Curious Cats

Cats are curious, and Baxter is no exception.  He loves to explore anything that isn’t part of the normal routine of his world. If the furniture is rearranged, he has to walk all around it and know where every piece is placed. If there is a new sound in the air, he runs to find its source and decide whether or not it is friendly. If strangers come into his space, he comes out to see what they look like; he rubs against them to mark them for himself; then he hopes to con them into feeding him to win a friend forever in Baxter. Baxter wants to know who and what is in his world, and what is going on beyond the ordinary routines of his cat life. Nothing escapes his notice and his sniff test to determine if it is friend or foe, food or just fuzz balls.

Curiosity is Baxter’s way of making sure that nothing escapes his notice or his control. He wants his world to be within the boundaries that he has set with the objects and people he has placed there.  That way he can try to eliminate any surprises that may disturb and disrupt his life. Keep a hold on everything, and nothing will escape and threaten your comfortable existence.

We are curious creatures also. We want to know what is going on, how it works, who is involved, what is behind the obvious facts. On the one hand, this drive to know more is a good thing. It spurs new developments in human knowledge and the life style we develop from these. If no one ever wondered how human cells work, many devastating diseases would still be menacing our lives. If no one ever thought about micro waves and storing information on silicon chips, the world of the internet and cell phones and all that comes with them would never have been possible. If we don’t ponder the great mysteries of life—from where did it all come, why do we suffer, what happens after death—the meaning of our lives will remain shallow and devoid of the weightier questions that lead us to the mystery of God and our own lives. Curiosity is the engine that drives our minds and hearts to grow in comprehending the fullness of life.

On the other hand, however, we can misuse our inquisitiveness. We snoop into places we don’t belong with little regard for what we are doing. When science is not directed by appropriate respect for the objects of its study, we can do things that are unethical and justify them in the name of free inquiry. Some stem cell research, death dealing comfort drugs, mineral extraction technology, and even cyberspace data collection reflect this distortion of our human desire to know. Closer to home, our curiosity sometimes leads us into areas of other people’s lives where we have no right to go. We try to get private information that we share with others for no other purpose than to tear down another’s character and reputation. We justify our twisted inquiries by neutral terms like “idle gossip” or “small town news”, but they are really calumny and slander. This kind of dark knowledge makes us feel important in our own eyes and sometimes in the eyes of those who listen to it. Like Baxter’s drive to know everything that’s going on in his world, it’s a way to control and manipulate others’ lives. We use information like a weapon that threatens and confines people for our purposes.

An old saying reads, “Curiosity killed the cat.” The misuse of our God-given and wonderful desire to know our world and each other in it will kill our souls and warp our understanding with sinister and selfish motives behind it. So explore, wonder, ask questions, investigate but do so for the good of others and our world. Any other reason is not worthy of you, others or the God who planted the seed of our curiosity when He made us.

A Balancing Act

Despite his portly bearing, Baxter is quite the acrobat.  He can still negotiate window sills and shelves with ease. He can walk the rim of his litter box with alacrity. He likes to sit on the edge of the bathtub, and he will even hold a pose on the back of a dining room chair for a few moments--if he thinks I’m not looking at his trespass onto forbidden territory. Cats have an amazing sense of balance. Between their agility and ability to adjust their body weight quickly, they are able to get to where they want to be no matter the obstacles or the limited access.

Although we may not be as versatile as cats, we too have a remarkable ability to balance our body weight against gravity. Once we get the hang of standing and walking on two legs, there is no stopping us. Did you ever watch a two year old set loose on his or her own? It’s usually nonstop motion into everything. Steps, cabinets, decks and balconies, they all are fair game for the young one who has discovered his or her knack for balancing his or her body on two feet. Once we have learned how, we take our sense of balance for granted. We just get up and go, not thinking twice about what it takes to stay upright.

But then something happens. We injure our back. We develop vertigo. We lose the strength in our legs.  We can no longer stand upright without holding onto something, and we can only move forward slowly and cautiously. We’re afraid of falling now, and so we begin to move less, go to fewer places, stay put to stay safe. Losing our sense of balance has many consequences for our way of life.

The same holds for our spiritual lives as well. We need to have balance to keep moving and feeling secure, and sometimes we lose this balance and don’t notice it.  Life gets busy, and soon we are consumed with work or activities.  An elderly parent or spouse becomes ill, and all the focus is on caring for them.  A divorce happens or an addiction is uncovered, and now everything falls out of whack.  At times like these, we can get trapped into limping through our days not thinking about how we are doing and what we need to change to make things better.  We are hurting so much that we can’t think straight.  Our feelings go numb, but our nerves are on edge.  We sense the pressure building in our souls, but we don’t know what to do about it.

