“What is a merciful heart? It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation—for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, and for every created thing.”
— St Isaac the Syrian

The last five years, the process of recovery—or more to the point, the healing grace of God—has been at work in me. The painful process of accountability and consequence made the anaesthetic of ignorance wear off. They say ignorance is bliss; to me, it was a numbing effect that reduced me to sub-human levels of empathy. Sexual objectification leads to the dehumanising of others and self. Believe me, I know.

I’ve written in my manuscript for a book I’m working on about how there is plenty of good in the world and plenty of evil, and how we do depends greatly on our point of view. From time to time, however, the world throws a story our way, much like the papers that used to get flung into someone’s front garden. Every now and then, one lands that you can’t just pick up and throw away.

As someone with two spaniels, and without huge scientific intervention unable to father my own kids—and probably too old now anyway—our dogs are our kids. Our first dog came as a bundle of fluff at eight weeks old, just days after the bottom fell out of my life. Just a week before, my partner held her for the first time and her eyes lit up with the closest thing to maternal excitement I’ve ever known.

At a time when taking things a day at a time was just too much, I had to go hour by hour. A puppy will do that to you. This little puppy kept us present and gave us hope and joy at a time when so much was up in the air. I had hit our relationship with the bombshell revelation that I had been living a double life and suffering with pornography since I was barely 12 years old. I mean no cliché when I say that little puppy, now five years old, saved me and continues to. Now accompanied by her little companion, who is two, they have both shown me what unconditional love is and that it can be expressed without uttering a word.

It is with that context that the viral story of a little street dog named Wang Wang hit me this week like a brick in the head. Four youths in a Chinese village reportedly beat and tortured her three puppies, just two weeks old, to death, and after beating and torturing her, set fire to her—all while streaming and filming it like it was fun.

I saw some clips that I couldn’t watch, and the snippets I did see haunt me. I cannot get them out of my head. I’ve recently become vegetarian to join my partner, so between us we are very animal-rights driven in our worldview, but this went somewhere beyond that. This subject has presented me with an anger and pain that aren’t personally mine, but a sense of needing justice rages within me.

Another thing at work is shame. I spent years degrading fellow humans as objects, and I despise that part of me. That part has been healed and transformed, but the memory of it remains, and seeing the capacity for dehumanisation in others is a bitter taste to hold in one’s mouth. I’m not comparing what I did with what was done to this dog and her puppies, but I do recognise something about what happens when empathy becomes numb and another living being becomes an object rather than someone or something of value.

So let’s work through this. I cannot wish some sort of damnation on those young lads who thought that this evil deed was somehow a good idea. I need to remember that if me, undeserving of grace, gets grace, then who am I to judge and damn someone else? But this doesn’t let them off the hook. What they did was evil. Justice and accountability still matter. I just need to let myself off this hook of resentment. That’s what’s at work here.

I hated the act of evil done to this precious little soul and her babies. There’s also fear in there because I love mine so much that the thought of losing them—which for almost all dog owners is an inevitability—is almost unbearable. Perhaps seeing something so vulnerable treated with such cruelty touches that fear too. We love these little creatures knowing that, in all likelihood, one day we will have to say goodbye to them, and there is something terrifying about loving anything that much.

When things happen that crush us and give us a worldview of pain and hopelessness, it’s specifically at this moment that I wrestle with my faith. I always used to scratch my head about Jacob wrestling with God, but I think I understand it more now. That’s what happens when we filter what we see in the world through the lens of a loving God whose ways are not our ways. Sometimes what we see and what we believe about God simply don’t seem to fit together, and so we wrestle.

If I let someone look at the black and white of my darkest decisions, then I’m sure plenty would damn me just as part of me wishes to damn those boys. This is where most of my wrestling with God leads—to the willingness to let go and let God. Not to pretend what happened wasn’t evil, not to say there shouldn’t be consequences, and certainly not to make what happened okay. But if I, undeserving of grace, get grace, I don’t then get to stand at the gates of that grace deciding who else is allowed through.

That’s uncomfortable because grace is easy to believe in when we’re talking about ourselves or people whose brokenness we understand. It becomes something altogether different when we’re confronted with someone whose actions disgust us. That’s where I find out whether I actually believe what I say I believe—that grace isn’t something earned by deserving people, and that the darkest thing a human being has done does not get the final word on who they are or what God can do with them.

China has a particularly bad history with the treatment of animals, and I guess that’s a cause, along with the numerous charities that work with street dogs, that I would like to fundraise for in the future. That’s the only thing I think I can do—to be a part of the change I long for rather than simply sitting with anger about something I cannot change.

I can’t undo what happened to Wang Wang and her babies, and I can’t unsee the little that I saw. But perhaps I can decide what I do with the fact that it affected me. Maybe the answer to feeling helpless in the face of cruelty is to turn some of that pain into compassion and action somewhere else.

Maybe that’s part of recovery too. When the anaesthetic of ignorance wears off, you start feeling things again, and sometimes feeling things fucking hurts. The answer isn’t to find another anaesthetic. It’s learning what to do with what you feel.

So when I get home tonight, my little dogs are having extra cuddles.

Whether they want them or not.

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