The Way of the Dog

I like dogs—or at least certain breeds of dogs.  On reflection, maybe I don’t like dogs so much as I like the response I have always gotten from certain breeds of dogs: immediately friendly, desirous to please, inquisitive, generally come to people rather than try to run away,  loyal to their master, quick to forgive, obedient,  expressively happy.  Memories of Labrador retrievers I have owned or been around come to mind.  But even Labs have their faults.

 As soon as you give them a bath their first desire is, in C. S. Lewis’ words, “to race off to reacquire their comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed.”

 

The way of the person is, too often, much the same.  Ever since the Fall, men who get too far away—or too long away—from their Master find it easier and easier to get dirty.  To mix the metaphor slightly, dogs, people, sheep tend to get dirty, tend to too easily hearken to other masters, tend to get lost.  Not that they want to get dirty or get lost—but it happens, especially when they are around other alien (to their spirits) influences too long.

People were sent to this earth to become ‘added upon’—added upon by experience, by knowledge, by passing the tests of being faithful to the light they were endowed with at birth, by accumulating the ‘oil’ for their lamps that would one day be needful—oil of acts of kindness, of resisting harmful temptations, of using their gifts in the service of others, of faithfulness.
  

But in the process of living, all creatures ( ture=loved, creat= creation) get dirty.  They were not sent to this earth to get more and more befouled and farther and farther from their Master, but to become more and more like Him.  One way or another they need to become clean once again—if not just for judgment, and for a happy homecoming, then for reassignment.
 

He calls us back to Him by his love, his light, the attraction of the Plan He has for us.  But the way of the dog, or of the man is to not easily surrender to the Master’s invitations to return to Him as long as all seems to be going well—but in reality is going wrong.  If gentleness and meekness, and love unfeigned do not effect a return, the Master will use other means of persuasion.  Lewis, as always, puts it best:

            We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down . . . food will admit that we can ignore even pleasure.  But pain insists upon being attended to.  God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains (physical or emotional) :  it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”