“Real people like dogs”

Beloved Ruth

Can’t say I ever heard my beloved Aunt Ruth Eloese Anderson Dunaway put it just that way, but she did express a worry that my enduring dislike for the creatures would surely unfit me for any happiness in the life hereafter.

Esteemed Valerie (a very real person)

So I confess: when selecting fellow creatures for any sociality or proximity, I have always gravitated toward those that slobber not, neither do they yap. And when they poop, they do their best to cover it up. 

Valerie, my esteemed and cherished eternal companion, evinces saintly patience toward all my sins and disabilities, including this one. But she’s far from sharing it: like our descendants, she gets all sloppy over Rick’s and Laura’s big, floppy Rudy. Who doesn’t get it and still, now and then, invites me to throw his red ball. To do which, thank you very much, I decline.

Rudy

And now I’m informed that our very language takes part in this conspiracy against my reality. Real people, you see, because they love dogs, are properly known as cynophiles. Some unfortunates bear the cynophobe tag: they fear the beasts, whether or not they also like them. 

A figment without a category

But the dictionaries seem to possess no antonym for cynophile. If, contrary to demonstrated fact, I hated women, I’d garner opprobrium as a politically-incorrect misogynist. If, equally improbably, I hated marriage, I’d be a misogamist. Or if I hated reasoning, I’d qualify as a misologist. But at least I’d still exist. And there’s apparently no “misocynist” nor “misopooch” nor anything of the sort that would acknowledge me as a recognized (if lamented) entity.

Does the commandment to “love thy neighbour” transcend the dictionary?

"Sociality"

My computer screen says it’s 4:42 a.m., on Friday, August 12, 2016. Normally, I’d still have a couple of hours of slumber before facing bathroom scale, toothbrush, blood sugar and pressure measurements, a cup of grapefruit juice, a fiber bar (prescribed by the colonoscopy doctor), a fistful of pills, and the general circulatory and articulatory creaking that initiate each new day. But there’s no point in trying to go back to sleep, because I’ve had some prayers answered in a bunch of connections that I have to capture here, while I remember them. 

I’ve been praying, recently, for help with a cluster of teaching opportunities: 

•  home teaching next Sunday (assigned topic: “The Hope of Eternal Family Love”); 
•  a lesson in High Priests’ Group, a fortnight later (“Yielding Our Hearts to God”); and
•  a Sacrament Meeting address, some time in October (“Temple Worship”) 

Brent

So, while pondering this diffuse handful of topics yesterday, in the interstices of everyday life, I accompanied Valerie to the Bountiful Temple. A friendly ordinance worker named Cottrell noticed my name, scanned my face, and asked whether I was related to my darling baby brother, Brent. Upon enlightenment, he asked that I pass along his greetings to Brent and Mimi, explaining that he and his wife had enjoyed their company over a recent eighteen-month Temple mission in Nauvoo. A warm and brotherly exchange, very brief and suitably muted by the surroundings, but none the less sweet for that. 

Me

After our shift, I placed my very first FaceTime call. Brent and Mimi answered from their car as they headed to a family gathering. I delivered the message; they were glad to hear from the Cottrells and shared in the pleasure of the connection. We remarked upon the frequency of such serendipities in the Temple, which brought up another apparently-random encounter in Bountiful, this time with Henry B Eyring of the First Presidency, whom I’d reminded (without expecting that he’d remember; he didn’t) that I’d been his Home Teacher, briefly, when we’d been graduate student and undergrad, respectively, in Cambridge. We reminisced about the long staircase to his Sacramento Street apartment, and parted with a smile and a handshake. 

I remarked to Brent that President Eyring is still, despite his exalted calling and consequent celebrity, utterly un-stuck-up: “just Hal.” Which elicited an anecdote from Brent: President Eyring had issued a calling to an old friend and classmate (I’ll call him Steve, not recalling his name) to preside over a Temple for three years, following immediately upon his three-year service as a counselor to his predecessor. In disappointment that he wasn’t to enjoy any respite from the rigors of that assignment, he burst forth with “Hal! Don’t I get any rest?” “Steve! You ask me that question?” — referring to his own extended and unremitting sequence of highly-demanding Church offices. 

Relevance? Well, we don’t go to the Temple (nor, for that matter, to other Church gatherings) in the conscious expectation that we’ll encounter others whose fellowship, however episodic, will enrich our life experiences. But it happens. All the time. Valerie and I frequently remark to each other, while driving back to Kaysville, what a lovely bunch of people we serve with in the Temple, and what a blessing it is to rub shoulders with them. And it occurs to me that we just may find there a glimpse of what Brother Joseph was saying when he puzzled me by describing the “sociality” of the Celestial Kingdom as the same, in unspecified respects, as that we enjoy here. 

And then there’s the “sociality” that we experience with our kindred dead, whom we name in the Temple and on whom we seal magnificent blessings, always on condition of their faithfulness. The ordinances we perform keep us reminded of our debts to them as our forebears and of our continuing connections to them. And the growing pleasure and urgency we feel in seeking their eternal happiness. And the sense of reticulated connectedness and occasional communication that doesn’t seem to care about distance in time and kinship.

In this month's First Presidency Message for Home Teachers, that same President Eyring asserts, quoting an unnamed prophet, that if we "live worthy of the celestial kingdom, ... the family arrangements will be more wonderful than [we] can imagine." Our family has to receive that in the context of our hopes and faithful expectations for "sociality" with our Chris, who before his suicide emphatically rejected his Gospel birthright, but who was born in the Covenant and who is therefore sealed forever to us. We still love him and want to enrich his eternal life and ache to take hope and comfort from such insights.

Mary Beth and Chris