PSI Annual Journal 2001

Some years ago I came across a couple of books on cats—THE TAO OF MEOW and THE CULT OF THE CAT. Since I had been thinking about doing a sermon on cats based on my experience of living with them in the Norwell parsonage they were the perfect resource for filling out my sermon with some interesting historical and cultural background. This is my attempt to take cats seriously (but not too seriously) and to say what they have to teach us about life and living, and maybe even about God and religion.

When I first met my wife I had a dog and a cat, a blonde beagle and a tiger cat. They got along fine, but the cat was definitely in charge of the relationship. When I got married I had to give up the cat because of Ellie's allergy. Years later we tried again and got another tiger cat at my daughter's urging. We named him Garfield, not after the comic character in the GLOBE, but because my stepsons were related to President James Garfield. Garfield's term in office was short-lived, because of an assassin's bullet, but the important thing was that he made it all the way to the top, which is what Garfield did very quickly in the parsonage household. He was Lord of the manor with no competition from a dog.

It took Ellie 6 to 9 months of wheezing and runny eyes to adjust to Garfield's presence in the house, but she finally was able to tolerate his being there. Seven years later he disappeared on a late summer night in August never to return. We think he might have been done in by a racoon which had been around the premises for two or three nights before. We'll never know. But we all missed him. Candy Clark, a parishioner, heard of our loss and offered to give us a kitten from a recent litter on her cat farm. That's how we obtained Barney, a black and white silky cat, friendly as could be, and much more affectionate than Garfield had been. Garfield was your typical independent cat, affectionate when he wanted to be, and strictly on his terms. Barney was a sure purr the moment you stroked him. Barney reminded me of the cat spoken of in a poem: "Cat, smoother, soother than a velvet glove,/ How can you thus reply to my caress?/ In giving, I receive the touch of love." It took Ellie another 6 to 9 months to adjust to our black and white witch's familiar cat.

Barney reminded me of a black and white cat from my childhood. Our gray and white cat, Mittens, had a litter of kittens. We gave them all away one at a time. The last to go was a black and white cat which I hated to give up, but my parents were insistent. Our next door neighbor had 17 cats. We were down to one cat and that was that. So the Tao of Meow had come back to bless me with a tiger cat and a black and white beauty to make up for earlier losses.

Barney's stay with us was much shorter than that of Garfield's, but I think my attachment was deeper, maybe because of the connection with my childhood memory. One day we noticed Barney was wheezing like he had asthma. We took him to the vet. Diagnosis was cardio myopathy, a heart condition. Prognosis, 3 or 4 years at most. Medication, three pills twice a day for the rest of his life. It's amazing that you can get used to sticking pills down your cat's throat twice a day. Garfield never would have tolerated it. Barney was a pussycat in comparison, and that's no pun. One day, a few weeks ago, Barney lost all control of his hind quarters. This was the final stage of his disease and irreversible in most cases. We left him with the vet not knowing what would happen. He took a turn for the worse and the vet called us. It broke my heart, but we had to make the decision to put him to sleep. My only regret was that I wasn't with him to comfort him and to say goodbye. We all shed some tears over his passing. We were touched by the fact that the Norwell Veterinary Hospital sent us a sympathy card and made a memorial donation to a medical research unit on cats at Cornell. I don't wonder that they were sorry to see Barney go. He cost us over $700 in the short two and a half years of his life. Garfield was expensive, too, but I don't think he cost us that much in the seven years of his existence.

Strange as it may seem, we all have had a sense of Barney's presence in the parsonage since his death. My daughter dreamed about him. I thought I heard him meow when working in my parsonage study. My wife distinctly heard his meow by the bed which woke her up one morning. As it says in THE TAO OF MEOW:
If you cannot hear me Meow in this world
You better believe you will hear me in the next
Try to remember the Meow of the Tao
Is the Tao of the Meow.

