A Feline Theology of Trust

A Theology According to Puderd

If we are really honest, we have to all confess to having some really absurd silly terms of endearment for our little furry friends and, horror of horrors, our not‑so‑furry friends, lovers, and soul mates. We would probably be mortified if others ever heard us use these terms in the light of day. Time for a true confession I have a small smoke‑gray cat that lets me live with her. Somehow the name she had when given to me, Frisky, has been transmuted to Puderd. Don't ask how. I guess it's the same process that transmutes Jan to Fuzzums. Life seems to have its little mysteries.

The important things here are the ecclesiastical merits of this fuzzy spokesfeline for a Higher One. I have attended bible school in Europe and have a letters in theology in one of the Hammermill photocopy paper boxes in my basement. Yet I have gained some deep insights from my small fur‑coated teacher I never learned from the scholarly men of the United Kingdom.

I have a small room in my house in which I keep an antique book cabinet filled with ancient books from prior centuries. I also have an oak table in there on which I have a large plaster Celtic Cross, back lit with a single orange light bulb in one of those little candlestick things you normally see in windows at Christmas, with clear lights in them. An olive‑wood clad New Testament I got in Jerusalem and the Episcopal Book of common Prayer are there also. There's a nine foot miniature‑leaf scheffilera filling up the remainder of the room.

With my mother having died this week I find I am going into this room a lot more than I normally do. It seems like a good place to wonder about stuff like the meaning of life, death, illness, dreams, God, the order of the universe. I just discovered last night it to be an exquisite place of learning about the peace of God. It was very late in the evening and I was sitting there on floor, legs crossed, facing Jan (Fuzzums), who was as I. We were having a time of prayer since the angst of the world and issues of mortality seemed much too close for comfort. In the midst of this other‑worldly time, a very short‑statured teacher came quietly into our midst, padding so silently in fur‑lined slippers.

This confident tutor, arranging herself in my legs, gave me a look as if to say "I have an important quiet lesson for you to learn, Watch." I didn't know that cat's legs could go in all these directions at once. This cat managed to assume a position of repose with all four feet somehow intertwined and at the same time pointing to Heaven. This spoke ever‑loudly to me, in the silence, of great trust and confidence. This little mentor went quite happily to sleep with a loud purr, proclaiming the peace of God. The aura of peace, contentment, and serenity that surrounded this small teacher radiated out in ever‑widening circles. I had a vision of those ever‑widening circles moving out beyond the dim orange light of this sanctuary to enfold an entire troubled world. I even asked out loud if God was making himself known to me through my cat. The ancient writings of Faith tell us God spoke through the mouth of a donkey. Perhaps he speaks through cats in the atomic age. I still feel like whispering and tip‑toeing.

They didn't tell me in Sunday School that God can purr.


Behind Closed Doors

There is a rather large regal male Himalayan cat that has been hanging around my house for many months. This huge feline is clearly used to getting his way with the female kitties of the neighborhood. My neighbor's hapless female tabby just delivered a third six-pack of kittens fathered by this rogue. This is important to me because I myself have a small declawed gray with semi-orange tabby which loudly insists on being let outside for short roamings. Fortunately, a surgical intervention will prevent my becoming grandfather to a young troupe of rambunctious Himalayan/tabby hybrids.

My innocent little know-it-all pet will stand at the back door and inundate me with a rather carefully contrived and irritating yowl until I relent and let her out. She knows what's good for her. I don't, she's certain. Be that as it may, I let her out against my better judgement, realizing that the only way for her to understand my reluctance to let her out, is to let her out. If the grand stalker is out there, the lesson is learned quickly and kitty is back in the house before I can even think about closing the door. At other times learning is slower to come.

Some time it takes ten minutes or more. The problem is that in ten minutes I may have forgotten that Puderd is outside and not hear her proclamations of a lesson well-studied. This has on occasion made for some very long and cold contemplation as she spent the whole of the night outside. I may find myself wondering why the cat has not hopped up on the bed during the night, but I don't get up to hunt for her. When I go to stand in the bathroom first thing in the morning, after one of those nights, doing my business, looking out the window, wanna guess who is precariously perched on the second-floor sill, greeting me with a plaintive heart-rending bid for safety, inner warmth, fresh Purina pellets, and a soft bed? One of the unexplained mysteries of my universe is how that cat can possibly know I am in that bathroom (there are three) at that precise time. You must understand I don't use the bathrooms in a predictable fashion.

