A Hard Mercy

Love, Suffering and Death

I’m a “dog person”. The bigger the dog, the better. The more of them the merrier.

This was our last batch of three.

The big, brown dog, Carlos jumped into my daughter’s car one evening and came home with her. We put out “FOUND DOG” signs because it was the right thing to do, not because we wanted him to be returned home. Eventually the owner responded. He couldn’t keep the dog because he was losing his house and moving into an apartment with his two young children who were too young to get what was happening. They said goodbye and we said hello. He was a “Chow hound” both in the literal sense and genetic sense we think.

The white dog, Maggie, we rescued from the dog pound to keep Carlos company. She was partly a “herding dog”, good natured, attentive. I came home from work one day and she had eaten my daughter’s rabbit that had escaped its cage.

The black dog, Bella, was a Rottie. She was a big brat. Strong willed but gentle and loved children. And family cats… for dinner. I had to pry one from her mouth once.

The “circle of life” isn’t always animals singing show tunes while dancing on each others’ heads. Animals have their natures and it can never be completely “trained” out of them.

We’ve put seven dogs down in our 30 years together. We found our “low rider” Bassett “Harley” in the back yard, paralyzed, her spine had finally given out. It was excruciating to wrap her in a blanket to “stretcher” her into the car. Rahab-the-Harlot-Dog, our Golden Retriever/Shepherd mix, had a stroke on our dining room floor and stared blankly as we drove her to the vet. Duke was a rescue and a “fear biter” who took a piece of a friend’s leg and couldn’t be trusted around our friends and grandkids. Bella the Brattie-Rottie was a “street find”. She got diagnosed with and died of cancer after only a few months. Maggie was old and looking “off”. Before we could take her to the vet she laid down and died on our living room floor on a Thanksgiving Day as we were packing up dinner to drive to my parents’ house. Dinner was delayed while I dug her grave in our back yard pet cemetery.

It is an evil, sorrowful thing to have to make a choice whether to put a pet down to end its suffering or to watch it slowly die “naturally”. I’ve had to personally euthanize pets because we could not afford a vet. It is not for the “weak”. If you don’t have the stomach for watching pain nor for ending it you can avoid both by taking your pet to a veterinary clinic to have them put to sleep. Vets offer you a choice: You can be there for the “procedure” or you can drop your pet off and pick up its ashes in a couple weeks. I get why they offer that.

We always said, “We want to be there.” “Are you sure?” “Yes, we are sure.” We sat on the floor of the vet’s room and held them and talked to them as they were put to sleep. It is a brutal mercy.

It just seems right that, if we are going to play “God” and decide to end their suffering, then to be present at their end is the only godly choice. Love demands it.

I think the closest we come to knowing what it must be like to be “God” is when we are faced with the suffering of something we love and we have the ability to prolong the pain or to end it with death. Either choice is hard and either is to choose a personal suffering. There is no easy mercy, no ending of pain that is without a grievous cost. Love, life, pain and death are the realms of creation in which God is most manifest and hidden.

Love, life, suffering and death is the rubric of all creation: human beings, animals, plants, the dirt under our feet and the stars above our heads, all experience the consequences of The Fall: the futility, dissolution, pain of death, and the longing for respite and restoration found in the love of our suffering God and through our love and co-suffering with Him. (Romans 8:18-25)

Even as fallen human beings we are given a priesthood and a dominion over the fallen creation. We wield a certain sovereign authority and power over life, death, disorder, and dissolution; we can heal or kill, consume or offer, comfort or afflict, prolong life or end it, whether it be our lawn grass, or our dog, or our neighbor, or our own child. Because we are in the image and likeness of a loving God we find both our true selves and God in our stewardship of the suffering creation whether cosmic or mundane.

Euthanizing a suffering pet is not “cosmic” (though perhaps it is a microcosm of the cosmos which is why it reaches our heart), but neither is it mundane because it involves love for a creature, which comes from the heart. It is almost universally understood as a hard mercy, an act of sacrificial love because we endure the pain of the loss for the sake of ending its pain. It is a "godlike” judgment call to decide when our pet has suffered enough, cannot bear it any longer and is hopelessly beyond healing. We suffer to end suffering. Love demands it.

So the question is always asked in discussions of assisted suicide, “If we have compassion on our beloved animals to end their suffering, why not have the same compassion for our loved ones who are suffering?” Or, more theologically, “Is the fallen order as manifest in an animal’s suffering and the consequent hard mercy of euthanizing a pet analagous to the fallen order and the suffering of human beings?”

Of course the very short answer is “no”. But of course the longer answer is, “yes and no, but in what ways?”

Love is love, pain is pain, death is death whether it is human, animal, or divine. The pain experienced by a human being or an animal or Christ is pain. Death is death. The question is not “how much pain is there” nor “how dead is something that died” but WHAT (or WHO) is suffering and dead and HOW is that experienced beyond the physical torment and loss of biological life. Is there a “qualitative” difference between the animals we love and the human beings we love? PETA notwithstanding, our theology says “yes, there is.”

The longer short answer is: “In whom are all things summed up?” ALL things. Love, life, suffering, and death— The love of all things, the life of all things, the suffering of all things, the death of all things. In Whom is it all summed up and reconciled? In a word: Christ incarnate in human flesh. (Ephesians 1:10)

Christ did not come to redeem all creation from futility, dissolution, and death as an animal sacrifice, perfect and unblemished. He came in OUR image and likeness to sum up all things in God: things we have done and un-done, tended to and neglected, loved and hated, nurtured and killed whether by choice or ignorance. Unlike the animal world that by instinct sacrifices, nurtures and dies for the preservation of life, we must make a rational, conscious choice to follow “The Image” in which we are created. We can consciously sin against our created nature; animals, by nature, eat rabbits and cats, and by nature die protecting and nurturing and sometimes killing their own. Our salvation, the salvation of the cosmos, is through a “rational” God-man.

So, within the fallen order suffering takes on a spiritual dimension to the human being that the rest of creation does not have: We experience suffering but we also have the noetic capacity to “rationally” perceive it and consider it and its consequences relationally, personally, cosmically, spiritually and eternally, and to redeem it.

It is because of this quality of our unique, human created existence in the image and likeness of God that suffering within the fallen order is viewed as a hard mercy, a divine providence for the sake of nurturing our very life in God: Suffering is God’s pedagogical tool for our humility, a reminder of our finiteness, a discipline of our bodies, a curbing of our passions, a tutor of patience, a school of prayer, a purification of our souls, a type of atonement for our sins, an awakening to the spiritual life, a path to embracing virtues, an opening of our eyes to eternity, an awakening of compassion, a journey to forgiveness, a teacher of wisdom, a discovery of our true strength, a re-focus of our priorities, and an imitation of Christ.

Suffering can be all that for some people. We call them saints.

The only problem is: Sometimes suffering does the opposite of all that. Because we are not all saints.

What then does a merciful God do with that?

Next: Unspeakable suffering, unimaginable choices, an implausible sainthood.