Wanting to be happy

Two out of the eight dogs we have owned over the years have been smilers.  One of them, a wiry black creature of indeterminate breed, smiled when he felt one of two emotions – guilt, or untrammelled delight. Sometimes the two went together, as when on arriving home unannounced we would find him gazing down, grinning and sneezing, from the top of the stairs, where he should not have been. But smiling and simultaneous sneezing seemed to have an expiating effect on his conscience – probably because we would react with an answering smile, if not with a sneeze.

That particular dog had the right jaw structure for smiling, and his whiskers were not too heavy. Our present dog would like to smile, and tries, but he is heavy of jaw and lip, so his efforts end in a slightly louche expression. In his case, it is the wanting to smile which is so endearing. We want him to smile as much for his sake as for ours, and this is where smiling dogs have something unique to offer. They make us want the happiness we already have and they make us grateful for it.  

Wanting to be happy is like having a healthy appetite. Wanting to be happy, and being OK about it, is natural and good. One of the worst ills of our times is that in the face of the suffering of so many people today it is easy to feel guilty about wanting to be happy, that it is somehow selfish. But guilt is the work of moral deception. It deceives us into believing that we do not deserve happiness, that in the face of so much cruelty and hardship in the world, we have no right to pause for even a second and know the joy of being who we are in our present surroundings. It tells us that we have no right to celebrate anything and that if we do, it should be done almost furtively, keeping the blessings of life and the joy they bring at arm’s length.

This is where dogs, and any animal which allows us to be physically close to it, put our lives in perspective. Both our dogs (one is very large and the other extremely small) do this by being fully who they are. As dogs, their emotional intelligence operates on a number of levels, most of them inaccessible to us. But one thing they make quite clear, and accessible through sheer physical activity, is that they know when they are happy – and that they are OK about that.

They also know when we need to be happy. Our big dog will decide when the news is taking me into a dark emotional place before I am ready to go there. He will signal this by putting his large head on my lap  prior to slowly clambering on top of me. He is pretty well unstoppable once this process has begun. But as he clambers up, he puts things in perspective. He obliges joy, even if this comes as I am in the process of battling him off the sofa and back on to his ‘mat’, that section of the carpet which is reserved for him and his small friend. By the time we have sorted ourselves out, a sense of connectedness with what is real and what matters in the immediate here and now has quietly re-asserted itself. The news goes on but there is also a whisper of hope in the room. 

As with the intelligence of dogs, hope, which is part of our spiritual intelligence, is of a different emotive order than many people assume. Christian hope is not blind optimism or the denial of reality. Rather, it is a certain kind of knowing, a knowing which takes us to the very depths of our own darkness and to the depths of human conflict and suffering, only to find in these dark places the simplicity of God and the purity which we know as joy.