After a lifetime of living with loving and attentive animals, an insight occurred to me, an analogy of sorts. Our pets, I think, are made for communion with us, their animal nature with our human nature. Our dogs in particular are made for us. When we take them into our homes, when we love them and treat them well, they become better dogs, closer to the human, and closer to fulfilling their real doggie natures, which is to be loving and serving creatures in their own right and in the world with us. C. S. Lewis, in That Hideous Strength, called the animals our "servants, playfellows, and jesters." The animal world exists in relation to our human world, the animal nature in relation to our human nature.
Now, as our dogs' animal nature is made for communion with our human nature, so is our human nature made for communion with God's divine nature. The closer we are to God, the closer we become to truly fulfilling our human nature, to becoming truly loving and giving creatures in our own right.
When we first rescued Simon from his terrible situation (the person who had owned him, vacated her apartment and left him in it alone, without food or water for four days until her landlord found him), Simon was undisciplined, and he was a runner. If we opened the front door and didn't watch him, he would dash out and we would have to chase him. Chasing a reluctant dachshund is arduous, especially when he has his own agenda. In our fenced in backyard, he would try to find a place where he could dig his way out under the fence. We never knew for the first couple of months whether, when he didn't come when called, he was in the yard or gone again. Since I loved him from the start I was terribly worried every time he wouldn't come when called. Frequently he would simply be in the backyard pursing the smell of some underground creature and trying to dig it out of the ground, and I would have to find him and carry him back to the house. Of course I always gave him a good talking-to and he always looked sorry, but the next time was the same thing. No Simon. Finally we got all of the weak places in the fence line filled in and he finally quit trying to leave.
Now he is a delightful, but sometimes stubborn, housedog who no longer waits by the door to dash out or who doesn't come when called, well usually. He is undoubtedly a dachshund in behavior (I wouldn't have it any other way), but one who is a loving part of the human world. The change from what he was five years ago when we got him is quite dramatic. He has truly been humanized.
It is, I think, true to say that Simon's animal nature was made for communion with my human nature, just as my human nature was made for communion with the divine nature of the Trinity, to be specific. The evidence for that I find in myself and in my own experience too. When I graduated from college with a BA (1962), I was an atheist, at best an agnostic, and a selfish and foul-mouthed one at that. Oddly, in graduate school I became a Christian (oddly, because in this age that is not supposed to happen since you would have to be really stupid to believe what "they" believe, and graduate schools are only for intelligent people), for I discovered that there were indeed very intelligent people who were Christians. I didn't become one without a struggle, but my struggle did lead to faith and grace. Now I find the changes in my own nature are on-going and consistent with my understanding of the divine I have come to love and desire. As little Simon is more fully dog, so to speak, I find myself more fully human in a way I would never have thought possible at 22.
And that perspective allows me now to understand that Simon is truly "a simple gift," a good gift, a gift for which I am always grateful. One of the delights of my life is to be greeted enthusiastically by him whenever I arrive home after being gone for a time: ears perked up, eyes shining, bouncing around at my feet, tail wagging rapidly, eager to be acknowledged. "He's home, he's home, he's home at last!"
[We live in an age and time that denies this hierarchical view of reality: animal, human, divine. The world view of an age, however, does not determine what is real and true finally. That is for each person to discover for him or her self, as I did, and the currency of the divine/human relationship is love and faith, not reason.]