Balance is a key to the holy life. Time for prayer, work, enrichment, recreation; time to develop the mind and get in touch with the heart; time for physical and spiritual exercise; time to eat well, sleep well; time to be alone and time to enjoy others’ company; time for serious pursuits and conversations, and time for fun and frivolous banter. Like the Book of Ecclesiastes teaches, “There is an appointed time for everything . . . under the heavens.” If we fail to walk through all these times of our lives, we grow narrow, lethargic and rigid. We don’t allow life to keep us limber so that we can move through our time on earth gracefully rather than grudgingly. We need to ask ourselves:  what’s missing from my life to keep it in balance? There is where God is calling you to respond.

Cats walk upright on the narrowest ledges because they have a wonderful sense of balance.  We can learn from them.  We can walk in faith through the toughest of times, if we keep our sense of balance by using all that God gives us.

Cat Eyes

Baxter sometimes has a very strange look. He stares either into empty space or at me seeming to see something that isn’t there. This “cat look” has often been off-putting to many people, and some have accused the species of sinister motives because of this mysterious stare.  Is it a curse they are imposing?  Is it black magic their stare conveys to unsuspecting victims? What does Baxter see when he enters into this Buddhist–like trance with his eyes wide open? The unusual look in his cat eyes raises my curiosity and suspicions.

I suppose that we will never know what is behind “the look” that cats give.  However, this feline fancy raises a second thought for our ordinary human vision. How do we look on life?  The “cat look” reminds us that there may be more to see than we usually take in. We see the problems we must solve—a leaking roof, peeling paint, potholes, torn clothing, a burnt meal, etc. We see the annoying things we do to each other—he grinds his teeth, she fingers her hair, etc. We see the threats in our world—drug deals on our streets, abused children, random violence in our neighborhoods and world terrorism. We see the dilemmas we face—empty checking accounts, home foreclosures, unemployment, rising gas prices. All of these empty our eyes of their spark and vitality. Our vision becomes clouded by the heaviness of life’s burdens, and we don’t notice anything bright when our souls grow cold in a spiritual winter.

The Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, wrote: “There is the dearest freshness deep down things”! If we are to refresh our souls, we need to look deeply at life. We need to get beyond the problems, annoyances and threats to the mystery that supersedes them all. This mystery ties together the particular moments, whether good or bad, by rooting them in eternity where the good points to still greater blessings, and the bad is redeemed in forgiveness and healing. This mystery probes our hearts to seize their desire to love and be loved by the satisfaction of an unconditional love that cannot end. This mystery expresses itself in sacramental signs where everything is more than it appears to be when God claims it as the vehicle of His grace. This mystery is our life blood, our life breath, our bread of life, the reason we live. The God revealed in Jesus and living with us in the Spirit is the mystery we encounter when we live deeply enough. So work on developing “the look”, not of cat’s eyes but of God’s eye envisioning a world where the divine mystery sparkles in every encounter.

Bringing Baxter Home

I lost Baxter once. He was less than a year old, and I was living in a house that had a small deck off the back door of the second floor. Baxter loved to be out there on a sunny day, and this was early September, a perfect Sunday afternoon, warm, bright and with just a hint of Fall on the leaves’ edges.  I had been out with Baxter for a couple of hours on that deck, and now I wanted to come inside to watch the evening news on TV. Baxter didn’t want to come. Every time I went to grab him, he ran away.  Frustrated, I decided to leave him on the deck while I went downstairs to the television. I never thought anything would go wrong, but it did.

 I was watching the news less than five minutes when I heard this commotion upstairs. I ran up the steps just in time to see Baxter’s hind quarters disappear off the deck with a jump to the lawn, two stories below. Another full grown cat came onto the deck as soon as I left it, and Baxter knew he was outsized so he took the only exit available. I didn’t see where he went, but since there wasn’t a bundle of fur on the lawn below, I knew he survived the jump.

 I was panicked, and my mind was racing with worry. Where did he go and what happened to him? I decided to walk around the neighborhood to look for him. I went up and down the whole dead-end street calling his name. There wasn’t a clue to his whereabouts. Since there was an open, undeveloped area behind the houses on this street, I figured he could be long gone, and I feared for his safety. You see, Baxter never had to face the big, bad world. He came to me at four months and never had to develop street smarts to make it out there. I was at a loss what to do. I felt heartsick.

Then I remembered the routines Baxter learned. When I would come home, he would be at the door waiting for me because he heard the garage door opening. The sound of the garage door opening meant I was coming home, and my coming home meant Baxter would be fed. The other association he learned was the sound of the lid being removed from the catnip container. As soon as he heard the squeak, he would come running for a nip of pleasure from the contents. This gave me an idea.

 I went into the garage and opened the door. Then I stood outside on the driveway and opened the catnip jar. It worked. Baxter was hiding in the next door neighbor’s bushes, and he came running out of there and over to me in a split second.  It was a wonderful reunion for both of us. He was home again, safe and secure, and none the worse for wear after this frightening ordeal.

