On Reality (and Jack Russell terriers)

Hot water will take blood off concrete steps. You have to scrub a little, but eventually it comes up. Like a twisted barn in a field after a tornado, or a civil war battlefield, our front porch has now become a place where it happened.

I leashed our Jack Russell, Cali, for her evening constitution. My wife has had her for nine years, and we've shared “potty duty” for the last five since I came in the picture. Cali and I went about two feet out in the yard as I encouraged her to set her tinkle phaser to empty.

I'm amazed at how quickly and quietly the pit bull moved through the night air. This miracle of evolution is 180 pounds of teeth and muscle that lumbers about with a perpetual who me? expression.

“Hey get off my—“ was about all I got out.  Cali didn't stand a chance.  The attack was ruthless, primal, brutal. The leash ripped through the skin on my hands.I came at the attacker, a hurricane of slippers and hollering, but it didn't look scared until my wife arrived.

She tore open the night with her screams. The pit bull let go and ran away. She held Cali to her chest as the life flowed out down her shirt and pants, down the sidewalk into the dirt. I chased the offender down, as I reflect on it not a great idea, but my instincts would not let go.  Neighbors came from all directions—hipster sleeve tattoo folks who called the cops on their iPhone Sixes.

A vet student arrived with her idealistic eyes and ironic T-shirt. She asked me to clear a space in the house to lay out our injured friend and assess the damage. I turned around to go in the house as she looked at Cali, and immediately felt myself pulled back, “She’s gone.”

I have a picture of my amazing wife which I took as evidence if the police/animal control/city council (all involved) subpoena us. After all my hospital experience, I've rarely seen that much blood on a person. Her arms and legs were covered in red. We wrapped up our friend in her favorite blanket and took her downstairs. She was cremated the next day.

Heather's tears came immediately (and are still coming)—strong and pure and deep. She always cries well-water. Emotionally constipated folks like me have to wait a little for expression. Yet sniffles  finally came to even me as I placed Cali on the basement floor and kissed her cheek, already cold.

I'd love to say I had a profound other worldly peace wash over me that night. I'd love to have a story about God’s presence and a vision of a small white dog ascending to heaven. But there's just me chasing a lethal animal down a dark street with a handful of rocks, screaming at the top of my lungs.

As a good over educated evangelical, I filtered the experience through my theology for the last few days. I'd also love to have a profound revelation about suffering here for you—a dazzling formula of sovereignty and free will that would leave you breathless. Sorry, don't have one. Google it.

The only theological outcropping this sadness would snag was a quote from Uncle Screwtape. If you haven't read The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis, immediately stop reading my silly blog and go do it. This  speculative fiction classic is a series of letters from Screwtape, an elder demon, teaching his younger nephew Wormwood how to tempt a human soul. Their goal, ultimately, is to tempt the human “patient”, in this case a recent convert to Christ living in war torn London, all the way to their eternal company. Here is the passage, bear in mind that this is a devil talking:

“Probably the scenes he is now witnessing will not provide material for an intellectual attack on his faith—your previous failures have put that out of your power. But there is a sort of attack on the emotions which can still be tried.

It turns on making him feel, when first he sees human remains plastered on a wall, that this is "what the world is really like" and that all his religion has been a fantasy. You will notice that we have got them completely fogged about the meaning of the word "real"'. They tell each other, of some great spiritual experience, "All that really happened was that you heard some music in a lighted building"; here "Real" means the bare physical facts, separated from the other elements in the experience they actually had.

The general rule which we have now pretty well established among them is that in all experiences which can make them happier or better only the physical facts are "Real" while the spiritual elements are "subjective”…Thus in birth the blood and pain are "real", the rejoicing a mere subjective point of view; in death, the terror and ugliness reveal what death "really means". The hatefulness of a hated person is "real"—in hatred you see men as they are, you are disillusioned; but the loveliness of a loved person is merely a subjective haze concealing a "real" core of sexual appetite or economic association. Wars and poverty are "really" horrible; peace and plenty are mere physical facts about which men happen to have certain sentiments...

Your patient, properly handled, will have no difficulty in regarding his emotion at the sight of human entrails as a revelation of Reality and his emotion at the sight of happy children or fair weather as mere sentiment,

Your affectionate uncle  
SCREWTAPE”


So the old tempter coaches his apprentice: convince your patient that faith is emotional gas. That the true reality is red in tooth and claw and anything beyond raw power struggle in the world is just a sentimental coping system. Relationships are mere sexual games; childbirth is just a brutal animal act.

There is the temptation to believe this: that when I saw Cali brutalized I was seeing what was ultimately real. There is an almost macho temptation to believe that blood on the concrete is the whole story and I could be one of the “enlightened” who realizes this.

Yet there was a feeling—not a revelation, not a voice in my head—just a feeling like a bass note through everything. This is not the whole story. As the animal control officer took pictures of wounds, as I helped my wife scrub blood off her arms and back, this was not the whole story. Cali's life, as with the goodness or badness in the universe, can't be summed up in a thirty second nightmare.

Cali was the pup who kept jumping higher than the others when Heather picked her out almost a decade ago. Cali loved leftover bacon and Dairy Queen blizzards. She barked at cows (for some reason) and became a warm sleeping heap on your lap during road trips. A companion, a friend. We have nine years of that—and that is “real.” It is that reality—gripped sometimes only by a thread in the dark—that keeps my faith going.

So goodbye, my little Cali. We love you and know we will see you again. Thank you for loving us; thank you for showing us what is real.