Tails of Kindness

How It Is With Us, And How It Is With Them

by Mary Oliver

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.

This sermon is about dogs. This is also a sermon about kindness. If you are a dog lover you can see how this is a natural connection. If you are not a dog lover, don’t leave me just yet, perhaps these stories will speak to you beyond the limitations of furry paws and sloppy wet kisses.

I’m a country girl. I grew up in the rolling hills of upstate New York. I had a tree house. I had a swing set. I had a ton of cats that may or may not have actually been mine. And I had a dog. Dogs serve different purposes in the country, as they do in city life. Country dogs are hunting companions, security guards, and farm hands. A few miles up the road lived a man who raised Doberman Pinchers to be fierce and dangerous. I don’t remember the why. I do remember the warnings. If the dogs ever got out I was to run straight to the house as fast as I could. I also remember the story my mother told me about the dog who chased her as a little girl, pulling her off her bike, and mauling her ankle. It made sense why people would have a mistrust of dogs in general, but the dog our family had, the skinny version of a golden retriever mixed with a million different breeds, served as a trusted companion and loyal friend for the entirety of my childhood. All dogs are not bad. All dogs are not fierce. All dogs, I decided, are manifestations of the ways we wish ourselves to be in this world.

I wish, in this world, to be kind. To be kind and gentle and wise. I have my moments. However, if you are a gambling man let me just say that I am more likely to rush to a platform of indignant impatience where I shine with inappropriate quick-witted snarkiness fueled by an unlimited source of perpetual sarcasm. It’s not super helpful to lift myself up as an example of kindness, or any person really, I’ve decided today. People are unpredictable and competitive and fearful and sometimes we are nice. Maybe it’s the precipice of my renewal leave talking or the genuine grief stewing for a year of losing my two furry friends but the most accurate story about kindness I could think of involves four legs, two big brown eyes, golden brown fur that covered my clothes, car and apartment for ten years, and predictably wretched breath.

Patrick was kind. Not nice. Nice is a human thing. Nice says “everything is fine” and “I’m sure they’ll be okay.” Nice is avoiding conflict, staving off true relationship, and rejecting transformation. It’s not real. Nice keeps us moving horizontally around the same hollow tree trunk; it’s momentary smiles and fake laughs and “we’ll talk soon” knowing we probably won’t. Nice takes energy and I can say from personal experience, nice is exhausting. It’s kindness of our own accord; empty and fleeting. God never said be nice to each other, God said to love each other and we love each other through kind action not through nice gestures.

I can be very nice. I would like to offer up that many of us are experts in niceness. As Meryl Streep so passionately sings in the finale of Into The Woods, we’re “not good, we’re not bad, we’re just nice.”

Dogs are not trained in the stage performance of niceties. They are not raised to be “nice little girls and boys.” We teach them to sit and to stay and once in a while they might sit and they might stay. They are what they are; Patrick was kind.

 Patrick came into my life on the recommendation of a therapist when I was in my early 20s. “I think you should get a dog,” she said. “You need something to love that will love you back.” Our landlord, having watched me struggle with severe depression for over a year, conceded to the request saying we could get “a small dog.” We got Patrick; a small puppy with very large paws. John picked Patrick because he saw him in sitting passively in a cage while the other smaller dogs ran all over terrorizing one another. John perceived this to be a sign that Patrick would be a calm puppy. I perceived this perception with skepticism but wanted a dog so we took the puppy home. Patrick was a sick puppy with big paws. Parvo; a disease that attacks the immune system. Within 24 hours of having Patrick as part of our family we had to decide if we were willing to spend thousands of dollars on treatment with a 50/50 shot of survival. We chose credit card debt and treatment. He was ours. We were responsible for him. We would spend days in the puppy ICU and a few weeks later we would bring home a healthy, destructive, hyper golden retriever puppy. He ate my socks, he dug up the yard, and he saved my life. He pulled me out of the house and walked me around the block, he made me laugh and he made me angry, he gave me a purpose for sticking around and wading through the darkness that had crept all around me.  

