Everything in life has something to teach us, if we only allow ourselves to look at it deeply enough. I don’t talk about this incident much —for obvious reasons—but I don’t forget it. I mean, who can you talk to about what you learned from your dog?

His name was Danny. He was one of those wiry, intense, frenetic kind of Irish setters who go through life at high speed, laughing all the way. I have dozens of funny stories about him. Those are the ones I tell. There is one story, however, that is not funny at all. It comes back to me at strange times of life, at those moments when I am feeling most defensive and very vulnerable.

It was hunting season. The woods behind the monastery are thick, wide, and off-limits to hunters. Danny ran in those woods every day.

One afternoon he came back from a run, stood looking at me quiet as a stone for a moment, and then lay down, stretched out the length of the throw rug in front of my desk, and looked at me lethargic and sloe-eyed. Something was wrong: no barking for the biscuit, no nudging my hands off the keyboard. Just the look. I got up from behind the desk, knelt down beside him, and ran my hands through the long scarlet feathering that covered his flanks and rib cage. When I felt it, he flinched only a hair and then gave a deep, slow sigh. I parted his hair with both hands and saw the bullet hole in his ribs. There had been no sound, no agitation, no hysteria, no meanness. Just the trust that if he looked at me long enough, I would understand; if he waited long enough, it would be alright again.

And it was, of course. The vet removed the bullet and, little by little, we loved him back to the same breathless energy and total irrepressibility he’d shown before the shooting. But I was never able to forget the incident as easily as he apparently had. I went on being troubled by the shooting, of course, but as the months went by, I found myself even more overwhelmed by the way the dog had responded to it. I got the distinct impression that it had been a good run in the woods and that it was worth it come what may.

The memory of the event touches my own life yet. I learned the power of vulnerability, of opening yourself to life, of entrusting yourself to other arms, come what may, and presuming that, in the end, it will all have been worth it. I learned from Danny that somehow, someway, if and when we are cut down in the delirium of life, we will have all the resources we need to carry us through.

—from Gospel Days (Orbis Books), by Joan Chittister