Judith Viorst wrote a book for children, THE TENTH GOOD THING ABOUT BARNEY, which was about adjusting to the death of a pet cat named Barney. "Barney was a cat, and he was dead. What did you do about it? You cried, and then you made a grave in the yard and had a funeral. But most important you thought about him--and that was what helped most." The little boy's mother asks him to think of ten good things about Barney for the cat's funeral the next day. He comes up with nine and then later a tenth. Barney was brave, smart, funny, clean, cuddly, handsome, only once ate a bird, it was sweet to hear him purr in your ear, and sometimes he slept on your belly and kept you warm. Those were nine good things about Barney. The tenth good thing was that he was in the ground, in the flower garden, helping the flowers to grow.

For me, pushing up daisies, doesn't quite do it. For me, the tenth good thing about Barney are all the memories of love and connection to another order of God's creation, another mystery of being of which all creatures, human and animal, are manifestations. Garfield thought he was human and learned to drink water out of a running tap. Once he bedded down for a long winter's nap in my wife's bureau drawer. We heard the rustle and thought it was mice. Barney learned to let himself in the back door by pushing it open, but never learned to close it behind him. He also found out how to climb up on the shed roof over the kitchen, but couldn't figure out how to get back down. We had to let him in the upstairs bathroom window.

Both cats were sermon watchers, or should I say nappers. They sat on my desk as I typed my sermons, or slept on the bed near the computer in the room above my parsonage study where I labored far into the night. Sometimes they took a hike over the keyboard to put in a thought of their own, or plopped into my chair if I got up to look in my bookcase, and then, without my knowing they were there, sat back down on a fur covered seat, and heard the Tao of Meow like I never heard it before. You might say that they gave me "catspiration" as I labored on my sermons. Some of you may think that the end result is a "catastrophe", but that's your problem. I take my comfort from THE TAO OF MEOW where it says, "Most cataclysms have been caused by excessive catechism." Well, since this is a Unitarian church, and this sermon is about a couple of Unitarian cats, we have no fear of that. We set our minds to more profound questions, like this one posed in THE TAO OF MEOW:

Philosophers have asked, "If a tree falls in the forest, but no one is there to hear, does it make a sound?" I ask, if a philosopher is sitting in a chair at a desk, "Is it a chair?" Or does it only become a chair when a cat sits in it? Does paperwork only become important when I lie on it? For days it lies on the desk, unmoved; the moment I lie on it, one of the nameless ones decides to move it. This is Virtue; it has no substance, and yet it exists. But even though it does exist, it is nothing until you use it. In this regard, virtue is very much part of the Meow. Falling trees, on the other hand, are not. They make only a thud, not a Meow. Who would be so foolish as to listen to a thud, anyhow? Meow.

Barney got into my dreams last July. I dreamed he came up out of the garden by our back door with a snake in his mouth. It was still alive. At first I thought it was a green garter snake, but on closer examination realized it was a thin green cobra. The following week I shared my dream at a Dream Workshop at Ferry Beach. Everyone, including myself, focused on the snake symbolism except for one woman who said the cat was the most important symbol in the dream. "I love cats," she said. As soon as she said it, out of nowhere, a cat walked into the room. Barney would have like that.

Barney had the habit of crawling under the little bathroom rug upstairs next to the tub. I thought he did it to get warm because of his poor circulation. In reading THE TAO OF MEOW I discovered that other cats also do it:

Humans make carpets to walk on;/ Sometimes they even fantasize flying on them./ The cat knows the true purpose of rugs--/We lie under them./ First you slip one paw under the fringe,/ And lift the edge of the carpet up;/ Then you scoot quickly underneath,/ So that the rug covers your whole body,/ Except the tail,/ Which is probably sticking out from underneath,/ Wagging back and forth as you lie and wait in hiding./ You may think this is an idle game,/ But we know that a carpet is the fabric of life./ Either you cloak yourself in it,/ Or you strive against it./ Only the foolish tread on the fabric of life. The wise crawl underneath and become one with it.

I treasure the memory of both Garfield and Barney at Christmas, diving into open boxes and wrapping paper with a ribbon stuck on the top of their heads. "The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him," said Whitman, only in this case, if you can't give a gift, then be one, and that's what cats are to those who appreciate them, gifts of being from the Giver of life and love and freedom. I don't know what God had in mind when he/she/it made cats, but they are like no other, and make life more interesting than it would be without them.

