Lent Pupdate
Last December, at the beginning of Advent, we had to put down our beloved dog, Rowan. (I wrote a piece, “The Love of Dog,” about his decline in the fall.) This week, early in Lent, we got a new puppy. Immediately, Mary Oliver’s poem came to mind:
A puppy is a puppy is a puppy.
He’s probably in a basket with a bunch
of other puppies.
Then he’s a little older and he’s nothing
but a bundle of longing.
He doesn’t even understand it.
Then someone picks him up and says,
“I want this one.”
Getting a puppy seems the most un-Lenten of things. We’re feasting on fuzzy love. But, in just seventy-two hours, the little guy has turned our lives upside down. We’d forgotten how little sleep new puppy parents get. And we’d also forgotten how funny, cute, helpless, demanding, untamed, and adorable puppies are.
Mary Oliver loved them, seeing dogs as the ultimate liminal creatures — one paw in the domesticated world, the other in the world of wildness.
“Some things are unchangeably wild, others are stolidly tame. The tiger is wild, and the coyote, and the owl. I am tame, you are tame. There are wild things that have been altered, but only into a semblance of tameness, it is no real change. But the dog lives in both worlds.”
“The Summer Day” is arguably Oliver’s most quoted poem. In it, her attentiveness to a grasshopper raises the question: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
If a grasshopper leads to the question of our hidden wildness, the liminal dog can guide each of us to discover the answer within. In a prose poem, Oliver imagines the dream life of dogs — and seems to insist that our dreams can likewise aid in finding our truest, undomesticated selves:
“Wolf faces appear in dreams. He finds himself running over incredible lush or barren stretches of land, nothing any of us has ever seen. . . The dreaming dog leaps through the underbrush, enters the earth through a narrow tunnel, and is home. . . where he was almost wild again and knew nothing else but that life, no other possibility. A world of trees and dogs and the white moon, the nest, the breast, the heart-warming milk! The think-mantled ferocity at the end of the tunnel, known as father, a warrior he himself would grow to be.”
What would we see at the end of the tunnel, if we burrowed deep to find the earth our home? If we truly knew home, what wild life would we know? Would we see ourselves as strong, brave, and true to who we were always meant to be? Would we see our “Father,” the shining presence of God, who is the very image of the love and mercy our lives should reflect? Some Christians fear that which is “undomesticated” in our lives — yet it may well be that that part of us is nearer the mystery of God.
Mary Oliver invites us to consider that possibility: “For wilderness is our first home, too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world.”
Ultimately, Lent is about that — burrowing into our souls to see the divine joy and “ferocity” that dwells within. During this season, God opens weary hearts to the magic of the sacred, stripping away everything that obscures the awe that pulses through all creation.
Perhaps getting a new puppy is one of the best Lenten disciplines I’ve ever embraced.
Most of today’s quotes are from Dog Songs. For the entire list of Mary Oliver’s books, including Dog Songs, please visit her website HERE.
Wonderful things. . . may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you.
— Mary Oliver, “Ropes” in Dog Songs
INSPIRATION
We become religious,
then we turn from it,
then we are in need and maybe we turn back.
We turn to making money,
then we turn to the moral life,
then we think about money again.
We meet wonderful people, but lose them
in our busyness.
We’re, as the saying goes, all over the place.
Steadfastness, it seems,
is more about dogs than about us.
One of the reasons we love them so much.
— Mary Oliver, “How It Is With Us, and How It Is With Them,” from Dog Songs