Lyricist Robert Hunter penned profound poetry – “once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right” – in the Grateful Dead song “Scarlet Begonias,” which first appeared 50 years ago this week on the 1974 release “From The Mars Hotel.” The entire ballad is fantastic. However, this particular melodious insight resonates with me on my journey as a Catholic. On that long, strange trip and just as the tune counsels, I often learn transcendent truths in the strangest of places and from the unlikeliest of teachers. No lesson has been more strangely-timed, and no instructor more unlikely, than Sugaree, my mini-Bernedoodle. Deadheads, who don’t include my father, will note she’s named after another Dead song, but my dog and my dad do share one trait: Neither abides lollygagging.
In adolescence, lazing about the house ensured that my dad would task me with unpleasant real work like cleaning the garage, which took hours, or Sisyphean make-work like moving earth by the wheelbarrow load to fill an enormous backyard ravine, which took years. My dog is equally nonplussed to see me reclining on the comfortable couch in our family room. While she’s in no position to dole out chores, Sugaree has her own way of signaling displeasure. She delivers her favorite slobbery tennis ball for me to throw and her to retrieve. This gets me off the couch, out of my head, and outdoors with her. Each time and just for an instant, she keeps the ball in her mouth and resists dropping it into my hand. When she does this, I chuckle to myself and wonder why she always struggles as if it’s the first time.
In that moment, is she a budding pragmatist, for whom a tennis ball in her mouth is worth two in my hand, or a sound teleologist, who sees the purpose of a game of fetch already achieved? Whatever it is, after brief canine cogitation Sugaree invariably relinquishes the ball. By doing this, she confirms there is greater joy in surrendering her will to my own. It’s a choice each time, but she is batting a thousand on making the right decision, and joy beyond her imagining follows. The other day I, as Mr. Hunter urged lyrically, finally looked at it right. After years of being smug about my pug, now I see the joke’s on me. I love Sugaree, but no more perfectly than a human can love. Yet with all my flaws, Sugaree trusts I’ll bring her happiness that she cannot secure on her own. In her daily leap of faith, she drops the ball. How much easier the choice should be for me. I’m loved perfectly by not just someone loving but Love itself. My life is a series of opportunities to cede control and surrender to God’s will my own. Unlike my pet in her dogged faith, too often I don’t trust but cling to the ball.
Earthly joy is good, but like the ball in Sugaree’s mouth before a glorious game of fetch, nothing in comparison to the joy of the world to come. Sugaree somehow gets the paradox of surrender that is at the heart of true and lasting happiness. It’s high time that time I did, too. I don’t know when the universe will serve up its next trippy lesson for me. Until then, I’ll stay close to the dog whose trust in me reminds me to trust in God always and everywhere and keep listening to the Grateful Dead.
