I am tired of this thought experiment, this place inside the box where brilliant but uneven men might shape narratives about alive-but-already dead cats. We are all either alive-but-already-dead or entirely eternal in the throes, in the arms, beneath the motherly, sheltering wings
Of the Divine
So good, so very good
…at
setting captives free
Six weeks ago we lost a beloved cat who was originally named Billie Holiday until she survived a traumatic near-death experience. We renamed her Miracle.
When Miracle died suddenly I rushed to stuff meaning and hope into the place she had left with us. We adopted a gregarious shelter cat and began to foster a litter of kittens.
For a brief time things looked manageable. We grieved, but we also marveled. Then, one by one the kittens succumbed to something awful. After the first few died we surmised it was panleukopenia. It was an agonizing week of trying everything and then losing them. We lost, then lost again.
I kept thinking this must have been what the plague felt like (worse, of course).
Against cooler heads we adopted a second cat for my college-aged son. She is amazing and is going to be a great city girl.
We knew–no kittens, the panleukopenia is too strong, lingering like a vengeful ghost all around us in the house.
Then we got an email–momma cat, four week old kittens, needed a foster home. I told the coordinator our story. She said she would keep looking, hope for someone less contagious.
No one emailed back.
When we got to the shelter there was a hesitation, some consulting over Momma Cat’s listlessness. They sent her home with us, humans of last resort. It has been a rough season for cats, for shelters, for life or death decisions.
We took this little feline family home and sensed something was wrong. Mama seemed wan and apathetic.
I called the vet the next morning, emailed the shelter. Nothing materialized in terms of veterinary answers so I enlisted the help of a trusted medical professional whose patients are mostly human.
We dosed mama with “subq” liquids and antibiotics left over from the last bacterial thing. We knew this was a race against time. She needed to eat soon.
Last night at 12:30 she started eating. Miraculous.
She went from skinny, listless, glassy-eyed to an engaged and selfless mama cat.
Selfless because she has a moon-shaped laceration on her belly, right across the nursing plain.
I am not sure all the little ones will make it. I am not sure what we will do with our grief if we lose even one.
One thing is sure for me though, this little feline mother is a Wonder Cat to me.
It was Texas-July hot, with no chance of rain when, for reasons beyond the ken of ordinary foster moms, the air was filled with a host of juvenile butterflies. Tender and small, their origami wings beat the air, carrying some insistent message.
Perhaps about how fragile we are
Or how only God knows
how to bring the rain.
The moon and a neighborly planet shine bright, two boats in the current of night
While the trees reach out to one another
I tell myself you are in another country which is more than true, more than doggedly-what-I-see-true.
You are in another country no sun lights the so blue sky there and we will
All be changed.
He was so pretty we thought he was a she, but fierce, a climber and a player, a napper and a hunter. At first I thought it was losing his mother, then I thought other things, increasingly more desperate until the end was a wild wail of hope and then the kind of grief that comes when hope dies as well.
He was our tiny harbinger. The first clue of what was to come.
We all get new names there.
Scientists (at least the social ones) love to navel gaze at the belly buttons of the religious.
I get it. We are a messy, heterogeneous bunch. As I get older I get less and less religious but more and more convinced in the power of the God of Love.
Take this week for instance. This week we threw our all at trying to save a litter of kittens from panleukopenia.
Wrenching.
When my children poured out their grief in each loss they said, I just want them to know that I love them. I just want her to know I love her. I just want him to know I love him. Or directly to the dead–
I just want you to know I love you.
When you believe in a compassionate, omnipotent God, getting love notes to kittens is no biggie. He keeps what we have committed to Him against that Day.
Even if the day is Friday.
Even if you thought the last one might make it through.
Even if the patient weighs less than a pound.
Impending demise might make some pragmatic, other it pushes on to say, no matter what
I love you
On earth as it is in heaven.
(In a time-keeping nod to newcomers) on “Thursdays” the cows are in charge. Always close to the Grown Up Manger Child,
All chew their cud
In the greenest pastures
And amble down to the wide, wide River of Life
To drink whenever we want.
Even from a distance of 2000 years and a decent set of personal anecdotes about the constancy of God, not everything Jesus did or did not do makes sense to me.
Which helps when my prayers get different answers than what I want.
Because I do not need a Savior who feels the need to do what I find logical or necessary.
I just need a Savior.
I was born into a traveling family. Growing up I struggled with issues of identity and loss. What was home? What was this nagging sense of displacement?
I remember traveling in Italy as a young child and looking for the face of my grandmother in the crowd–despite my knowledge that she was not there. There was no chance that my middle-aged grandmother had jetted off for a Roman holiday in the spring of 1977
I had family members who I loved who did and said and believed things I did not. I found their beliefs deeply painful. How could I love them but not their way of seeing the world?
I settled on loving them but not the faults in their world views, and uneasy, precarious compromise, and one I have not much improved upon in all the years since.I struggle with disappointment in the collective institution of “family,” just as I have with “church,” “friendship,” “community,” and “club.”
People fail each other in big and little ways all the time, but Jesus never does. He is this extraordinary voice for justice, for love, for honor, for hope. His family resemblance marks the best of us.
Jesus does not look like a white guy in a flowing robe. He does not look like any of the famous pictures we have of him.
What he looks like is Love. Love that protects. Love that shelters. Love that never fails.
And that kind of family resemblance is hard to miss…when we find it among us in this broken world.
Matthew 12:48-50
1 Corinthians 13
Nondescript kitchen window transforms itself into stained glass as I overthink which teacup, settle on porcelain white so different from the non-Euclidean trees green, alive, and fierce in this hot summer wind
I drop
two bags into the single cup, pour water from the kettle, assess how full the tea tin used to be
Last time we were alive
Together.
Carrying Light 