When my friend was picking up his new puppy from a breeder, the breeder asked him where the dog would sleep. My friend explained that they had a little kennel ready for the dog.

“Okay,” she said, “that’s good for when the puppy is little, but how about when it grows? I mean, will the dog sleep outside or in the house?”

The puppy was going to be a family dog, he said, so he imagined that once potty training was accomplished, the dog would sleep beside their bed.

“Or maybe in it!” the breeder exclaimed. “A dog in your bed is one of the best parts of life! There’s nothing more relaxing than falling asleep with your dog curled up against your body, or cuddling in bed together on a lazy Saturday morning. I love it. For me, that’s total peace and rest.”

Dog in the bed or dog somewhere else? This is a question every couple must decide. Kara and I settled on dog on the floor, but in the mornings, Kirby would sneak into our bed and wriggle his soft, black body in between Kara and me. Before we had kids, he was our family and our reminder that family always starts close up and personal. The clock could be ignored. The stuff that had to get done could wait. To begin a day right, we first had to do some serious snuggling together.

That priority gets quickly forgotten in the frenzy of our days, I’ve found. We live in a 24/7 world, plugged in, powered up, and accessible night and day, where the boundaries between work and home life have become hopelessly blurred. We forget how to slow down, how to be fully here before we rush off to there, how to master being before doing.

Dogs have no such problem. Dogs force us to stop and put down work. They need to be walked, brushed, and cuddled, and their need is grace to us, demanding that we stop and tend to our own souls as we tend to their needs. Dogs don’t care if we made VP yet, checked off all the items on our to-do list, reached our ideal weight, or cleaned the garage. They give us permission to rest. They recognize our worth simply because we exist and we’re their humans. They tell us to enjoy life as it is, not as we are working for it to become.

What a remedy for the soul this can be!

Sometimes, when I felt super busy and stressed out, I would find Kirby conked out on the couch, legs splayed, not a care in the world, and I would feel a pang of jealousy. Why couldn’t I be that free? Why couldn’t I live in the moment, like a dog napping in a sunbeam?

Then I came to realize that this reminder was itself a gift. By his example, Kirby could draw me back—if I let him—to a simpler, better quality of life. Nearly every form of spirituality or religion teaches that we must be attentive to the now. And here was Kirby, my live-in reminder to live gratefully in the present.

So, really, I see it as a choice. We can think of our dog as a beast that makes constant, primitive demands and sprawls over the couch we worked hard to pay for. Or we can see him as a natural-born spiritual director and healer, one who excels at helping us receive the eternal that’s waiting in each moment.

Comfort in Trauma

I’ve always been fascinated with the capacity of dogs to sneak into our ordinary days and show us, in the words of Jesus, that the Kingdom of God is already here and among us. I’m not saying this is the exclusive ministry of a dog, mind you. A sunset over your favorite lake or a deep conversation with a friend can do that, too, as can sitting with a dead bird as it dies, or hearing the sound of your baby’s laugh, or, if you’re lucky enough to visit Florence in your lifetime, the majestic beaconing of the Duomo.

What dogs might do best, though, is show us God in the very worst of times. Take these opening lines from a New York Times article in June of 2016:

On the Monday following the Orlando massacre, 12 golden retrievers arrived in the Florida city. They had come to offer comfort to some of the victims of the attack, the families of those killed and the emergency medical workers, as well as anyone else in the city in need of some canine affection after the deadliest shooting in American history.1

The highly trained animals were part of the K-9 Comfort Dogs team based in Northbrook, Illinois, and this wasn’t their first outing. They had brought consolation to victims after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, too, and to the aftermath of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting before that. The Comfort Dogs excel at providing a feeling of safety, at inviting people to let down their guard and express their vulnerability in the midst of traumatic circumstances.

“Dogs show unconditional love,” a program spokesperson told the paper. “We’ve had a lot of people here that start petting the dog, and they break out crying.”

