Canine Rites

The car park at the Pet Crematorium at Hartley Wintney contains, very very roughly, something in excess of half a million pebbles. I estimated that an area about 8 inches square included about a hundred of them, and that the car park was about fifty feet square; (50 x 12)2 /64 x100 = 562,500. Professor Abacus thinks the margin of error in this figure is too wide for it to be useful, and who am I to argue. But working it out helped to occupy the time, for someone not very adept at mental arithmetic, while I waited for Christine to finish saying a very emotional goodbye to her dog.This is the third of Christine's dogs I have offered to the Lord, in the faith that he does something we may not clearly know with the mute creation. She has stopped bothering overly about the helpful souls who, frustrated at their inability to share her passionate relationship with them, have told her 'it's only a dog' or asked whether she'll get another one. Her entire existence has been organised around them. To her credit she has never treated them as anything other than dogs: she recognises that they have canine thoughts and relations that are fundamentally a closed world to her. People say silly things because such extreme emotions are embarrassing enough to express about a human and they will say silly things in those circumstances too, trying to ward off the power of the feeling, to put it right, to restore calm. But this is what love looks like, even if I don't share it. I suppose the test of the love's quality will be what Christine does with it next.I read from Isaiah 11 - 'the wolf shall lie down with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid ... for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea'. There are not many dogs in the Scriptures, and those that do appear don't play a very positive role. In 1Kings they lick up Naboth's blood and gnaw the flesh of Jezebel; they snarl around the author of Psalm 22; they eat the crumbs under their masters' tables, points out the Canaanite woman who confronts Jesus in Mark and Matthew, and in Luke they lick the sores of Lazarus. The friendliest Biblical dog is the one who accompanies Tobias in the Apocryphal book of Tobit, but nothing is said about him. So I settled on Isaiah's vision of the renewed earth in which the animals very clearly have a role to play, and later accompanied the dog on his last journey, a few yards along a covered walkway to the kiln.The cremation oven at Hartley Wintney is in a huge early-19th-century brick kiln. Its slightly disorganised brickwork and the fact that it's been clearly repaired and restored makes its sombre bulk rather gentle and welcoming. It has seen life. It's the kind of place a human might choose to be cremated, quite apart from an animal.