I awoke at 2 a.m. this morning with the sweet ache behind my eyes and corresponding hollowness in the breast bones that come from crying the night before. Sunday morning our dog Annie lay down on the braided rug in front of the dryer and stayed there until late afternoon when her old and anxious heart stopped, as my wife, whose fierce and tender heart sensed the day before what might be suddenly coming, stroked her red coat.
There are plenty of very good reasons not to write of the death of a dog, especially in a place like this, and especially on the morning right after. Personal emotional experiences can put the person and the emotion too much in the center for anything else to be seen. But the emotions are among the basic equipment we’re given to perceive the world we’re given to, as surely as our clunky rational hardware is.
As I lay awake in the dark, I did what I know I shouldn’t, and almost never do on sleepless nights. I tapped open my phone. But not in search of distraction. I searched out a piece by a writer whom I’ve come to only lately. One of the few I know who can weep in his own essay without getting in the way. His name is Brian Doyle, and here’s part of what I went looking for on my phone so the reading light wouldn’t wake Ardelle:
"I suspect all beings of every sort do pause and revere occasionally, and even if we think, with our poor piddly perceptive apparatus, that they are merely reaching for the sun, or drying their wings, or meditating in the subway station between trains, or chalking the lines of a baseball field ever so slowly and meticulously, perhaps they are praying in their own peculiar, particular ways. Who is to say? Who can define that which is a private message to an Inexplicable Recipient? So that he who says a scrawny plane tree straining for light in a city alley is not a prayer does not know what he is saying, and his words are wind and dust."*
What the sanest of the Desert Mothers and Fathers apprehended is not that humans are an entirely different order of creation and that the bodily appetites must be denied because we are special spiritual beings. Their work was to trim away whatever kept them from burning with love. And not as a project in personal piety, even as hermits. If there’s any wisdom in their way it’s in the notion that a life burning of love is not blinded. It sees further into the way things are because everything that is was conceived in love, by love, for love. Which means the whole creation groans and stretches and leans toward God. Not just us humans, but sunflowers and moths and scrawny plane trees in city alleys and, yes, even dogs that fire up love in us as a deeply felt emotion that seems to have no usefulness beyond its delight in who these fellow creatures are.
Increasingly, I believe that even such loves, even such emotions as these, are part of our peculiar, human way of straining toward the light right along with the rest of creation. They are not what distinguishes us from other creatures, but might just be how it feels to be drawn viscerally into the redemption of all things that Easter is truly about.
It is said that Abba Lot went to Abba Joseph and said, “Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” The old man stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.”
Old Abba Joseph, with fingers like lamps of fire, doesn’t sound like someone afraid to feel deeply. If he lived in such a way so as to beat back the judgment and resentments and anger and fear that so often overtake our hearts, perhaps it was to make room for a Love that he prayed would consume him entirely one day, right along with the rest of creation.
And so, what I wonder is this. When have you been overtaken by an emotion — whether heartbreak over a loss or a clear instant of joy — that was born entirely (or nearly so) of love? Can such moments be portals into the interconnectedness of all things, created in love as they are? Might they even be forms of prayer…ways that your life is also straining towards the light?
There are plenty of very good reasons not to write of the death of a dog, especially in a place like this, and especially on the morning right after. Personal emotional experiences can put the person and the emotion too much in the center for anything else to be seen. But the emotions are among the basic equipment we’re given to perceive the world we’re given to, as surely as our clunky rational hardware is.
As I lay awake in the dark, I did what I know I shouldn’t, and almost never do on sleepless nights. I tapped open my phone. But not in search of distraction. I searched out a piece by a writer whom I’ve come to only lately. One of the few I know who can weep in his own essay without getting in the way. His name is Brian Doyle, and here’s part of what I went looking for on my phone so the reading light wouldn’t wake Ardelle:
"I suspect all beings of every sort do pause and revere occasionally, and even if we think, with our poor piddly perceptive apparatus, that they are merely reaching for the sun, or drying their wings, or meditating in the subway station between trains, or chalking the lines of a baseball field ever so slowly and meticulously, perhaps they are praying in their own peculiar, particular ways. Who is to say? Who can define that which is a private message to an Inexplicable Recipient? So that he who says a scrawny plane tree straining for light in a city alley is not a prayer does not know what he is saying, and his words are wind and dust."*
What the sanest of the Desert Mothers and Fathers apprehended is not that humans are an entirely different order of creation and that the bodily appetites must be denied because we are special spiritual beings. Their work was to trim away whatever kept them from burning with love. And not as a project in personal piety, even as hermits. If there’s any wisdom in their way it’s in the notion that a life burning of love is not blinded. It sees further into the way things are because everything that is was conceived in love, by love, for love. Which means the whole creation groans and stretches and leans toward God. Not just us humans, but sunflowers and moths and scrawny plane trees in city alleys and, yes, even dogs that fire up love in us as a deeply felt emotion that seems to have no usefulness beyond its delight in who these fellow creatures are.
Increasingly, I believe that even such loves, even such emotions as these, are part of our peculiar, human way of straining toward the light right along with the rest of creation. They are not what distinguishes us from other creatures, but might just be how it feels to be drawn viscerally into the redemption of all things that Easter is truly about.
It is said that Abba Lot went to Abba Joseph and said, “Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” The old man stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.”
Old Abba Joseph, with fingers like lamps of fire, doesn’t sound like someone afraid to feel deeply. If he lived in such a way so as to beat back the judgment and resentments and anger and fear that so often overtake our hearts, perhaps it was to make room for a Love that he prayed would consume him entirely one day, right along with the rest of creation.
And so, what I wonder is this. When have you been overtaken by an emotion — whether heartbreak over a loss or a clear instant of joy — that was born entirely (or nearly so) of love? Can such moments be portals into the interconnectedness of all things, created in love as they are? Might they even be forms of prayer…ways that your life is also straining towards the light?
*Doyle, B. (2020). A Father’s Day Prayer. Retrieved 20 April 2020, from https://blog.franciscanmedia.org/sam/a-fathers-day-prayer
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