Understanding revelations doggy or divine

National Catholic Reporter, April 30, 2004 by Jeannette Cooperman

My friend calls, all excited, to report what her "animal communicator" has told her--for a hefty sum--about her animals' feelings. Freckles wishes she'd stop worrying about him. Yes, the guinea pig is irritating, but Freckles knows the critter will eventually adjust. What he's really upset about is the dog next door, who is driving him crazy barking all the time and doesn't seem to recognize Freckles' senior status ...

Enough. I love animals. I loved Dr. Doolittle, original and remake. But I've also lived with a dog long enough to guess that they don't think that way What the communicator said may well be true, at an instinctual level, but casting it in terms of human cognition just turns it silly. A dog's strength is the ability to recognize emotional tones, patterns of events or sensory cues. Dogs are not big on time frame comparisons or political analyses. They can decode the difference between a raised paw, a hesitant paw and a proffered paw faster than we can decide whether to shake hands with our hostess. But I doubt they use such an abstract tool as a sentence.

We find the notion of interspecies communication as intriguing as communication with the dead--and we are as easily suckered by quasi-experts. My friend was delighted to find her suspicions about the guinea pig confirmed. We are always delighted when another creature--be it pundit or poodle--echoes our own notions. Projection is reassuring.

Prayer is reassuring, too. How often someone announces, eyes alight, that he "prayed about it" and is now sure of his decision. I don't doubt the clarity possible through discernment, but I do question my ability to distinguish between God's voice and the echo of my own. Because if animal communicators sometimes overintellectualize and anthropomorphize a dog's mind to translate it into human terms, I suspect we do the reverse to God's.

Any force powerful enough to call Creator is far more capable of abstraction, far less trapped in sensate boundaries than we are. Unburdened by minutiae and unbound by a single individual's viewpoint--grasping entire interconnected universes, past, present and future at once--we're talking "big picture" of a magnitude no management consultant ever conceived.

Such abstraction need not require impersonal detachment. God can take in the specificity of each sparrow, love all the penguins, know the mind of every physics professor, every murderer, every florist. God is love, unbounded and eternal. And love knows everything.

Still, I find myself reaching for pillars of salt when I hear most communiques from the divine. "God told me to collect this money and buy a lot out west and build a church." That sounds more like human communication, sprinkled with sanctity and projected on a big screen, so the speaker can be sure, and convince everyone else, that his plan is God's idea. Flashes of insight of the sort Julian of Norwich experienced seem likelier connections with divine wisdom, if only because they couldn't have been scripted. Loosed from individuals' petty or even grandiose agendas, they strike the ear as strange, wise, mysterious, transcendent.

They make us nervous. But unlike echoes, they are worth holding in the heart.

From dogs, I will look for doglike revelations: near-wordless constellations of sensory perceptions, instinctive knowledge, glimpses of mood, the physical joys of the moment.

From God, I will look for insights larger than my own.

Jeannette Cooperman is a freelance writer living in St. Louis. Her e-mail address is kabaka@aol.com.