In defense of cats

 

Listen. I love cats.

I know they get a bad rap from lots of haters (mainly grumpy people and dog people). Some say cats are mean, or they’re all opportunistic Garfields or tiny tyrants, or that they have no emotions, like houseplants. Dog people especially see cats as unpleasant or unaffectionate.

I was once one of you, until I got my own kitties. See, I had never had a cat friend before.

When I was very little, our family had a cat, but we were not friends. It wasn’t her fault really; my sister and I used to want her to hang out with us and on at least one occasion we barricaded her inside the cabinet of our mini Fischer-Price playhouse kitchenette. I do not blame her for not wanting to be friends with such maniacs. And then my sister’s allergies started flaring up, so we had to say goodbye to Whiskers. We all cried on the way home from the humane society.

The only other cats I knew growing up were friends’ or family members’ cats, and they all either hissed at me or were constantly hiding whenever I came around, with the exception of a couple cats who just seemed not to care about my presence at all.

Cats seemed all the same to me, grouchy and easily offended. So I became a dog person, or I thought I did, until my husband begged me to get a kitten and my world went FWOOOP (that’s the onomatopoeia for turning upside down).

Don’t get me wrong, I love dogs. They are pure and lovable and genuinely good. There’s nothing wrong with dogs (except when they’re puppies, but even then their extreme cuteness makes up for the horror of having to potty train them).

Cats though, cats are complex. They’re more like people than dogs are, and building a relationship with a cat takes time, effort, and lots of trust. Some cats are more naturally friendly and cuddly, like our maine coon, Zuko. Some have one favorite person whose face they will sleep on at night, but aren’t super into strangers, like our grey tabby, Pippin. Some are enigmas like our rescue tuxedo cat Bombadil, who is a little cinnamon roll of anxiety and strange yowling meows.

Cats don’t trust you right away. Get ’em as kittens and they’ll spend the first several hours hiding from you and hunting you until you leave them in the bathroom overnight and they realize they miss you and your body heat. Get ’em as adults and they’ll spend the first six months basically ignoring you until one day, something clicks and they feel safe enough to use you as a headrest on the couch.

Cats are quiet and unobtrusive. They potty train themselves. They only make noise when they need something, or if they’re feeling particularly lovey toward you–or when they inadvertently knock over that stack of books on the end table. Their happy sounds are soft rumbling purrs, not barks. And cats purr at frequencies that actually promote cell growth and healing in their bodies and whomever they happen to be lying on. If I never get sick again, it’ll be because Pippin chose to sleep on my pillow every night since she was three months old.

Dogs are easy. You see a dog, they see you, bam, instant friends. Cats, not so much. You have to work for it, but if you put in the time, a friendship with a cat is all the more rewarding because of the effort.

I’m not writing this to convince dog people to change themselves into cat people–some of us just gravitate more toward the easy openness of dogs than to the hard-shelled, gooey-interiored-ness of cats. One reason I love cats so much is because I’ve never been one to have lots of friends, or to really enjoy casual relationships of any kind. I want deep emotional connection with a few beloved people, and I want the gratification of knowing they chose to like me, maybe even against their better judgement.

Cats suit that need exactly. And they’re also an exercise in unselfishness, when you analyze your relationship and realize, “hey, this cat is definitely getting the better end of this deal” or “I need to give this cat some space with its feelings.” Many people’s frustrations with cats come from the fact that you can’t always read them or get them to do what you want them to do. Some nights they might sleep on your bed. Some days you might only see them for a total of five minutes. Cats play when they want to, and sleep when they want to, and show affection when they want to. They’re selfish and self-serving and protective and loyal and sweet, all rolled into a delightfully complicated cat sushi.

Sometimes cats are monsters, but hey, so are people. Maybe being friends with a cat can help us learn how to better love the human monsters in our lives.

I want to get in a fight

 

Lately I find myself pining for a world in which the great and small thinkers of the day would exchange letters the size of treatises, meet in each other’s parlors and in stuffy cigar clubs to discuss their differing opinions, stand on boxes in the middle of the sidewalk to give well-rehearsed speeches about grave issues. 

