Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who fell deeply in love with his hospital nurse after  some surgery, wrote after a long and torturous year – he stayed in his monastery – that “Loving God is a piece of cake compared to loving another human being.”

He might as well have added “loving God and dogs.” The big shock to Merton is that he had, for perhaps the first time in his life, found himself capable of loving someone other than God.”

I understand his bewilderment in one sense. Ten years ago, and perhaps for the first time in my love, I found myself in love with Maria. I realized with great shock – and some regret – that I had been incapable of genuinely loving anyone aside from my daughter.

The curious thing about love is that if you can’t feel it, you don’t really know what it is. When I was talking to a therapist about my dog Lenore, she looked at me and said, “don’t you understand? This is what you want from a person.”

I didn’t understand, I was stunned.

I know I loved my sister and my grandmother, but that was a very different kind of love. But I have always loved dogs, easily and continuously.

I hate to compare dogs to God, but I do sometimes wonder why people find it so easy to love God and dogs, but so difficult to love one another unconditionally. And by people, I include me.

What Merton (I wrote a book about him called Running To The Mountain) learned when he fell in love is the same lesson that I learned when I met Maria. Being human is harder than being holy, harder than loving a dog.

And Maria taught me what unconditional love really means. You can’t love me – a lot of people don’t – if you don’t really know me and accept me. Unconditional love for me is the love that comes from being fully known, or from loving fully. No dog can ever understand me like that.

Like most of the people reading this, I know countless people who love dogs open-heartedly and thoroughly, but who struggle to love human beings. It is almost a cliche in the dog world that many of us love dogs more than people.

And I have noticed with surprise and anger that some people love dogs in order to hate people.

Many of us dog people have wondered about this.

And I’ve also wondered about this: One of God’s main commandments and injunctions is for human beings to love one another. How can one love God and not each other?

Why is it so easy for people to rescue dogs – there are hundreds of thousands of people in the dog rescue movement – but who are reluctant to rescue people. (When we are in trouble, no one is coming to pick us up in big vans and re-home us with excellent and loving care. In this culture, we are on our own.)

I read a story recently about a San Francisco neighborhood with thousands of people living on the streets, many for years. A local paper ran a picture of a homeless dog wandering the streets, and hundreds of people rushed to give him a home and donate to his care.)

Is it impossible for people to love human beings in this way? What is it that makes it so easy to love a dog, and so hard to love a human? I’ve written a couple of books about this myself.

It’s complex.

Dogs can’t speak or argue; they are dependent on us, and can’t move out or file for divorce. Since they don’t talk, we are free to project anything we wish onto them: they love us, they are jealous, they can’t live without us, they can’t bear it if we go to work or on vacation, they are abused, needy, they love us unconditionally.

These are all emotions we don’t always or often get from other people. The new work of dogs, I believe, is tending to our loneliness and disconnection. We need them more and more in our fragmented and disconnected society.

Dogs are masters of Darwinian evolution. That’s why they do so much better than raccoons and squirrels.

We don’t need them to hunt for us or protect us these days, they have evolved, as they are so good at doing, to become what we need them to become: emotional support systems and comfort in a sometimes harsh world.

During my difficult times, my dogs comforted me, showed me how to love in a way. But they couldn’t save me, the can’t save the planet. Only people can do that.

The English Author John Middleton Murry wrote that it is better to be whole than to be good. Speaking for myself, I was not close to being a whole person when I only loved dogs and not people. I am not quite devout enough to love God, although I do love what he stands for at times.

Learning to love people is a very difficult path to wholeness, and I am not yet fully there. This path takes us to being fully human. In one sense, my friend Susan Popper’s struggle with cancer has brought this into focus. We had drifted apart, but when she was stricken with an awful disease, I felt a love for her that was somewhat new to me. I was drawn to it, not away from it.

Perhaps I am learning to love. And I see very clearly that the path to salvation is learning to love other people.

This is not the love I feel for Maria or the love I felt for Red or feel for Zinnia or Bud. It is a love of being whole, being human. My friendship with Susan reminds me that people are complicated, that I am difficult. That makes love deeper and richer for me.

When Merton finally loved someone other than God, he had a powerful epiphany while walking the streets of Louisville, Kentucky, near Gethsemani, his beloved monastery.

Looking at the crowds around him, he wrote, “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers..”

That’s what I am feeling now.

This sense of connection was a relief and a joy to him, as was my loving Maria. When I found love, like Merton, I began to open myself up to others, not at once, not easily, not even wisely. But still, I thought of my own heart when I read what Merton wrote about his insight:

“Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man, among others.”