Dog Sees God

I'm going to the play tonight, "Dog Sees God." I find the title a bit ironic because I've been playing with palindromes all week with my writing students and just this morning I was reflecting on how and where I "see" God. I know the play has, on the surface, nothing to do with God. It is about the Peanuts/Charlie Brown comic strip characters growing up. By the time I finish this post, I will have seen the play and may have more insight into how it is about God.

Why was I teaching palindromes in writing? Well, we were working on character sketch, vernacular, speech patterns, and I told students that Barbara Kingsolver's book, The Poisonwood Bible has a character who only speaks in palindromes. So I brought in some examples and challenged the students to come up with their own literary palindromes. One student brought in, "Madam, I'm Adam." I remembered Weird Al Yankovic's song Bob, dedicated to Bob Dylan, that is entirely made up of palindromes, "I, man, am regal a German am I.......Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog." You can see the entire poem at (http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Bob-lyrics-Weird-Al-Yankovic/64A208DBB08E381D48256D2E000AABEA). So we challenged ourselves all week to create those literary palindromes.

We also challenge ourselves in writing to 'show don't tell', which is a classic literary technique involving the use of concrete images to show what abstract sentences tell. Ex: Telling sentences: Al Yankovic is weird. Showing sentences: "Al's hair sticks out like he stuck his finger in a socket. He speaks in a crazed, caffeinated voice, and wears stripped bell bottom hip huggers even in 2009."

My friend and the president of our church wrote about the challenge of showing her 5 year old where God is. Where God isn't is a heaven where the boy can visit his sisters and get home in time for dinner. I began to think...how do we show don't tell a five year old where we find God?

This is what I came up with:
God is in the friendly wave from a neighbor who would help me jump start my car even though he doesn't know my name.

God is in the crow who wakes me every morning: caw, caw, caw. We need you.
out in the world
awake, awake, awake.
There is life
for you to live.
There is work
for you to do.
There is joy
for you to feel.
There is love.

God is in your hugs and in my good night kiss.

God is in your friend's hand, offered you when you fall down.

God is in the tears of the mother who misses her lost babies.

God is in the moon, the same single moon that can be gazed at by every single person in the entire world.

God is in the minuscule spider scampering up a thin strand of web...why?...for the same reason she repels back down five minutes later.

God is in the earthquakes, the tsunamis, the fire at the Dougy Center and in the troubled heart of the arsonist who set that fire.

God...where is God? How do we find God?

God is in the courage it takes each of us, every day, to rebuild our lives.


So the play was interesting. CB deals with the death of his dog and the death of his lover "Beethoven." He asks his friends about life after death. There is a bit of Buddha, a bit of what the Bible says, a bit of outrage, and a bit of love. Where do we find God in life and in death? In the pain and the sorrow, in the love and loss, in the life sometimes not worth living, in the death that came too soon. Life can really suck canal water, but good grief, wasn't that part of God's plan?