[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Pinned

I am pinned by kittens. Hobbes, a lean golden teenager, occupies my lap; he 
is curled up, purring rapturously. Smaller Calvin, black Velcro kitty of 
the pencil neck and the bat ears, occupies my upper reaches, lying belly-up 
on my arm with an absurd fringe of pink tongue sticking out, and is so 
soundly out that he has forgotten to purr and is uttering the kitten 
equivalent of tiny snores. For the time being, I can't reach for my book or 
my knitting or the newspaper. I am too thoroughly bekittened.  Try to 
imagine how much I mind.

As always, I wish I could manage to trust God the way they trust me, with 
that perfect confidence that the bowl will be filled, the cat box cleaned, 
the door opened when they squeak -- but also that they'll be protected and 
guarded and taken to the vet for shots. They are cats, and by nature cats 
don't "do" anxiety, but they also have little to be anxious about. I am 
quite deeply envious.

We envy this sort of innocence and simplicity; we look back to childhood, 
when we weren't responsible for the mortgage, the taxes, the bills, and 
Saturdays were wide open and summers were long and lazy. It's easy to think 
that the world was as golden and lovely as Hobbes is now, and that it has 
fallen. We forget about the bullies and the fears and the zillion nicks and 
scratches to body and soul that are also part of childhood. We forget that 
for most of this world's children, childhood is very short indeed and not 
safe, not at all.

There may have been a time between the establishment of agrarian societies, 
which give us a reasonably secure food supply, and the foundation of 
cities, when the power struggles get under way, when human life was really 
pretty damn good, and that that's what the story of the Garden of Eden 
represents. I don't know.  Human prehistory is not something I know an 
awful lot about, and I'm not sure what evidence we have. I am, however, 
sure that storms happened, and occasional famines and earthquakes and all 
the other natural events that sometimes make life more interesting than we 
like. There may be a time before human evil. There has never been a time 
when nature wasn't capable of doing us damage.

Nature is no more guilty or innocent than these kittens. Yes, they have 
never killed anything -- yet! -- but that's only lack of opportunity. 
Hobbes is certainly quite capable of mousing, and so I suspect is Calvin. 
The instincts are there; all I have to do to prove that is to wiggle a toe 
under the duvet in the morning, and they're airborne and incoming. Hobbes 
is absurdly cute when he's chasing the cursor across my monitor screen with 
his paws, but those are quite effective claws clicking across the glass, 
and he's fast, accurate and professional. Calvin plays with my face with 
velvety paddy-paws, but when he bit my ear (aiming for my earring and 
missing) those baby teeth were piranha-like. Turn either loose with a mouse 
and the mouse's fear and pain would be very real indeed. But that's not 
evil. That's just how cats operate.

What's different is that we humans have made a division between Good and 
Evil. That's where the Genesis story is utterly true, however factual it is 
or isn't. We are conscious of suffering and we try to understand how it 
happens -- not just the simple causality that even animals get (bite my 
finger, Hobbes-boy, and your golden snout gets lightly smacked) but a 
deeper linkage that tries to work God's goodness in somehow. We struggle 
towards meaning, and we never entirely get there. We are conscious of a 
goodness that the world doesn't match; we dream of a Peaceable Kingdom in 
which the lion will lie down with the lamb, the toddler will play with the 
rattlesnake, and mouse will play with kitten and nobody will get hurt.

It's a good dream, an important dream, because it tells us what, in this 
world in this time, we need to work on, if we're willing to pay attention. 
The outpouring of aid after the South Asian tsunami was a rush of 
compassion that's in the Kingdom way; the occasional reports of predation, 
renewed conflict, and exploitation are things that we identify as wrong, 
instead of shrugging them off as normal.  It would be better if we could 
manage the same compassion for other afflicted areas of the world, instead 
of shrugging *them* off -- the Congo, say -- but there's been an underwash 
in that direction too, at least in editorial cartoons and the like.

The knowledge of good and evil is tough, because it calls us to action. But 
it is also of God. It costs us our innocence, it leads us into places we 
might not want to visit, but it also builds our souls.

Enough sleep. Two kittens tumble off me, stretch, yawn, wash, and sit 
quietly for a while. But not for long. As I reach for my book, Calvin 
utters a warlike chirp and jumps Hobbes, who trills heroically and knocks 
Calvin arse over teakettle. Then both go thundering down the hall. It's the 
11 o'clock Crazies.

Have fun, guys.

******************

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