An important spiritual principle occurred to me as I let her in the house yesterday after a wandering in the outer darkness, compounded by one of those surprise freezes that aren't supposed to occur because the calendar says it well into springtime. God knows best. We humans like to think we know what is best for us. We are quite willing to enter into protracted entreaties with God in Heaven to grant us our secret desires. We believe there is something better on the other side of the closed door. Sometimes there is. Today there was a clear warm spring day on the other side with no feline monsters lurking in the bushes. Yesterday there was darkness beyond AND that Minotaur was out there. I knew this, but Puderd didn't want to trust my judgement on this. It almost got her badly hurt. We often don't want to trust God to know what is on the other side of our doors. We yank knobs. Some times we get torn up, very badly at that. Sometimes we even die.

We often like to say that God does not close a door without opening a window. Sometimes God doesn't open the door in the first place. We may ignore the fact it's closed and rip it open only to find an abyss on the other side. Our own momentum may well carry us out into the void. If we are fortunate, we may grab onto the safety chain and avoid freefall. That door may well have been closed for our protection.

Each of us has been created unique with a constellation of life experiences, strengths and weaknesses. What is an abyss for one may be for another an opportunity to test new wings. What for another may be a horror of darkness may be for me an opportunity to see diamonds of possibility glittering in a night sky.

Large-scale polls show that the number one fear in the United States is to speak before a group of people. People would rather die than be compelled to do this. For me, what others fear even more than death, is a pleasure of the highest order. Today, I spoke before groups twice, relishing every moment, wishing I had a multitude more of them. I could happily stand in a stadium before ten thousand.

Every time I get on an airplane, which I have done hundreds of times, I am amazed that most of the people around me quite blithely pop out a novel, the Wall Street Journal, or a lap-top computer and carry on with the ordinary doings of life. Me? I'm too busy leaving my fingerprints in the steel of the armrest to be bothered with something as trivial as reading or pounding on my computer. I don't do well flying, especially in TURBULENCE! I think about nothing except the delicious prospect of that small bounce that comes when the wheels touch down on my beloved terra firma once again.

After going her own way for a season, my cat comes to realize I had a better plan for her. Her animated scamper and gleeful gurgle as she rushes back into my safety tells me she has accomplished some learning. I had offered her security, food, repose. She chose darkness, want, and fear. Alas, the next day she forgets. But, so do we.

Only God knows the future and only God is able know what is really best for us. Surely if I can see to the best interests of my house pet, then we can trust God to bring the right mix of experiences and challenges to enrich our lives and to grow us past our fears. We can believe He has nothing but our ultimate welfare in mind. After all, we ░were bought with a Great Price. The promise of the Christian message is that God will withhold no good thing from us. At the same time, He doesn't promise us freedom from turbulence. Yet, we can often seek out the safety of smooth air by following His precepts, including honoring closed doors. And, He will see His chosen through to a safe landing in Heaven.

When God let's us out, He also remembers to let us back in.

"Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us."

Shutters

Each morning I get up amazed and thankful that another priceless day has been cast before me to use and invest as I want. Before opening the wooden shutters in my bedroom I often offer a small prayer of thanksgiving for my safe passage through the sometimes precarious darkness of another night. I frequently play a little game with myself, guessing what the day will look like before opening up to the world. Clear, sunny and warm? Cloudy, rainy, and foreboding? A crystalline wonderland of snow and ice? Today I opened the shutters as usual after my diminutive prayer to find the day before me containing a dark leaden bank of forbidding cloud. It presented an ominous sensibility and I wondered what it would bring to me today. The cat purred a respectful quiet requiem from her cozy cave in a nearby mountain of blankets and other assorted bedding.

Moments later the phone rang. I just learned that you were not able to open your shutters this morning, that the severe blackness of night had blotted out the light of Hope for you. Or had it? I recall One who died a horrific death many years ago and how the world suddenly became black as night at the moment of His passing, even though sunset was hours away. Our world was shaken to its foundations by His death and it would seem that even the sun lost a reason to shine. Yet, some hours later, the sun began to give warmth again to the cold despair of humanity. For many days in spite of the sun's return, His closest friends and followers moped around in darkest despair, wondering if the Son would return as He promised.

And He did. The darkness of Friday yielded to the grand brilliance of Easter Sunday. When Mary went to His tomb to check on His body that fateful morning, she found it empty with the stone seal broken open. She encountered a man she thought to be the gardener and implored him to tell her where the body had been taken. But he wasn't the Gardener and he hadn't taken the body anywhere. He revealed to her that he was, in fact, the risen Son, the reason all the chronicles of humanity are now called his-story.

In that moment when history waited to know if he was just the gardener or if he was the Reason for Hope, Mary learned what all of us now know two millennium later. He wasn't the gardener! There is a reason for hope on the other side of the inky shadows which will one day overcome each of us. He came back from death to tell us he was leaving to prepare a place for us and that if it wasn't true, he would have told us so.

