November 21, 2013
All successful people make priorities: it is a key element of success, divining that which must be attended to, from that which need not, or might be attended to after more pressing concerns are addressed.
Which is what makes the love of an animal such an anomaly in the life of an organized, analytical, goal-oriented individual. You needn't project that I write about myself: I freely admit that I am besotted my puppy dog, "Beau".
To look at a living thing, realize its helplessness, conclude that you are able to lessen its fraught existence, then find that the selfsame rationale of your head has in fact, struck deeply into your heart--is to sum up the emotion that has taken over my existence since I brought the little brown dog from South Carolina home.
The dog is not a "toy" --it cannot be put down and to the side when I tire of it. And with each gesture I make in acknowledgement of its unique way of summoning me, I realize that I enter into an intimate relationship with an animal, not a human being. So Beau can't talk back to me, and he can't hurt me, because he will never assume that I want anything but the best for him. Even when he thinks that I oughtn't to have exercised my authority over him-- say, by putting him in his crate while I go briefly out-- after a point he resigns himself to not getting his way. And never holds against me that I made the decision to coop him up.
What I find most curious is that, at one level, I am parroting all the clichés about why owning a dog is desirable: "He's a good companion", "He's been so easy to housebreak". At another, the truth is, he's not perfect: he makes demands on my energies, he still needs to be watched, he needs to be cleaned up after once in a while.
What I would be less likely to forgive in a fellow-human, I willingly forgive in this little thing. Is it because I know he will only, as the years go on, become a more physically strong variation on what he is now, never developing independently of me, as a child does? Is it because I know that he will, even more, as the years go on (should I live so long with my forces relatively intact), need me to shelter him as his strength ebbs? Is it because we may, at this point, grow old together in more or less the same rhythm?
I had a professor of the law that governs the first amendment of the Constitution, a Jesuit who specialized in freedom of religion cases. His teaching method was to ask Socratically what our Constitution meant when it guaranteed religious liberty, even as he explained to us what the Justices of the country's highest Court said it meant. The professor was also a priest, and a Jesuit, at that. He married my husband and I, and he knew us for many years. There was no one whose insights I cherished more.
So I asked him one day, "I love our dogs so much. Will they be with us in heaven? They don't have souls, so does that exclude them?"
His answer was that at one time, it would have been categorically stated that animals did not have souls. He quoted Saint Thomas Aquinas, the theologian whose writings are the foundation of Catholic faith. Saint Thomas distinguished between man --a creature with a soul, and the power to discern right from wrong-- and animals like the whale, whose migrations from ocean to ocean are guided by instinct, rather than thought.
However, this priest concluded (in a flourish wholly Jesuitical), that today it was not uniformly accepted that Saint Thomas Aquinas had got it completely right when thinking about animals as a group, when so many clear distinctions appear between what one species can apprehend and another. So the migratory instinct of whales could be distinguished, say, from the devotion of "Fala", the Scottish Terrier to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom many witnesses swore had a preternatural intelligence when it came to FDR.
My professor-priest wrapped up the subject with a more telling question:
"The question isn't really, though, whether your dogs will get into heaven--"
And at this point, he leaned in towards me a little bit, to make his point--
"--But will you?"
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