Reading · Church Blogmatics by Beth Felker Jones

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Fellow Pilgrims,

We got the Puppy when my youngest child was three years old. We’re up North in Chicago, and the breeder, from Southern Illinois, agreed to meet us halfway. The Puppy, I should note, was meant to be a surprise, but my husband—designated to drive the four hours to pick up the dog while I was at work—needed to take the preschooler with him.

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The preschooler did not want to miss preschool. Preschool had puzzles and dinosaurs and two lovely teachers who doted on the children. (Those same teachers would show up for my daughter’s graduation party in another 13 years.)

How to get a determined little boy to relinquish preschool for the day? The solution was to tell him about the Puppy, and his dad instructed him not to tell his siblings.

Of course he told them.

I imagine their days at school were almost unbearable with aching, anxious, full of excited longing to get home and meet our new love. I can hear their happy voices on coming home to embrace that fluffy brown teddy bear of a creature.

In The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis suggests:

“It may well be that certain animals attain immortality, not in their own right, but by being remembered and loved by man.”

He understands animal existence in relationship to God and to human beings, and it’s precisely in that relationship that he imagines an eschatological future for them.

“It would not be strange,” says Lewis,

“if God loved all the life He has made, even the humblest... and that in His final world, nothing beautiful shall be wholly lost.”

In a 1962 letter Lewis reflected back on this, noting that such “guesses” could only come from “taking seriously the resurrection of the body.”

The Puppy saw us through preschool, elementary, middle, and half of high school for the boy who never should have been asked to keep her a secret.

She walked with us through dance competitions, school plays, tennis matches, and piano recitals. She was there for tantrums, learning to ride bikes, Christmases and Easters, job changes, puberties, and great griefs.

We added to our pack when the dog was about four, bringing home a Springer Spaniel who, for the next decade, would be the world’s most dutiful Beta dog to the Puppy.

On the older boy’s birthday, we gave him a framed picture of our new dog, and he immediately became anxious, even suggesting we should cancel the plan. He was worried about our first dog, our Puppy.

There was no need to worry. Love expands and overlaps. Love is exponential.

Beta Spaniel learned everything she knows from the Puppy: which weeds to eat, which spots to sniff, where to roll in glory in the grass. Beta became the puppy’s conscience. Puppy was always too smart for her own good and so secure in our love that she never agreed to, say, stop trying to steal boxes of donuts off the counter. Puppy stole the donuts and Beta slunk about in shame. Puppy ripped the trash open and Beta gave us mournful eyes. What will Beta do now, this walking conscience without her criminal, this furry penitent minus her sinner?

In his 1781 sermon, “The General Deliverance,” John Wesley makes it clear that the kingdom of God, which is to come, includes all of creation:

“I doubt not that the Father of All has a tender regard for even his lowest creatures, and that, in consequence of this, he will make them large amends for all they suffer while under their present bondage.”

Not only do dogs have a forever future in the love of God, so do donkeys and cats and insects and flowers.

Why should God to this, asks Wesley? Well:

“to illustrate that mercy of God which ‘is over all his works.’ And it may exceedingly confirm our belief that, much more, he ‘is loving to every man.’”

Wesley encourages us to “imitate Him” and to

“soften our hearts towards the meaner creatures, knowing that the Lord careth for them.”

The Puppy began to decline about a year ago. She was still happy, but she was slower, grayer. She who had always followed me everywhere would now skip the stairs and wait for me to return to the first floor.

But slow decline never prepares you for sudden endings. She had what we presume was a stroke, something gone wrong with one eye, unable to get up from her bed, head bobbing in the air.

We lifted her up, still on her bed, and took her to the vet. We had to take two cars to make room for both dogs and all the family members. I was in the front car and went in to tell them we were there, when Puppy came running in, her tail wagging. “Puppy,” I said, “are you alright?” just as her legs gave out behind her. She loved the vet. Arriving there gave her one last burst of happy motion, one last tail wag.

But she was done, and we gathered around her to say goodbye. “Good girl,” we said, and “we love you.” The people at the vet’s office were unfailingly kind.

The vet’s office sends a sympathy card. It includes a poem about a “rainbow bridge.” Google doesn’t record many uses of the phrase before it picks up in the late 1990s and continues to rise exponentially from there. Before that, references seem to be to fairy tales or rock formations, but at some point internet poetry posited the “rainbow bridge” as a bit of eschatology for beloved pets, a place where they would cross over to the other side while waiting for we who love them to join them.

Said rainbow bridge is meant to take lost pets to a beautiful meadow when they wait for us so we can go together with them into heaven. It posits a non-purgative purgatory for animals, a happy limbo space.

This is, of course, nonsense, if we were to suppose it refers to something real about the metaphysical architecture of the universe. There is no biblical or other persuasive reason to posit such a “place,” but that exponential rise in mentions shows that it’s not nonsense in the sense that it gets at something deep in the human heart. How we love our pets. How we want, for them, a future. And Christian eschatology gives us something better than a rainbow bridge. It gives us the new heavens and the new earth, the restoration of all creation for the Kingdom of God.

We measure our lives in dogs. Losing the puppy of my kiddo’s childhoods felt like the end of something in me too. I feel it deep; I’m that much closer to my own mortality, my graying slowdown. It breaks me in a new way.

The real horror of the destruction of nature so much bigger than the loss of a family pet. And yet it’s in the relationship—the personal relationship between me and my labradoodle—that the horror and the weight is felt. The real glory of the restoration of nature, of God’s promise to deliver all things, is bigger than the family pet too, but where could I feel it more strongly than when the Puppy greets me, not in heaven, but in the resurrection of the body, in the kingdom that has no end?

Christian theology rejects pantheism, and it’s important to get that right before we’re able to marvel at the wonders and the beauty of creation, the bees, the flowers, and the perfect whiskers on my old dog. The world is not God.

My dog is not God. God is Other-holy-beyond-transdencent-mysterium-tremendum-unimaginable. It’s only when we’ve cast our minds and hearts into those fathomless waters and come up, unable to understand but in awe, that we’re able to glimpse how miraculous it is that the Holy-Other-God should choose to make and know and love the bees and the flowers and the dogs.

If the dog were a little a bit of God, that God would be quite underwhelming, and I say that as quite the lover of dogs. If the dog were a little bit of God, then the loss of the dog would be true despair. But if the dog is not God—while at the same time God chooses to work love in the dog and in my love for the dog—then what a gift of grace we encounter, when we pat that fluffy head.

Dogs don’t go to heaven. They’re held in God’s love until the restoration of all things. I don’t want a ghost dog. I want flesh and blood and fur.

One more quote from C.S. Lewis:

“If a good sheepdog seems to us almost human, that is because it is so nearly divine.”

If a dog is not God, how wondrous that we should glimpse divine love there. We love our pets, and love never ends. It wouldn’t be surprising if our days were almost unbearable with aching, anxious, full of excited longing to get home and meet our loves once more.