Robert
Lyon is a retired clergyman who divides his time between
Guelph, Ontario and Melaque, Mexico. He taught high
school English, Latin, Greek and science, and served
as an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserve,
retiring in the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. His latest
book, Don’t Throw Out Your Bible, from
which the essay below is excerpted, is now in print.
If
you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous
he will not bite you.
This is the principal difference
between a dog and man.
Mark Twain
A
local Facebook post about a lost dog led me recently to
pick up a collar-less puppy who looked very much like
the posted photo, when I spotted him roaming the street
outside a local coffee shop. Took him to the woman who
had posted the notice, but she said, in Spanish, “Not
my dog.” It would have been unconscionable to dump
him back on the street again, so I took him home. The
bond was instant. He sticks to me like glue. I’m
thinking he has separation anxiety from a previous dump.
He spends the night snuggled up on top of the covers,
so I’m constantly laundering doggy hair, but never
mind that. I never had at dog when I was younger, so it
was a bit of a revelation to discover how much and how
quickly one could love this lamb-white love-bug who lies
at my feet each night. Love-bug. Lamb-white. Lies beside
me. Lyon lies down with the lamb. My apologies to Isaiah.
But
maybe Isaiah was on to something that had never much registered
with me. So as I lay there one night, Dog-with-no-name
got me thinking about the nature of love. Bishop Robert
Barron regularly cites Thomas Aquinas’ view that
“love is willing the good of the other." And
I have no doubt that Aquinas was right. Certainly that’s
how I feel about Dog-with-no-name, and that’s why
I’m delighted that some heroic friends have found
him the forever home in Canada that I can’t provide
and made the arrangements to get him there. Bishop Barron
also says that the Holy Spirit is the love that unites
the Father and the Son. Not sure I get that – Is
he speaking in metaphor or metaphysics? In whatever way
he means it, it certainly implies that love is the motive
force at the heart of the universe – or as many
popular songs have said, “Love makes the world go
‘round”. That fits well with St John’s
“God is love” (1 John 4:8) and “If we
love one another, God abides in us” (1 John 4:12).
Then
there’s also that line from the Flood story, where
the writer emphasizes the scope of the covenant that God
gave to Noah. He says “it’s [not just] with
[Noah] and [his] descendants [but] with every living creature
in [his] company, with any bird or beast or animal that
leaves the ark, [and] with every beast of the earth”
(Genesis 9:9f). To the writer of Genesis, God’s
covenant extends even to Dog-with-no-name lying peacefully
at my feet. I used to think that the hymn “All things
bright and beautiful” was hokey and had little relevance
to the gospel. How wrong that was! God’s covenant
extends to “all creatures great and small”
because he loves the world he made and that’s why
he chooses to redeem and renew it. Dog-with-no-name instinctively
knows that. He craves the same things the rest of us need:
to live, to belong, to be wanted and valued, to be safe.
And that, to Dog-with-no-name, is the essence of love.
And
being a dog, he thrives on predictability, order and routine.
As do most of us. In fact, we have a craving for order:
change makes us antsy; predictability feels safe. Maybe
that’s why many ancient creation myths imagine the
gods bringing order out of chaos. But the story at Genesis
1:2 goes one better: it starts back even before the chaos
and says that at the beginning everything was tohu and
vohu – “without form and void. Both words
mean empty, vacant, deserted, nothingness. God created
an ordered universe out of nothing! “Creatio ex
nihilo.” And he called that order “good.”
By contrast, and not surprisingly, the Greek word diabolos,
from which we get ‘devi,’ means one who scatters,
throws things about, creates disorder. So we recognize
that order is good and desirable, while disorder is bad
and undesirable. Cancer is a disorder; healing is the
restoration of order. So we love order, because our existence
depends on it.
Since
1957 scientists have enhanced the idea of that order with
the anthropic principle – from the Greek word anthropos
= ‘man,’ ‘human.’ That’s
the idea that the conditions for life, and particvularly
intelligent life, are all ordered in our favour. According
to the anthropic principle, we live in the best possible
world for human survival. If things were hotter or colder,
wetter or drier, bigger or smaller, farther or nearer,
faster or slower, our survival would be challenged. It
leads one to suspect that there is something more than
just good luck at play here.
Of
course, chaos does regularly intrude upon this order at
all levels. How we might understand that is a topic for
another day. But until then, let it be said that God in
love absorbs and redirects that chaos, as he did preeminently
on that first Easter weekend. If that is so, then love
is not just what I feel for you or you feel for me --
though it is that, too -- but it is (if I may be presumptuous
in trying to describe God) the motive and integrative
force in the heart of the universe. We live in a universe
that was created in love, is sustained in love, was redeemed
in love, and is being and will be renewed in love. Coutts-Hallmark
used to have a slogan about “when you care to send
the very best.” In creation, providence and redemption,
God has sent us his very best. And one part of God’s
‘best’ was a stray dog with no name who helped
me to see that with fresh eyes.