Walt Whitman once wrote, "I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained. I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins....Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things....Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. They show their relations to me and I accept them, they bring me tokens of myself."

"They bring me tokens of myself." From the most ancient times to the present felines and cats have been utilized to represent particular human qualities--power, prestige and wealth, from coats of arms to fast cars and jewelry, from lions of Judah to the lions of the British Empire, from a tiger in your tank to Tony the Tiger in a box of Frosted Corn Flakes, from a jaguar in the jungle to a Jaguar on the road. Cats--whether lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars or domestic felines--behave very much the same--kneading, scratching, cleaning, stalking, hunting, playing, purring--though just how and why cats purr remains a mystery to this day. They combine qualities of power, speed, patience, stealth, cunning, ruthlessness, sheer survival (the nine lives bit and always landing on all fours), intelligence, affection and sex. They have been used in culture and art to represent royalty and political power, symbols of sexuality and death, life and renewal, the wisdom of the sphinx, the masculine strength of Samson and Hercules, the sexuality of Cleopatra and the feminine. Cats have been worshipped as divine by the ancient Egyptians and feared as representatives of the devil by medieval Christians and the residents of 18th century Salem. They have been loved and hated, worshipped and despised.

The cat was first domesticated by the ancient Egyptians around 1500 B.C. All domestic cats were regarded as living forms of the goddess Bastet, who had a cat's head and a human body. Bastet bestowed gifts of life and fertility on her devotees and her figurines abounded in gold, bronze, bone, wood and mud. Egyptians lavished great care and attention on their cats, adorning them with silver chains, jeweled collars, golden ear-rings. When a cat died there were prescribed periods of mourning and lamentation which included shaving off the eyebrows. I decided I was bald enough as it is. They went even further in their devotion and mummified and buried their cats in special cat cemeteries. Some 300,000 mummified cats were discovered by archeologists at Beni Hassan in 1899. Contrast the Egyptian worship of cats with the torture and execution by hanging of thousands of cats by fear-crazed medieval Christians who thought they were witches familiars and agents of Satan. One medieval pope ordered all cats to be killed. This was the cult of the cat in reverse, the shadow side of feline human nature which had nothing to do with the cat.

Though we no longer torture and execute cats by order of the pope, millions of cats are abandoned every year, set loose in the wild to fend for themselves. Some manage to exist for awhile, but most don't survive for very long. Today we no longer worship the cat, but there is no question as to who the King of the Beasts is in any home that deigns to house one. We think they're our pets, but in truth we are theirs. American-British poet, T.S. Eliot loved cats, wrote poems about them, which were later adapted and made into a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Remember the lines from the song "Memory", text by Trevor Nunn: Touch me. It's so easy to leave me,/ All alone with the memory/ Of my days in the sun./ If you touch me you'll understand what happiness is./ Look a new day has begun.

Apparently it is a medical fact that simply petting a cat lowers human blood pressure and increases longevity. The ancient Egyptians would have said, "I told you so and you thought it was mere superstition." Cats have been used to enliven the lives of the elderly in Nursing Homes and autistic children in institutions. There is something about touching a cat, feeling its warmth, hearing its purr, that sparks the light of love in the human soul. "Cat, smoother, soother than a velvet glove,...In giving, I receive the touch of love." I know that a little white cat, named Snowball, perked up my father's life in his latter days. And I know that a tiger cat named, Garfield, and a black and white silky kitten, named Barney, gave a decade of pleasure, love and diversion, to the minister and the members of his family. As it says in THE TAO OF MEOW:

If you love cats, and pamper me, I will wrap my tail around your leg, and share the way of the Meow with you. I might even nip your knee. At night, I will curl up with you on your lap, and you will be comforted by my soft, warm, supple body of fur. If you dislike cats, or mistreat me, it will be very difficult for me to recognize the living essence within you. I will probably mistake you for a dead stump, and use you for a scratching post. This is why we say the Way is soft, warm, and supple.

O God and Goddess of furry feline creatures and smooth and hairy humans, we thank you for the gift of life and love and wonder in all living beings, especially the ones that purr your purfection. Help us all to know the touch of love, smoother, soother than a velvet glove. Amen.

PSI Symposium Annual Journal 2001