In other words, I pine for middle school sometimes. Middle school. Which, if you know me, should tell you a lot. 

If you don’t know me, a quick recap: middle school was probably the time in my life that I most aggravated myself. I wore tight graphic tee shirts and got up early every morning to straighten my hair, and I was not interested in watching Phineas and Ferb, not even a little bit. I also had a crush on a drummer in eighth grade. A drummer. God help me.

I don’t miss middle school for those things. What I do miss is getting in fights with people. Fights!

Not fist fights. Word fights!

I swear, I don’t think I went a day without arguing with someone about some trivial or vitally important (according to us) thing.

Some things about those fights weren’t so pretty. We didn’t know precise words for our thoughts and we didn’t know as much as we thought we did about political candidates. We (I) were abrasive and sometimes close-minded and a little too ready to get angry.

But we fought, and argued, and debated, and talked. We discussed! Our lockers became French salons, the lunch table was our cigar club, our social media the sidewalk or the parchment from which we let our ideas flow freely into the world. We were bold because we were ignorant. We were steadfast because we were stubborn. We were loud because we were passionate.

Why is it that we seem to have lost this now? A cloud of compromise, of I-see-where-you’re-coming-froms, of conflict evasion seems to have descended upon us. Compromise is good in many cases. Seeing, listening, accepting that other perspectives exist is good. We learned a lot in middle school about shutting up, and we needed to.

But what happened to our willingness to engage? To respond? To fight and then apologize, not for what we believe but for maybe just being too rude in the way we expressed ourselves, if things got out of hand? To forgive because we know the person we’re talking to isn’t the only flawed human in the room?

Is there no room next to our grown-up lockers to allow this kind of fight? Can coffee shops and zoom meetings and cubicles not give us space to fence with words? Can we not be like William Seward and Abraham Lincoln and all their contemporaries who knew the power of words—able to respect each other’s minds and abilities, and willing to take up the challenge they presented? 

If we are people of conviction, of passion, of intellect and empathy, arguments shouldn’t scare us. Silence should. We should be ready to engage when we hear the call, knowing the discourse isn’t what defines us–we define it.

We can be bold because of our experiences. We can be steadfast in conviction. We can speak out of our passion and the power that knowledge gives. We can do this without anger, because life has equipped us with better tools than that.

Sometimes people act like conflict is the end of the world. I’ll skate around issues I care about because I’m afraid of letting my thoughts exist next to someone else’s wildly different ones. If it comes to an argument, my friend and I will have to dramatically part ways, like two spoiled sisters in a soap opera. But conflict, though uncomfortable, is a fact of life. And while it exists we can’t just shove it under that nice Persian rug in the living room. Conflict, like fire, needs to breathe–and it can only be addressed in the open. Trying to contain it rather than quell it only causes more damage.

A fight is not the end of the world. If you’re mean, you can apologize. If you’re offended, you can call someone out. If you’re wrong you can change your mind—and if they’re wrong you can hope they might get around to admitting it. 

We’re adults now. Maybe we can get over ourselves and our partisan rhetoric for a bit and just have a conversation for once—even a loud or uncomfortable conversation—like we used to when we cared too much about hairspray and who we were sitting next to on the bus. 

God knows we have much more important things to care about now, and we should be talking. So let’s fight.

This is one of the only photos of me from middle school that I don’t regret.

Abe and I have a lot in common

 

If you don’t already know, Abraham Lincoln is probably my favorite historical figure (followed by Louis XIV, the Anabaptists of Muenster, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn). I feel we would’ve been great friends, had we met when he was alive, and I hope someday to meet him in the afterlife–after receiving my long-awaited hug from Jesus, of course.

Lincoln was a person of great depth. He laughed loudly and often, and he experienced pain acutely. His passion for words and stories fueled and was fed by his curiosity for human nature, and his huge empathy enabled him to understand others in a profound way. All his life, Lincoln was characterized by his melancholy–different from depression, although some historians would label Lincoln’s emotional life as such.

