Dog/God/\God/Dog--Part 1

No accident dog spelled backwards is God. And no, I am not suggesting God is a dog. But dogs can teach us all about God's love. If Jesus had lived in a different culture, where dogs were not corpse eating pariahs, he would have had a dog too. And like the story of Grey Friar's Bobby, his dog would have waited as devotedly outside his tomb. And Mary the Magdalene would not have had to have been all alone when she discovered her dearly beloved Jesus gone from the tomb, but she would have had Jesus's dog waiting there to greet and comfort her. And Jesus's dog would have become her dog and they would have had each other to love ever after.

Anyway, that is not at all what I meant to say. I have had dogs in my life, knowingly, longer than I have had God in my life, knowingly. I did not always invite God in. I was not always so certain about this God. The version I got of God as a child was not such a nice guy. I come from a family of dog hating, God hating people. People who do not go to church because they feel deeply unworthy of God's love. How far back that got beaten into them is beyond my knowing, but it is a fact. I came back to God, because God was always with me, more loyal then any dog, waiting to welcome me back with open arms. And dogs were his secret agents, his covert operators, in my little life.

As a child, I always liked animals better than people, except for my grandmother because she was about the only one in the family who was never ever mean to me (and she is the reason, a therapist told me, I never went completely off the deep end, just a little bit off--because she loved me. Amazing stuff, love!). I was fortunate that my parents even let me have a dog. We lived in an ugly urban place at the time, and I always saw this little forlorn beagle pup in a pet shop window One evening, my step-father came home with the pup on his lap. On his lap because my step-father was a paraplegic--that is what we called it then. He had a spinal cord injury and his back was broken. Broken in a drunken driving accident but that is decidedly another story. We lived in a high rise apartment building and my teenaged mother was too lazy to take the dog out, and i was only 3 years old. So they tied the dog in a corner of my bedroom and she shit on the floor there. My mother didnt clean it up every day. I definitely remember turds whitened with age there. It was only a few years ago that a counselor took a lot of time trying to drill it into my head that that was not normal, the tied up dog in the corner there, and the dog shit, in my bedroom, well, all of it, really.

Anyway, I named her Cindy after Yogi Bear's girlfriend, and she became my childhood confidant, companion and love. And she took some of the abuse heat off me, because when the old man in the wheelchair, who had very strong arms, by the way, he grew up on a farm, wasn't beating me in his impotent (literally) rage, he was beating her. I had no siblings. I had Cindy, my dog.

Cindy did not play games with my mind. Cindy was always happy to see me. Cindy communicated with me in clear, direct language. She did not say one thing and act completely differently. I have always been quite sensitive and perceptive, and can easily read body and emotional language. I also get tone of voice really well. I understand what animals communicate to us in the same way I soon understood that my crazy parents talked one way but rarely said what they meant except for when they were heaping verbal abuse on my head. They were experts at twisting stuff all around and I think I became an English major in college because I had been reading between the lines for years. Living with crazy people can give a person such incredible skills. Such incredible survival skills. If you survive the training, that is.

Cindy and I finally moved back to the country my crazy mother had wrenched me from when she married the man in the wheelchair. We had fields and woods to run in and off we went, for hours. We were silent companions of the wild. It was a kind of heaven. But God didnt play into any of this yet. The parents had tried to foist me off to Sunday school, dragging their hungover selves from bed to drive little pristine me to the white church where no one else had parents like mine, I was sure. I was not comfortable there with the stiffly righteous, the holier than thou, the neater than neat. I could not wait to get back home and change my clothes and hit the trails with Cindy, who never judged me or looked at me like I was oddball dirt. She just loved me as I am, accepted me, and stayed with me. And that is what I have come to learn of God, and of Jesus too. They love me as I am, they accept me, and they will never abandon me. Unlike a lot of people I have known.

But there is more to this story.

Until next time, I remain your friend, Rozenkraai