You had your last sunrise yesterday and your shutters are forever closed on this world. Yet, your eyes are now open to the Kingdom in which darkness never descends, where there is no night, a place where the streets are of gold so pure as to be transparent, where the foundation stones are of precious stones.

For those of us still here wondering what's on the other side of the shutters, we will miss you greatly. Life here can be really scary. Your parents have been through more than most of us can even fathom. I know of those times when the shutters were locked prematurely on the lives of your brother and sister, your brother shot to death in a robbery and your sister literally swallowed up in a sinkhole on the beach while taking a holiday walk. It's more than enough to make me want to hide in the blankets with the cat, suck my thumb, and never come out again. I often have wondered how your parent's have been able to carry on these years. I wonder how they are going to do this week, and next, and next. In a world where Friday always comes before Sunday, I can only hope they will take great consolation in the promise of the One who said he was going ahead to prepare a place for you.

It has been dark and rainy all day but Sonshine is forecast for tomorrow.


Refuge

This winter, here in the south east, we have experienced the harsh abuses of the so-called El Nino effect, even though the causative patch of warm Pacific Ocean water is more than seven thousand miles distant. Many of our days have been dark and leaden, battered by intense unrelenting rain and howling winds. Numerous people throughout the country have lost their homes this winter. Some have died. Hundreds of thousand shivered in sub-zero temperatures, sans heat and light. It is the kind of weather that makes one appreciate the security and comfort of four-poster beds and warm furry foot warmers. I find arising in the dark on such days is a special challenge, not made a bit easier by the prospect of leaving a warm cozy nest shared with a splendid feline.

For three years I have enjoyed the constancy of Puderd's unconditional affection. It is my good fortune to live in a time and space where a small gray tabby cat feels sufficient serenity and contentment to greet each day with a sustained purring vibrato. I count my blessings every morning to wake in peace and live out the day in harmony. Many places in the world are in such turmoil and agony that cats have, no doubt, long disappeared from them. Certainly, those few that remain are too busy surviving to purr.

One of my delights in coming home each evening is going into the bedroom to discard my coat, tie, and other trappings of professionalism. This is greatly enhanced when I find my fuzzy pet yet buried in the bedding, seemingly unmoved from ten hours earlier, still making her resonant vibrato. My gray and orange tabby had not given any concern for the likes of food, shelter, or safety during her quiet day of leisure.

On those rare occasions when danger looms for Puderd, I quickly intervene. Last week a huge steel-gray feral monster, lurking outside, caught my hapless tabby unaware, and drove her to seek refuge on the second floor sill of the kitchen window. So beset with fear was my howling Puderd, that she soiled herself. Launching a brisk counter attack, I compelled Puderd's feline enemy to make a frantic getaway; a flying leap fifteen feet from the deck into space. Puderd was limp with relief. Fetching her from the sill, I could soon feel a rising purr of thanksgiving and gratitude. Carrying her back into the house, her harrowing experience was soon forgotten.

People face things much worse than giant cats the color of blue gun metal; things like bankruptcy, unemployment, the prospect of death, divorce, shame, fear of the future, crime, busyness, competition, the suicide of children, broken dreams. So many of the people around me are in all manner of turbulent white water, collectively experiencing all of these calamities.

My cat can enjoy refuge in my bed every night, secure in the knowledge I will pluck her from the feral predators that occasionally confront her. I can enjoy refuge in my bed with Puderd each night, during my days of peace and safety. But what about when a giant wave of boiling white water slams you onto the rocks and knocks the last breath out of you? Like when a doctor tells you that you are going to die slowly and painfully from a neurological horror. Like when you come home to an empty house and find a note from your wife on the counter telling you she has taken the kids and furniture and moved out-of-state. Like when your accountant calls and tells you the business you have given your life to has failed. Like when your husband is killed by a drunk driver on his way home with your anniversary gift. Like when you are told you are being re-engineered into unemployment, effective at once.

Hurricanes cause more destruction than any other type of weather phenomenon because of their vast size and fury. Some of these cyclonic monsters can exceed five hundred miles in diameter. Yet, every single one of these monsters has at its center an eye, a region of complete calm, clear skies, and magical tranquility. The very highest, most destructive winds of horror in a hurricane are to be found immediately adjacent to this oasis of peace.