When we are afraid and hiding from God, we need to listen for familiar sounds that call us home.  Maybe it’s the prayers we learned as children. Maybe it’s the sound of church bells or a familiar hymn.  Maybe it’s the memory of something your parents or grandparents said about God and God’s ways.  Maybe it’s your children’s questions about church. Whatever it is that provokes our memory about Who God is and His presence to us is a call to come home. “Big Cats” in this world may have driven us away, but since God is everywhere, we are never far from His comforting welcome—if we listen and are ready to respond.

Baxter's Bad Moment

Baxter is generally a very mild mannered “gentlecat”. But once, he had a bad moment that showed another side of him.

I was in a hurry one evening to get back to the office for a meeting. I went home to grab a quick bite of left-over chicken for dinner, and in cleaning up afterwards, I put the chicken bones, skin and uneaten parts into a small garbage bag to throw into the outside garbage container. Getting ready to leave the house, I put this bag on a table near the door until I put on my coat and hat. Then the phone rang, and after I hung up, I was so distracted that I left the house with used chicken parts sitting in a plastic bag on the table near the door. It was too much temptation for Baxter.

When I returned a couple of hours later, I couldn’t find Baxter. I found a few chicken bones but no cat. I called his name, looked in all his usual hiding spots, and shook his treat container, but still no cat appeared.

Then I heard him. He was in the spare back room crying and hissing. When I got to the door, he was beside himself. He had found what was left of the chicken and tore open the bag to get at it. Somehow, he got the bag wrapped around his belly and it wouldn’t release. He hissed and howled and cried and glared at me. Whenever I would try to approach him, he became even more belligerent. He had worked himself into a frenzy over this bag that held him prisoner, and there was no soothing him. He was in a ridiculous predicament of his own making, and he wasn’t about to let anyone help or calm him.

I didn’t know what to do, so I just closed the door to the room where Baxter was. I decided to call the emergency vet for some help. That went nowhere as they offered me no advice except to bring him into the clinic. But that was my problem. He wouldn’t let me approach him, so how was I going to take him anywhere without becoming a scratched and bloody victim of his rage. Baxter ate the chicken, and I became chicken.

I decided that maybe “time out” was in order. I would just stay in the living room and watch television for a while. Give him time to settle down in the spare room. I quit calling him. I opened the door a crack, and I pretended he wasn’t around. I allowed him to settle down. It worked.

After about a half hour, Baxter came slowly out of the room with the plastic bag still wrapped around his belly. He sheepishly walked up to me and rolled on his back. I petted him gently for a few minutes. Then I got a pair of scissors and cut the bag away from his body. Shortly afterwards, he stood up, went to his water dish and drank a healthy portion. Aside from the chicken bones strewn around the house and a few towels and other clothes scattered about in his desperation to get free of the bag, nothing was the worst for wear. But we both learned a few things.

Baxter learned to stay away from what he couldn’t handle, even if the temptation seemed so good and enticing. He learned to stop fretting and fuming if he wanted to get over the incident. He learned to gear down and be quiet if he wanted to return to his old, affable self. He learned that “time out” isn’t just for kittens, but adult cats need to stop, take a deep breath, and let go of their anger, if life is to get back to normal again.

I learned that I can’t fix things as quickly and easily as I thought I could. I learned to allow Baxter his space to work out his feelings before he faced me again. I learned to speak softly when he is hissing and crying loudly. I learned to go slowly when he did return—pet him gently and calmly—then when he was ready, to cut loose the bag holding him bound. I learned to let him take care of himself once he was free, and to let him decide when he could come close again and sit on my lap. I learned to respect Baxter’s desires and disposition, and not force him to meet my desires and disposition all the time. I learned how not to own Baxter but to care for him.

A cat, chicken bones and an absent-minded cat lover--God uses the strangest things at times to teach us His ways and wisdom.

Baxter is Back

Summer is over, and the world is gearing up for the long haul until next June.  But before we forget about the months just passed, we need to take stock of their hidden lessons for us.  Baxter shows us how.

Baxter loves the summer.  He sits on the ledge of open windows.  Open windows offer so much more than closed and locked ones.  He smells the fresh air, hears the birds chirping, the dogs barking and the humans chattering.  He feels like the outside comes indoors when the breeze streams through the room and the sun shines brightly on the walls.  In the winter, Baxter protects himself from the elements of nature, but in the summer, he invites them into his living space to refresh and brighten it.  Baxter soaks in the summer, and I think its memory keeps him going through the cold, dark days of winter when he is confined to the artificially heated room behind closed and locked windows and doors.

