Lulu and the Supreme Human Art

By David F. White

Like many people, I share a home with a dog. Lulu (Christian name, Luisa) is a three-year-old, ninety-pound Golden Retriever that my wife and I raised from a small pup. She is a big, furry, yellow, throw pillow, who lounges in our home on any bed or sofa she chooses. My wife and I pass her dozens of times each day wherever she is enthroned; we speak to her, rub her ears, take her on walks, throw the ball for her, and ply her with treats. Although Lulu is exceedingly proud when she succeeds in returning the ball, she is not an athlete like our Border Collies of blessed memory who delighted in running and leaping to great heights to catch a frisbee. Lulu is mostly content to sit near at hand and gaze adoringly between naps and delicious treats. Each night she jumps onto whatever sofa or chair I am sitting on and lays her head in my lap, within easy reach of my caress. Sometimes she speaks to us in perfect English, with a slight Mid-Atlantic accent (think Kate Hepburn) or so I imagine. She asks, ever so politely, “What is for dinner?” or “When might I expect a walk?” She inquires about my day, offers sympathy for my hardships and support for my perseverance. When I come home beleaguered, she crouches in her play stance to say, “Hey come on, sad sack. Life is good! Catch me if you can!” Lulu comes to our bed each night to tuck us in, wish us pleasant dreams, and pray compline with us. Never does she miss a night offering us this blessing.

In the morning, she entreats me to walk with her to survey her parish and minister to her parishioners. She introduces me to neighbor children, to widows who furnish her with treats, and especially to college students who cut through our neighborhood on their way to campus and whom she seems to recognize as members of her own secret monastic order or lost tribe of pups. On our morning walking ministries, each new scent betokens late-breaking news as she hoists her muzzle in the breeze to extract every bit of available gossip. She is my spiritual guide who directs my attention to things I might ordinarily miss—babbling streams, frogs, egrets, our neighbor’s red poppies, the community’s squirrel bandits, the best lawns for legs-in-the-air back scratching, God’s grace shed abroad amid the flora and fauna of our little piece of the planet.

Whatever modicum of virtue I manifest would not be nearly so evident without her. Somehow amid our walks, blessings, treats, and ministrations, my heart grows a tiny bit larger. I simply cannot dwell alongside such a creature and be mean or petty. She does not allow me to retreat inside my introversion or fearful egoism. Her beauty, and the mysteries she manifests, recruits me, makes covenant with me, and calls me into communion with the world, beginning with my neighborhood.

Here’s the thing—please don’t judge—I do not, as you might have guessed, perceive her as a “mere” dog (as if there is such a thing). When I look at her soulful gaze, noble muzzle, endless curiosity, her continual benediction, I see—well, royalty. I imagine that she is a royal emissary or perhaps a theophany from a wise and benevolent world sent to heal my twisted soul and those whom I love. It is sometimes said that pets remind us of our materiality, but the opposite seems more likely—they remind us of our spirituality. My testimony stands within a long history of literature such as, for example, Wind in the Willows and Winnie the Pooh, in which animals are portrayed as sources of wisdom and spiritual insight.

I know how all of this must sound to a Freudian or Jungian who would doubtless interpret my fanciful account as me projecting some hidden aspect of my psyche onto the flat screen of Lulu’s dog-ness. But try as I might, I simply cannot reduce our attachment to a mere projection or fantasy. I describe her poetically or mythologically because other languages (biological, psychological, economic, etc.) seem to reduce her to an object and obscure the depth I discern in her.

My quarrel is not so much with analytic psychology as with the vision which is background to all modern science. Rene Descartes’s vision of humans as “thinking things” emphasizes the power of pure reason and reduces the created world as objects to be mastered, obscuring their mystery, and suppressing our wonder. Charles Taylor has characterized modernity as a transition from a self “porous” to the world to one “buffered” against the world by mental boundaries.1 Today, especially, artists and mystics seem to be awakening from the spell of Enlightenment rationalism. They know that within the ordinary world there lies mystery which can be rendered by art, poetry, or myth.

Creatively rendering the world’s mystery finds resonance in Christian theology. Today, certain theologians are reclaiming medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas’s vision of truth as dialectical and symphonic, not confined by rational or willful mastery.2 In Thomas’s view—against Descartes’s mastering self—the human self does not exist autonomously since even the very language of our thoughts that compose our personhood are constituted by images from the tangible world. Neither does the non-human world flourish apart from imaginative human intervention and care. Aquinas saw that all creatures are at once in movement toward their true end in God, but also being “taken into” each other. Today we see more clearly that the fate of the created world depends greatly on how we perceive and imaginatively render its true ends—whether as objects for mastery, or alive with spiritual depth and wisdom.

As Thomas might observe, in my whimsical account of my dog, Lulu, I am not an autonomous person who secondarily relates to her—and certainly not as an object to master. Our lives are intimately bound together. My virtue, indeed, my very personhood, is called forth by her grace and deepened by my mythology of her spiritual patronage. My myth of her royal and spiritual bearing is not mere fiction or fantasy, since it is a response to what I have glimpsed of her mystery, which influences how I relate to her, redounding to our mutual benefit. Because I see in her a dignity befitting a royal emissary or spiritual guide and have named her as such, I do not kick, hurt, or neglect her; I give her good things to eat and throw her ball for her—and she enlarges my introverted and egoistical soul. In Thomas’s terms, we are truly a part of each other, a symphony or convenientia.

Of course, Lulu is not the only wondrous creature that calls for my allegiance. When I am most awake, I glimpse the articulate depths of God’s created world, in the skies, waters, woods, mountains, creatures, in the poor, sick, and oppressed, and the face of my students. To remain awake, I sometimes write poems or tell stories of their graces.

Poiesis or poetry is woven into the ordinary thought and life of the church. Patristic theologian Nicholas of Cusa once characterized Christ as the “art” of God to which the church bears witness in its art—in creative songs, liturgies, testimonies, and practices.3 Liturgical theologian Alexander Schmemann characterizes humans as homo orans, which expresses our vocation as naming or praise. He writes:

The significant fact about the [Genesis account of] life in the Garden is that man (sic) is to name things. As soon as animals have been created to keep Adam company, God brings them to Adam to see what he will call them. And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. Now, in the Bible a name is infinitely more than a means to distinguish one thing from another. It reveals the very essence of a thing, or rather its essence as God’s gift. To name a thing is to manifest the meaning and value God gave it, to know it as coming from God and to know its place and function within the cosmos created by God. To name a thing, in other words, is to bless God for it and in it.4

Those who have lost the ability to see the transcendent reality that shows itself in all things have restricted themselves within an illusory world of mastery and objectification. Those who are truly awake may see the truth that shines in and through and beyond the world of ordinary experience, may know that nature is the gift of the supernatural and that God is that absolute reality in whom, in every moment, they live and move and have their being. Thus, poetry is the supreme human art that names the extraordinary within the ordinary—but loving a dog is surely a close second.

NOTES

1. Charles Taylor, Secular Age, (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007), 337.

2. For a more detailed account of Thomas’ notion of symphony or convenientia see John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, “Truth in Aquinas,” (Routledge, 2001), 4.

3. See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 27-30, 82-84, 126-132.

4. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (New York: St. Vladimir’s, 1998), 15.

David White is The C. Ellis and Nancy Gribble Nelson Professor of Christian Education at Austin Seminary. Portions of this essay first appeared in Dr. White’s latest book, Tending the Fire that Burns at the Center of the World: Beauty and the Art of Christian Formation (Wipf and Stock, 2022). He contributed the centerpiece essay for Insights on the theme of “Beauty and the Churches Mission” in Spring 2021.