Melancholy comes from feeling things deeply–not just sadness, but joy. From sensing the pain of others. From living in a world so paradoxically stuck between supreme good and incomprehensible evil. From the inevitability of death, and the persistence of hope.

Lincoln and his melancholy are fascinating to me, so easy to relate to. It’s not a surprise to me, then, that so much of my poetry begins or concludes with the thought of death.

It’s not Stage Fright
I’m not afraid of death.

Not at all,
though I am afraid of dying

It’s the last thing I’ll ever do here,
my grand finale,
and I won’t even get a rehearsal.
I may explore the stage before the lights come on,
stand there frozen in insecurity for a
long
and awkward
interlude
Who knows how long it’ll take for me to remember my lines

Funny, we don’t have an instrument
that measures the precise moment
a soul leaves a body

How much time is in the in-between–
after the brain waves calm
and the heart takes a Sabbath,
before you wake up
on the other side of eternity?

That seventh day of the soul
could be a few seconds, a minute.
Or what if the soul stayed put, unsure, inside you
for a day, maybe another six
to steep a little longer

and then float away, full of something like confidence?

The tangible God

 

The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing. -Zephaniah 3:17

This week I’ve been captivated with the thought of Jesus’ presence. Reading in Laurie and Matt Krieg’s book An Impossible Marriage about their powerful experience with visual prayer has invited me to think about Emmanuel in a different way. Christians say often that God is with or near us, but how often do we see him there next to us, before us, around us, in any way that makes that truth significant in our situation? Many times it feels as though we’re sending messages in a bottle—perhaps we can trust the recipient to read them, but we can’t be sure of how long it will take for them to hear us, or whether our message will somehow be swallowed up by an ocean filled with other bottles. 

Talking to God doesn’t feel personal, it feels distant and cloudy. What else should we expect when we envision God simply presiding over things, rather than existing in and through and with his creations?

But God is with us, it’s true. We simply can’t use our fleshly eyes to see him. And what if that’s because he gave us a way of seeing that is somehow both more intangible and tangible than that? What if God gave us imagination as a way of perceiving him, not just through story or imagery, but as a vivid part of our active reality?

Imagine for a moment that Jesus is really here with you. On your couch, in the passenger seat of your car, walking next to you through the mall. Not just in your heart or your mind but specifically present and visible to you. You can reach out and touch his clothing. You can hear his voice as that of a friend. You can ask him for a hug, and actually receive it.

How different is our response to this real Jesus. How much more clearly we can hear him when he speaks.

If Jesus is here with me, really here in my space, I don’t have to direct my words at the sky and wonder how long they’ll take to reach him. I can turn to him and say “Jesus, I’m hurt. I want to run away” and hear him reply, “No, stay here with me. I will help you.” 

I can trust that he’ll come to my aid because we’re not communicating through radio waves or morse code or video feeds. We’re together in real time—and what loving father, what brother or mother or sister or friend, would fail to help me, love me, encourage me when I’m right in front of their eyes? How much more will Jesus, the perfect Son of God, be able to rescue me from any danger and lend his strength to me in trials?

Note to Self

When you were tiny and your mother held you
snugly, close to her chest
one hand cradling your sweet head
cheek pressed against yours,
she was safety and
you trusted her.
Her love would protect you always.

That’s the way He holds you now.
In my mind’s eye his smile greets
your trembling chin

Your eyes tell what words can’t

that somewhere along the way love betrayed you
something hurts now that should be whole
Safety is lost
and you can’t find it

I know
are the words spoken to you.
I was there when no one loved you
There, in that unseen plane
He reaches out a hand to touch your pain
His arms enfold you, down-soft

Somehow it gets inside you,
the silent strength of that smile, the love that warms those arms,
and gives you words to tell the darkness.

You can’t have me.
This light is mine and I belong to it.