its head under the water to drown it. But while committing this heinous act, the man lost his balance and fell into the rushing waters. The man couldn’t swim. So what did the dog do to the one who had just attempted to drown him? He swam over to the man and struggled to keep the man’s head above water until a rescue team came and got both of them out of the river to safety.
I’m not sure if Tikka would have done this, but she did not hesitate to give us love and in turn gave us countless occasions to love her. She was always the first one to the door to greet people; and she greeted everyone as friends. When any of us were sad or injured, she would come to us and lay down next to us, sometimes even licking our wounds. She did have an issue with other dogs. But in those moments on walks when she would cause harm to us by lunging out at a dog and sometimes pulling us off our feet (in one instance dragging my at the time twelve year old daughter on her stomach across a gravel path to get to a squirrel) she would choose her timing and pad over to us, lower her head, and snuggle in.
She was the mollifier for bad days; she was the one who regulated out of control emotions; she was the one to greet with bright eyes and wagging tail at the end of your long day; she was the companion who lay under our desks warming our feet while we worked; she never retorted when I said bad things to her or were angry at her, and she never gloated when I praised her.
And when the priest came to perform our first house blessing in our current home, he blessed Tikka as well with holy water. Subsequent to that, it seemed, she would wait for me to bless her food with the sign of the cross before she ate. This past Theophany we had our priest come and bless the house. Tikka approached him while he was seated, and kissed his hand.
And when Tikka was very sick, after she had collapsed again and had vomited blood and was laying motionless on her dog bed that we had brought down to the living room for her to rest on, and having made the decision to put her down my sister in-law and her family came with tears in their eyes to say their goodbyes, Tikka stood up for them, and with a weakened wag of her tail greeted them and remained standing for a time as they petted her.
Animals Opening The Tender Hearted To the Reality of God
Now I’m writing this as if Tikka was a saint. I am not claiming she was a saint. Nevertheless, she did display behaviour that reflected what we would call saintliness. And I’m sure many dog owners would have similar stories. Part of what dogs do to us is create occasions for us to see them and the natural world as reflecting the Logos, Christ Himself. We see the order, the logic, the pattern, the meaning, the direction of the Eternal Logos reflected in them. And our eyes are somehow opened to their beauty. Is this not what saints do?
In his Encomium of praise to St Isaac the Syrian, the Greek iconographer Photios Kontaglou describes the noetic vision of the divine energies experienced by the humble and pure heart: “He will see another world, and he will hear another harmony which heretofore his calloused heart did not even expect. . . . The earth and the creatures of this world, which all of us see, will then take on an indescribable appearance and an unfading beauty (Noetics of Nature, 193).
Creation can break through to us when we struggle to become more open, more humble, more meek, more loving. God will open nature to us and we will glimpse its unfading beauty.
I believe dogs and our relationships with animals do that for us. I think of the story of a blind man in Greece who was left alone in the monastery other than the cat that would lead him wherever he needed to go. But again, we have to be open to it, to the gift of creatureliness. In such a state of awareness, the world becomes as it were mingled with God, and Creator and creation become one.
Dogs and the Poetic Soul
Perhaps this is what we love so much about dogs: they show us in real time this mingling of God and creation. Their meekness, constant embodiment of love and friendship open us right in the middle of our day to something other, a mystery that we simply cannot fathom.
How could God create such creatures? How could he create dogs for instance who just want to show love and be loved all the time? How does He create such amazing animals that love and serve us? How can a dog show me my sins more deeply than another human? How have they been created to have such a special bond with us and us with them, as if we glimpse heaven.
Such relations with our dogs, with other animals, help us to cultivate a poetic soul, as St Porphyrios writes about. That in working with and relating to animals we see more of God’s love in and through everything. And we are mutually–human and animal–bringing more beauty and order to the world. That animals fulfill their purpose through us, and we, as priests of creation, partially through them.
For as Zossima says in the Brothers Karamazov,
Love all of God’s creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing you will perceive the mystery of God in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it each day.
May our daily interactions and relationships with our dogs, our animals, foster in us a poetic soul; to see the Beauty of the Lord in them, and be transformed.