The truth is, for centuries dogs have brought solace to humans going through hell. The thirteenth-century saint Roch, of Montpellier, France, is known as the patron saint of dogs. His story shows why. Roch was a wealthy young man born with a red birthmark on his chest in the shape of a cross. After the death of his mother, he feared that he had not been living in a way that honored the mark of the cross on his body, which he understood as a calling to serve God fully. So he sold all he had, gave the proceeds to the poor, and went on a pilgrimage. According to some accounts, all he took with him was the family dog.

At the time of Roch’s pilgrimage, the bubonic plague was ravaging Europe, reducing the populations of major cities such as Florence by up to a third. It must have felt like the Apocalypse. Yet, in these awful years, Roch took up a ministry to those who were routinely abandoned as soon as the plague struck and left to die alone.

Where others shrank back, Roch and his dog would approach the sick without fear. The dog would lie down next to sufferers and lick the sores that often accompanied the disease. Roch saw that the dog’s patients improved; some even healed completely, and even those who remained sick nonetheless seemed to recover their humanity. Watching the dog’s ways with the sick inspired Roch. To him, the dog was a witness to these beleaguered communities that even the very ill among them were still human, still deserving of recognition.

When Roch himself came down with the plague, he retreated to a small hunter’s shed, expecting to die alone, but his dog refused to leave his side, and tended to him until he recovered. After he was healed, Roch and his dog continued to minister to others.

In times when evil and suffering seem to prevail, an animal without the gift of speech can remind us of the truth we need but can no longer recall. Thomas Merton’s words distill this well: “We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time.”

The Paws of Peace

As we saw in the snuggle scene at the top of this chapter, the healing gifts often come on a smaller scale, and in quieter moments, too. Yet this doesn’t make them any less important.

As a child, I struggled with reading, especially reading aloud. I know well the paralysis that comes with performance anxiety: the mind goes blank, the words get stuck, and nothing comes out. If I was worried what the teacher thought, how I ranked, how I was doing, what my friends were thinking, I was cooked. Everything I had learned about how to read would fail me. What would have helped me, but what I unfortunately never had, was the ministry of a reading dog.

Today, elementary schools and libraries across the country have programs for kids who are like I was. For example, a few days a week at schools in the Northeast, leaders from the Good Dog Foundation bring dogs to the school library. A child sits down on the floor next to a dog and reads aloud from a book. There is something magical about it. After lying next to Pepper, a slightly overweight border collie, and reading him a book, seven-year-old Jessicah, who has always hated reading, says to the volunteer, “[He] loves when I tell him stories. I think he likes stories about turtles best, and so do I. He’s the coolest dog in the whole world.”2

I can vividly imagine what it would be like to be the child in that situation. To read to a dog whose big eyes took me in with simple pleasure, who laid her head on my lap with absolute ease to listen to my voice, would have made for an entirely different experience. The dog would have exuded patience, unconditional acceptance, and peace. The words I botched terribly would have captivated the dog every bit as much as the ones read perfectly. In that one-on-one relationship, the anxiety, self-doubt, and panic I used to feel about not being able to do something would have faded. I would have become free simply to be.

That’s the power of a dog’s attention. It moves us out of powerlessness, granting us the clear sense that we matter, that our timeline is the right one, that everything is going to be just fine. Barbara Christy, a third-grade teacher and facilitator of the reading club, concurs, saying, “Kids who used to slink into a room are walking tall, with their shoulders back and head[s] up. One young man used to stutter; now his speech is nearly stutter-free. I tell everyone there’s magic occurring every week in this classroom.”3

I’ll admit, the theologian in me sees at work in this little scenario not magic but the ministry of God. Whether it’s Kirby on my couch or a reading dog with an insecure kid in a school library, in both scenarios I see a powerful invitation to experience Sabbath. Sabbath is a ritual where we put down all our striving and simply rest, by God’s invitation, in God’s promise and provision. It is a time for healing. It reminds us that no matter what the world says about us, or what we say about ourselves, only another, higher power has the final say—that, at least for this moment, all is well.