Seeker, Snooper, Teacher, Tale

Snooper is no longer with us in the flesh, but her inspiration remains. Wendell Berry writes, “We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.”


During class one Friday I was in the midst of explaining how to punctuate the line references for verse quotations when a hand went up.

“Yes?”

“Can I ask a question?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe in God? And if you do, why? I mean what proof do you have that he exists?”

I said, “That’s two questions. I can answer the first pretty easily. The answer is yes. Answering the second might take some time. You aren’t on the point of committing suicide or suffering some other catastrophe if you don’t have an immediate answer, are you?” I said it half-jokingly, but it was a serious question. I’ve known some who would have answered differently.

“No,” the student said.

“Then let’s discuss it over lunch today.”

“I have an away game this afternoon.”

“How about Monday?”

“It’s a deal.”

“Anyone else who wants to can join us,” said I to the rest of the class, who, after their initial laughter at the apparent inappropriateness of the question, had become uncharacteristically quiet awaiting my response. “I’ll try to have a decent answer by then.”

Lying in bed on Saturday morning, I recalled the question. The difficulty, of course, was not to offer a proof where none was possible, but to demonstrate the impossibility of the proof while affirming the value of the questioner’s continued seeking. But I had not even formulated it that clearly in my mind before Snooper, as she has many a time, came to my aid. (Snooper was my beloved companion of over 12 years, a mixed border collie who meant to me more than anyone but our common Maker can know.) She didn’t do anything, you understand, but continue sleeping nearby. But she came to mind and, with the help of our Founding Fathers, brought with her an analogy that might serve.

“Proving to a human being that God exists,” I said to the two or three gathered at lunch on the following Monday, “is like proving to my dog Snooper that the United States of America exists. It can’t be done. The U.S.A. includes her as one of its inhabitants, obviously. She must abide by its laws. It allows her to live and, if she proves in certain ways troublesome, may put her to death. Her territory, from her napping place under the table to the park of her excursions, is contained within it. And yet its existence can by no method be demonstrated to her. I could walk her from San Diego to Bangor, Maine; I could take her to Washington, D.C., to sniff the parchment of the Constitution itself. Proof of the existence of the nation would remain, to her, unattainable. She simply lacks the organ to perceive it.

“In the same way, we lack the organ by which the divine may be directly perceived and proven. Since we are a part of it, it cannot become a part of us, even as an idea, certainly not as a proof to any organs we do have—the senses, the intellect, the imagination. But does the nation cease to exist or cease to strive for the welfare of its citizens and their dependents, including Snooper, because for her it is invisible?”

From there the conversation was carried in various directions. Some argued that the analogy breaks down, and of course it does eventually. But its good was harvested before it did, and I felt that through the two of us, Snooper in her being and I in my thought, something valuable had been accomplished. Only later did I realize that we had incarnated James Joyce’s famous jeu d’esprit: God is dog spelled backwards.

The following week ended the quarter, and on its last day I indulged the impulse to tell this story and to draw from it one more lesson.

“It is true that we cannot encompass and know the divine. It is great and we are small. But it can shrink itself down to become for a moment known to us—not through expansion of our organs of knowing but through its own contraction into perceivability—as, the Jewish mystics say, it did in the beginning to make room for creation. The presence in the Burning Bush and at Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the inner voice of Socrates and the enlightenment of Buddha, the vast universe of space and time itself, and the instantaneous and subtle shift in comprehension that can change one’s life—all these are contractions of the divine to fit into our narrow sphere of experience. We call them revelations. God, when he wills, can reveal himself to us as the U.S. of A. cannot to a dog.

“And this is why I am here teaching poetry to you and why I think it important that you should be here learning it. Because a great poem or play or novel, too, is a revelation. It comes, as the poets report, from somewhere beyond the self, and the poet, like every artist, is not a creator but a maker of forms in which to convey what is demanding to be revealed (which is why the word “creative” as usually used seems so absurd). Every work I will teach you this year I teach because I know it can become, for a moment, a small window on the vast, unfathomable, living reality of which we are all parts—a revelation of the divine.”

The bell rang, and at the end of the day I went home to write progress reports. But I carried with me the experience of a small revelation of my own: A student is one who raises his hand under invisible compulsion to ask a question and is never quite satisfied with the answer. A teacher is one who in seeing that raised hand hears the voice of his calling. And when two or three such are gathered together to discuss the existence of God, who do you suppose is there in the midst of them?