Patrick had no special training, he wasn’t a Stephens Minister or a Doctorate of Psychology yet he embodied the ministry of presence and manifested the fruit of kindness. And, Patrick was very popular. When we lived in Evergreen church members would bring their dogs over to the parsonage yard so they could play with Patrick while they went to worship services or administrative meetings. The doggy daycare across the street that he frequented eventually told us to just bring him over for free because “he helped calm the dogs and he would play with any dog so he was actually like a helper.” Patrick would also run off without a leash, jump directly into people’s faces when they came to our house, bark at nothing, and throw up when he got nervous. One time John and I were having an argument and when I came into the room to apologize Patrick ran in front of me, jumped on the bed next to John, and growled at me. This past Thanksgiving our family went to the mountains and every time Fiona tried to sled down the hill Patrick would run alongside her and pull the saucer out from her and run down the hill swinging the saucer side to side victoriously. When I told the Evergreen daycare staff woman we were moving down the hill she held Patrick and sobbed, then looked up at me smiling and said as she laughed, he’s the dog that knocked out my tooth. He wasn’t perfect. He was kind.

And a few months ago, he got sick. Cancer. At first they thought it was arthritis. I had taken him for a run and a few days later he was having trouble walking. Then he couldn’t walk up and down the stairs. Within ten days of seeing symptoms the vets told us he had Lymphoma, including a mass pushed up against his heart. There wasn’t anything we could do. We took him home and waited. Four days. We gave him medicine until he refused to take it. We threw him a party and made him hamburgers. We bought him stuffed animal toys that he hadn’t been allowed to have. We carried him up and down the stairs. The plan was to wait. He would pass peacefully. He had waited for the sun in my life to rise, surely I could wait with him for the sun of his life to set. This would be my gift. This would be my kindness.

But here’s where the mask comes off, where the niceties are sucked dry, and we find ourselves empty and waiting for something, anything to lead us out of the uncomfortable place we sit. Patrick’s death contradicted all of my preconceived notions of the right thing to do. It did not go according to plan. One day he couldn’t even lift his back legs. He couldn’t go to the bathroom. And by 3am in the morning, after lying in bed listening to him pant for hours, I let go of being nice and I embraced the fear that accompanied being kind. Patrick passed that evening in John’s arms at a 24 hour animal clinic a few miles from our house. They gave him chicken, placed a needle in his arm, and he slipped beyond the sight of our eyes and the touch of our fingers. His passing was a full on encounter of the brutality that is kindness.

John came home. I fell asleep and dreamed I was standing in our alone apartment. In my dream it was quiet and I was looking all over the house for him, calling his name. I started sobbing. I saw myself crying in the dream and I felt wetness of tears on my cheek and I heard the sound of my cries and I watched as in my dream Patrick, ball in his mouth, smile in his eyes, ran out in front of my off to to play in a new field, in a new place.

Mary Oliver writes, “... it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old-or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.”

These fruits of the Spirit, this peace, this joy, this love, this kindness. These are not gifts we can give; these are gifts we can harvest in the most honest and desperate moments of our lives. Perhaps dogs have this down. This willing dependency, this passionate loyalty. We are learning to let go. To embrace the reality of a kindness that blooms when niceties run out, when we are swallowed up in the pond of our own helplessness, when we relinquish our masks to all that is holy in hopes that we might be nothing but fully present.

Here we are. Invited to seek out and harvest these gifts we cannot give. This kindness that so often only the non-human creatures offer; we have much to learn from the flow of the river and the soft purr of the feline laid out in the sun. “Stop trying to so hard,” God whispers in the beat of the earth, the nudge of a dog’s nose, the morning song of the bird outside our window. Everything is here for only a moment; rest in the gift of all that surrounds you. Harvest this kindness; it is in the fullness of all that has been, the richness of all that is, and the culmination of all that may be. You are alive.