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Two Dogs and a Parrot
Two Dogs and a Parrot
Joan Chittister, one of our leading inspirational writers, invites us to embrace and celebrate the deep bond between humans and animals. Two Dogs and a Parrot offers both heart-warming stories and thought-provoking reflections about sharing life with an animal companion. The relationships we form with animals—with dogs, cats, horses, birds, rabbits, and other pets—are full of joys and rewards. Our companion animals draw us out of ourselves and show us what it truly means to be alive. They teach us to accept life’s struggles and to cherish its pleasures and the importance of being able to accept ourselves and respect others. They help us to find purpose and meaning in what we do, and to overcome challenges and setbacks. In our treasured animals we observe varying degrees of excitement and play, of love and fear. And we realize their beautiful uniqueness, their sensitivities and strong sense of purpose.
Whether we have an animal companion, long to have a pet or love someone who does, or cherish animals and nature, Two Dogs and a Parrot will speak to us all. It illuminates the significance of sharing our lives with a pet and celebrates the great gift of animals in our world.
This best-selling book, at its core, is a psychology of human development. Now in paperback.
What Readers Say...
“...Chittister has a wide complement of credentials...When she speaks, people tend to listen...This thoughtful title should find a wide and enthusiastic audience with general readers...highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
“...this fine and often touching volume...discusses the spiritual connection between humans and their animal companions and explores the lessons to be learned...”
—Booklist
Reader Resources
Read an Excerpt
I was still grieving the loss of my laughing, loving Irish-setter Danny when the call came. A young woman who had visited the monastery over the years had heard about the death of Danny. And then, at about the same time, she came to know, too, of an exhibitor who presented show dogs in competition. This trainer and dog exhibitor, she learned, intended to have one of her highly bred golden retrievers euthanized.
This dog had simply had the misfortune to “outgrow the standard of the breed.” He was, in other words, too tall or too broad or too something to compete. He was no good for stud. In fact, he was of no financial good to her at all anymore. He had to go.
Did we want him, the girl on the phone pressed? If we would promise to take him, she was sure she could negotiate some kind of agreement to make it possible. We weren’t over Danny yet. But we did love dogs. The house might not be ready for another dog. But it might be easier to accept when we were used to having one around than it would be later. We didn’t have the time to think it through. But if we didn’t think quickly, this dog was going to be dead.
I took him.
…oh, was he trained! It was almost pitiable to watch him. Call the dog to come and he trundled across the room and threw himself flat on his face in front of you. No joy in coming. No joy in getting there. He had been robotized to the point of pain.
Somehow or other, in anticipation of dog show ribbons and championships, puppyness had been stripped right out of Duffy. We had an old dog, an empty kind of dog, in a young dog who had never found life for himself. It had been given to him in short phrases: come, sit, down, and stay. All of them are valuable things to know, but all of them, in his case, had been exaggerated to the point of meaninglessness.
My first attempt to free Duffy was to decide that no one who was involved with caring for him would ever give him a command again. It was the one clear gift I could think of to prove to him the trustworthiness of his essential dogness.
“Duffy,” I would say silently as I looked into his deep, wise, and knowing eyes, “you are enough just as you are. You have had all the shaping into someone else’s expectations that you will get for the rest of your life. From now on, all you need to learn is how to be yourself.”
Then the lesson became clear: It is when we become ourselves that people have the least control of us and we have the beginning of the whole of ourselves. Then, like Duffy, we will begin to bloom.
Each of us has been wounded by something on the way through life. No one of us really goes through all of life whole. In fact, the great Olympic struggle of existence may be exactly our need to work through our wounds to the point of our deepest, most secret valor. Only then, perhaps, can we come to peace with what we have done with the years as we were given them.
It’s easy, of course, to dream of doing great things someday— but our greatest gift to others, as well as to ourselves, may well be, in the final analysis, what we have done with ourselves. To grow beyond our limitations as we know them is surely the great task of the human enterprise. Otherwise, what do we have to bring to everything else in life as we go?
The problem is that we have learned to see woundedness as negative. As a drawback. Or an obstacle. Or a curb to success, to the fulfillment of the self. But that is only half the story.
The other half of woundedness lies in its invitation to give our whole selves to something else. It enables us not to squander our lives on multiple things when we can focus our hearts and our talents and our time and our efforts on bringing particular gifts to full bloom.
Woundedness is not the end of everything.It is the beginning of something else, something we would never have dreamed of—unless something else we thought we wanted ended.
In the Media
Awards
First place winner, books by small publishers from the Catholic Press Association.