It was an impromptu but profoundly moving benediction for a much-loved friend who had just died, delivered by a grieving 8-year-old, that was the genesis for the new book, “The Grace of Dogs: A Boy, a Black Lab, and a Father’s Search for the Canine Soul”
Andy Root, the Carrie Olson Baalson Associate Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary, admits his latest book was the hardest of all his works to write, and says it also consumed the most time—nearly three years.
“This book is really my first legitimate stab at writing for a really broad audience,” Root says. “And I learned very quickly that writing for a broad audience is really quite different than writing for an academic audience or really even a church audience.”
The book centers on the death of the Root family’s black Labrador dog, Kirby, and on his son Owen’s immediate and innocent desire to mark his passing with an act steeped in Christian tradition.
“My wife had taken our dog to the vet and it turned out he had a mass in his stomach,” Root says. “She came and picked me up and our kids and we went back to say goodbye to him. To watch the kids grieve his loss was really something, and the grief really caught me off guard. They hadn’t known a day in their life without him. After the injection [to euthanize Kirby], the kids cried over him until his snout was literally soaked with their tears. And then Owen got up, went out to the waiting room and grabbed a paper cup full of water and some dog treats. He came back in, set the treats on the dog’s back, and then made the sign of the cross over Kirby and the water and looked up to heaven. It was like watching a priest at the table, and it was one of those experiences where the air just leaves the room. So that’s the entrée into the book, ‘Why did that act feel like the right thing to do then, because it’s essentially a liturgical act?’”
The Amazon description of the book notes, “In The Grace of Dogs, Root draws on biology, history, theology, cognitive ethology (the study of animal minds), and paleontology to trace how in our mutual evolution, humans and dogs have so often helped each other to become more fully ourselves. Root explores questions like: Do dogs have souls? Is it accurate to say that dogs “love” us? What do psychology and physiology say about why we react to dogs in the way that we do?”
“Watching my kids go through that experience really led into how this book is set up,” Root says. “It’s about this quest to figure out what it is about these animals that makes them so significant to us. Across all cultures and all times, people have felt that deep connection to their dogs. I tried to tease out whether or not there is a spiritual dynamic to that, and that’s kind of the voyage of the book. It’s a little bit memoir, a little bit popular science and a little bit pop theology. It’s supposed to be for the spiritual reader, the person in a church and just dog-lovers in general who’ve always wondered where this connection comes from.”
The Grace of Dogs will be published by Convergent, an imprint of Penguin Random House. It comes out on June 20th and will be available at all bookstores and outlets, and as an audio book.