So it is within the storms of our lives. If we are willing to look for the center of tranquility beyond the fierce turbulence of life, it is always there. Hurricanes always have eyes. A refuge of peace is always available to us in the tempests of relational failure, financial ruin, terminal illness, and traumatic loss. A prominent business man was called in the middle of the night and told his large factory was engulfed in flames. His livelihood burned to the ground despite the best efforts of many engine companies. His response? He laid his weary body down on the ground, pulled his coat over himself and slept soundly, knowing in the morning he would start anew. Beyond the flames of adversity he had found refuge for his soul. Thus it can be with each of us.

"The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul; He guides me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake. Even though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me. Thou dost prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; Thou has anointed my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and loving kindness will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever."

Shake, Rattle and Roll

The splendid small gray tabby, with blotches of orange, that allows me to live with her has come to enjoy the security of a self-made cave in the mountain of blankets I keep on a four-poster bed during the cold cloudy depressing part of the year most of us know as winter. I think we both get a sense of security and safety from hiding under that heap of assorted bed spreads, sheets, blankets, and even old sleeping bags. I often emerge, shower, and head off for the uncertainties of the work place while Puderd luxuriates in her cozy repose until the spirit moves on her to come forth to sample the offerings of a new day.

One of the things I rather enjoy doing is going to the kitchen at the far end of the house in the morning and shaking the paper bag containing her Friskey's Special Diet. I am amazed at how this contented cat can be sound asleep under eighteen inches of blankets, sleeping bags, bed spreads and sheets at the far end of the house, yet hear this quiet rustling of her bag and instantly be at my feet insisting that I hurry up and get it open.

During the day or evening if I want to find the cat and fail in my mission, I simply go into the kitchen and take out a small round cardboard container containing cat treats and rattle it. It would seem that the treats colliding with the plastic ends create the precise frequency to entice my obscure feline to come out into the open from her still unknown hiding places. In seconds my furry disciple is at my feet, telling me to again hurry.

Puderd has learned that small quiet signals can be associated with blessings of different sizes. She is willing to leave the warm cozy safety of her nocturnal repose or the secure anonymity of her secret hiding places and venture out onto a cold tile floor to receive her sustenance for another day. She daily risks leaving her comfort zone. So far she has not been disappointed.

It occurs to me that a life of faith for cat owners is exactly the same, under ideal circumstances. When we trust God to meet our needs and become silent, we learn to hear His often still small voice which beckons us to receive His blessing. In the noisy frenetic world we often create for ourselves, we fail to hear His voice and His sustenance for the day is frequently never delivered, because we don't go to the right place to receive it. We fail to come to the kitchen of Heaven and receive His bread and the Water of Life. My cat learned long ago she must come to the kitchen to be fed and watered. Perhaps our cats have something to teach us.

So often in our self-imposed hunger, we seek relief from our cravings in the cauldrons of materialism. The vital minerals and nutrients we need for spiritual life cannot be found in any material thing so we often experience vast deficiencies in our souls. So many angst-torn souls experience little more than living death in our consumer society, victims of malnutrition of the heart. We have come to believe that fulfillment and contentment are to be found in mountains of possessions, safety to found in fortresses of financial security. A cultural addiction binds us to the false belief that 'just a little more' will finally scratch those unreachable itches in the deepest recesses of our beings.

There seems to a spiritual object lesson in the fact that my feline room mate purrs all the time and is in ecstasy when presented with just a small treat rolling across the floor, the name of which escapes me. It seems cats have learned the secret of contentment. They don't continually crave more of anything, just enough. Cats are expert at telling us when they have had enough, be it offerings of food, water, or affection. We don't seem to have yet quite figured out that the secret to 'more' might just be found in 'enough.'

Today I sat at the bedside of a dear dear friend who will more than likely never see the sun rise again. It is a dark, foreboding, cold and rainy day and she will probably miss the sunset as well. It is expected Nancy will not survive the night in her battle with cancer. A more elegant, gentle, and kind soul is not to be found on Earth. Two days ago just before she slipped into that twilight that comes at life's end, Nancy related to me the vast wealth she has had in the cloud of family, friends, and well wishers who have been accompanying her on the last part of her journey. And there aren't any car dealers, jewelers, or representatives of corporate and retail America among them.

In the still quiet of that death watch there was a very loud message being proclaimed. You might just be able to get the same message from your cat, if you're real still. Wouldn't you rather learn it from your cat early in life than late in life on your death bed? If you chase after the consumer culture's lies there just might not be anyone at your bedside to hear your message. I know. My mom died alone and in stark terror. She chased the mirage in the consumer desert and ran out of water.

"No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will hold to one and despise the other You cannot serve God and mammon. For this reason I say to you, do not be anxious for your life, as to what you shall eat, as to what you shall put on. Is not life more than food, and the body than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single cubit to his life's span?"