[SB] Sabbath Blessings

[Molly Wolf]

Meow

It's not the cat box; I cleaned it this afternoon.  It's not the food and 
water dishes; I replenished them at supper time. She can't want out because 
she just came in. So why is Maggie sitting there at the other end of the 
dining room table, mewing?

I just bought the _New Yorker Book of Cartoons_ and am immersed in it, and 
immersion in books is something that cats have been known to take exception 
to. The standard response is for the cat to advance, delicately walk across 
the book and slowly sit down upon the page you are reading, as a personal 
statement. But she's not doing that either. She's just sitting there 
uttering a running commentary, making it hard to concentrate. Maggie's 
voice, like the rest of her tortoiseshell self, is substantial. At her last 
vet's appointment, after we weighed her, the vet, looking her over, said, 
"Well, this one's *supposed* to be a 14-pound cat. She's not overweight. 
She's just big."

I get up and try to pick her up, but she's having none of that and 
immediately pours out of my arms. I suspect that what she wants is a 
thorough fuss -- she's been asking for those more often, as Mud Season sets 
in --  but on her terms only. I sit down in the big chair and invite her to 
join me, but she settles on her gloriously brindled haunches about eight 
inches out of reach and goes on mewing.  Lord only knows....

Slightly exasperated, I have a moment of deep sympathy for God, who must go 
through this a lot. There God sits, listening to us quarrel and _kvetch_, 
seeing how needy we are, how desperately we want and don't want love and 
all that, and wanting to be allowed to care for us -- and we sit there 
eight inches out of reach and go on mewing.  We give God such very mixed 
signals sometimes.

We don't want care because it implies that we need it, and to be needy in 
this society is to be judged a failure. Good people, happy people, loving 
people, aren't needy.  And yes, we've run into people who project a type 
and intensity of neediness that puts our spiritual teeth on edge. There can 
be a very fine line between healthy interdependence and unhealthy 
codependence, and sometimes all you can go on is intuition. Perhaps we've 
been sucked into caring for a bottomless pit or two, and that leaves us 
feeling distinctly queasy about the whole notion of legitimate need.  We 
forget that just as there's a distinction between interdependence and 
codependence, so there is a difference between having needs and being needy.

We may have been brought up to believe that our job was to look after other 
people's needs and ignore our own -- a particularly serious issue in 
dysfunctional Christian families and as old and as common as dirt. Perhaps 
we've looked around our personal landscapes and realized that nobody was 
going to be there for us, and we shrugged and got on with it: "well, that's 
that." Maybe we've tried to voice legitimate needs and been met with 
silence or negativity.  It hurts when we say "I need", when the need is a 
normal and legitimate one, and the other person turns away, indifferent. Go 
through this a few times and we stop asking. Aversion "therapy", of a sort.

Take this far enough and we may lose all ability to identify and voice our 
real needs. We may in fact have no idea what our needs are, no words with 
which to body them forth. We may seize up completely, silenced by history, 
loneliness and fear.

It's hard to remember, in this place, that God's sitting right over there, 
within easy reach. The head may know this, but as a wise man once told me, 
sometimes the journey from head to heart is the longest and hardest one a 
person can make.  We're too frightened and lonely to pray, or we pray 
without confidence because we have so little experience of voicing needs 
and getting them met. For every prayer answered, there seems to be another 
case where God was silent and the patient died. It makes it really 
difficult to have confidence that God does provide. We may not always get 
what we want, but we do tend to get what we need, although sometimes it 
seems to take a while.

Maggie, being Maggie, has an excellent sense of what her needs are and has 
no trouble whatsoever asking for them to be met, especially when it 
concerns the state of the cat box. She's a wonderfully healthy piece of 
nature, a true Magnificat. Right now, she needs to sit there just out of 
reach and talk to me. I mew back, and we chat for a while; then she 
discovers a need to attend to her grooming and does that with her usual 
insoucient _joie de vivre_.

Later, just before dawn, I wake up for some reason and realize that there 
is no tortoiseshell presence next to me. My son must have let Maggie out 
and forgotten to let her back in. So I get up and open the outside door; 
Maggie flings herself in, mewing, and trots at high speed for my room. I 
crawl back under the covers, and she flings herself down next to me and 
accepts a fuss, purring expansively. Cats make God smile, I swear.



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I'm about to hit some sacred cows, and they moo so badly. -- Phyllis 
Tickle, aka The Divine Miz T.