The Incident at Bethlehem

One of the advantages of being a dog is that you speak the same language as God and the universe, which humans can’t speak or understand. This is why dogs are so great and people love them so much: we have qualities like loyalty and love and faithfulness and so on that humans lack, because we understand the universe.

Because of this I ended up (as was intended from the start) being a kind of advisor to Jesus starting when he was very very young and still talking baby talk which is actually an angelic dialect. You can’t imagine the confusion it causes angels when humans start talking faux-baby talk to their babies without knowing what they are saying. They say things to their babies like, “frog bottle the ironing board, it’s constipated,” and like manner of nonsense and it can be very hard for angels to sort things out when prayers like this reach them.

Anyway Jesus and I would often have heart-to-hearts which as you might imagine were incredibly deep and meaningful. Every single time, as it happens, which was kind of rough on me because sometimes you’d just like to have a normal conversation, like, “Hey how’s it going? Did you see how totally awesome that butterfly was?” And so on, but no. With baby Jesus everything was about some profound matter and you could hardly get him to comment on whether he liked the baby food or not. It was only later that he lightened up and that was largely the result of an incident. Of course it was because it’s always the incidents with these famous people isn’t it? In the meantime until the incident it was very heavy going and even hanging with Socrates was in fact easier, even towards the tragic end there when he drank the hemlock and began talking about owing people chickens. Because at least at that point he died and the endless heavy conversations were over whereas with baby Jesus he was obviously very young and there was no apparent end to how long I would have to have profound conversations with Him.

Little did I know. There was in fact a very near thing with the deranged King Herod (a right bastard that one, standout in a veritable field of right bastards) killing lots of babies in the vain hope that he would somehow randomly kill Jesus at the same time, a pretty heinous and stupid hope on his part. Destiny, who can always be relied on, called me up on the astral line and she had me guide the Holy Family out of sight until the horrific ruckus had subsided. Destiny can be great that way except when she’s mad at you. Then watch out.   

It was the incident that finally got Jesus out of the doldrums when it came to ordinary conversation and it went down like this.