Taking our cue from Baxter, the lessons of summer are many.  Lesson one:  living creatures thrive in light and air.  These elements lift our spirits; they make us look healthy; they even nourish us with Vitamin D and oxygen.  Lesson two:  hard work in cooperation with the natural environment yields a harvest that nourishes life.  August and early September are such bountiful months for fresh fruits and vegetables, and there is no substitute for the taste of locally grown foodstuffs.  Lesson three:  simple things make summer so rich.  An exotic vacation or an expensive purchase isn’t the usual hallmark of a great summer.  It’s the annual picnic or the still of a summer evening or the sound of a lawn mower or the visit to the soft-serve stand that distinguishes this season.  Simple things carry a weight of meaning that we learn through the years to appreciate.

For us as Christians, these lessons hold a spiritual message as well.  The fullness of human thriving comes in the light of Christ and the breath of His Spirit.  We seek this light deep in our hearts, and no artificial substitutes will satisfy us.  We need more than oxygen to sustain us.  We need the breath of God to keep us from smothering in the stale air of our own self-centeredness.  The fruits that will last are those generated by our efforts and God’s grace cooperating to make a better world for all peoples.  Grace tempers the tyranny of our human efforts to “do it my way”, yet our hard work makes concrete and tangible God’s hidden life and power in our midst.  Finally, God is simple, not in a simplistic or naïve sense, but in the sense of being true and self-evident.  Like the simple things that make up summer memories, there is no hidden agenda or dressed-up appearances with God.  He loves us without conditions, and this simple fact exposes our own truth and goodness that we often try to ignore or deny.

For Baxter and for all of us, summer is quickly passing, but its lessons can carry us through the colder seasons ahead.  Preserve a little of the nourishment grown in the summer, and take it from the shelf when you need it in a January time of life.  Hold on to the lessons of summer until it is warm and sunny again.  They keep all of us healthy and holy. 

The Last Meow for Now: God's Space For Us

Cats get a reputation for being aloof and uncaring. They are certainly independent creatures. They have their own routines and likes and dislikes, and they want them followed. They each have their own personalities, and others risk a hiss, scratch or bite if they choose to ignore the disposition of the resident cat. They claim their surroundings as their territory, and everyone who comes into it is a guest. Guests are welcome if they follow the rules like don’t rearrange things, don’t sit in my chair, don’t move the food or the litter box. Baxter is no exception to these feline foibles. He claims his space and those in it for his own, and he wants others to recognize and respect his rights for his stake in the world.

That’s all that God is asking as well. “Give me my rightful place in your life and our world.” It’s a message many want to write off. “Find your own space. Get out of my face. Your agenda is one among many. Take your turn when yours comes up. (Christmas and Easter?)” We want God to compete with us for a share in our lives and world. He is welcome to enter into the arena with all the other interests and rights that claim our attention, but there are no privileges of place or person here. Each party takes what he can claim before someone else gets it. It’s a dog eat dog battle for space, attention and importance, and God is just one of the many competitors for a place in our lives.

But God won’t play this game with us. Like cats, God assumes His claim over us. After all, He is the Creator of the world, and we are His children, made in His image, not independent agents on an equal par with the Creator. Of course, God respects our freedom and intelligence, so He won’t force His will on us. However, He also can’t allow us to play god with Him and each other without bearing the consequences for such arrogance and disrespect. God doesn’t hiss, scratch or bite. Rather, He allows us to do those kind of things to each other as a result of our silly competition to dominate others with our ways, our ownership and our egos. When we compete for the limelight, all we see in each other are the blemishes we have—our sins.

God’s claim like a cat’s is total and absolute. “This is my world. I set the boundaries for living in it, and I will not compromise them for your particular whim. But unlike cats, I won’t get my way with physical or manipulative force. I will use a stronger power which often takes longer to be felt. I will love you into doing it my way. When your ways have failed, when your battles to be number one are surrendered, when you can’t take the crazy pace, the isolation of being on top, the unease of seeing others only as competitors, and the senselessness of measuring the meaning of life by the number of wins and losses, then I will be there to forgive you and show you how to start over again.”

Cats seem aloof because they won’t play with us on our terms. They set the standards for feline happiness. God often might appear distant and even irrelevant for the same reason. But divine happiness is shared happiness with all creation, and so God’s standards are finally for our own good. Quit playing games, and give God His space this summer.

Baxter’s Personal Message for All His Readers

I can’t stand the heat, so I am taking a break for the summer from my life and faith lessons. Don’t worry though. I will be back in time for football season with purrs, meows and maybe a few hisses -- if Notre Dame doesn’t turn it around this year. Until then, think about what God teaches us through His many creatures, give thanks for the blessings in your life, and enjoy the summer! I won’t forget you. Don’t forget me and my housemate, Monsignor Statnick. Until kickoff, let us continue to pray for each other.