To Understand God, Understand Dog

There is nothing more human than to love a dog and nothing more divine than for God to love humanity. Empathy is both innate and learned, a variable talent to be diligently built on and a skill to be lovingly cultivated. Empathy is the glue that holds human society together (sometimes clumsily referred to as “love”), but it isn’t unique to humans, or even primates for that matter. Anyone with warm-blooded pets can attest to that (maybe not as perceivably so in reptiles, fish, and whatnot). Now, all of you cat people out there are probably annoyed that I’ve singled out dogs as being essential companions to the nature of humanity. But I would encourage you to be patient and maybe just stick with me on this. It’ll take less time to explain than lint-rollering the cat hair off your couch.

The Measure of Success

Whenever I reflect on what success is or how to define it – particularly how I define it, I find it helps to think about how other people define it and how I could help them do it. As is often the case, we most frequently discover ourselves through the eyes and perspective of others. In the past, or in my past career(s), I measured success the way many people do, which is by how much money I could make. As a teacher in the U.S., if I was dumb enough to measure success by how much money I made, I’d feel like a failure pretty much all the time. So, I find myself having to reframe and redefine the idea of success or how I understand it. And, in doing so, I was reminded of a quote by yet another person who was much smarter than myself, and it helped me a good bit. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that, "Success is to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived."

Know People by Their Fruits

Imitation is the primary, most fundamental, and essential mode of human learning. We learn our native languages through imitation of sounds and association during the formative years of our lives as toddlers. We learn practical things like etiquette and social norms by first watching our parents, then later by watching everyone else. And we learn ethics and basic morality from observing people around us and how they treat each other. You’ve probably heard that you aren’t judged on your character or intention, but on your actions, and that’s very true. C.S. Lewis once said: “What you are matters more than what you do, but what you do is evidence of what you are.” So, what we are inside (good, bad, or in between) shows through what we do and what we do shapes who we are. In other words, to have virtue is to imitate and practice virtue.

Protect Your Potential

We all remember that essential childhood wisdom passed down to us from our forebears: “Don’t talk to strangers.” There’s actually a lot to be said about the irony and accuracy of that imperative, given that humans are necessarily social animals and that for centuries , we actually had to avoid strangers who might raid and pillage our settlements. Unfortunately, people today often forget that strangers are potentially dangerous and are too quick to follow them or be misled by them. There’s something in our instincts that drive us to reject the old and familiar in favor of the new and interesting. It’s really a weird, paradoxical and almost nonsensical behavior we all have –we cling to the comfortable and familiar for dear life, but at the same time, we’re so easily enamored and fascinated by new things. We’re not that different from monkeys or even racoons. All it takes to trap us is a shiny new object of perceived value. Sometimes we’ll even cut familiar things away faster than we can even understand new things we’re chasing.

The Abilities of the Receiver

There’s a fancy philosophical saying by ST. Thomas Aquinas that tends to stick with me whenever I’m dealing with people: “Everything received is only received according to the abilities of the receiver.” What that means is that everyone only understands anything in the way they can understand it. It’s a pretty simple principle when you think about it, really. Even Jesus himself did this, Muhammad did it, Moses, the Buddha – every successful spiritual or philosophical leader was very good at recognizing their audience’s abilities or modes of thinking and understanding.

"The Secret" to Faith & Preparation

I hate self-help books. Don’t get me wrong, I love self-help, self-improvement, self-awareness... pretty much self-most-everything in general. But self-help books are often just filled with vacuous platitudes that are designed to make us feel better while not actually improving anything and, of course, sell books. So, today I’ll talk about how self-help concepts can help us with the interplay between faith and hard practicality. As I always say, religion is useless if we can’t apply it to our lives in some real and helpful way.