[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Creatures

I woke this morning to the sense of a moving pressure against my right leg: 
Maggie-cat, washing.

She likes sleeping with me. Of late, she's taken to leaning right up 
against my leg instead of curling up in a gloriously multicoloured heap on 
the green comforter. I usually wake to her substantial, 
mild-in-her-middle-years presence. This morning, I curled around and 
reached to give her a fuss, scritching the white fur of her chin and chest. 
She has a beautiful butterscotch-gold big diagonal blaze across the darker 
tabby of her face, and I admired it afresh as she half-closed her eyes in 
satisfaction, nuzzling my hand like a contented kitten.

Admiring her beauty, I remembered -- for no particular reason -- an 
exhibition I'd seen almost eleven years ago, at the National Gallery in 
Ottawa. It was called "The Queen's Pictures", and it was a sampling from 
the British royal art collection.  One painting in particular clobbered me. 
I can't remember (and can't, by Googling, find) what its title was, but it 
was a portrait by Rembrandt of a merchant and his wife. I've seen a fair 
number of Rembrandts, but this was a big 'un of the very best quality. I 
remember standing there, getting clonked by the sheer brilliance of the 
painting, and realizing that I was in the presence of really great art -- a 
diamond of the first water.

This morning, fussing Maggie-cat, the same feeling hit me. I was in the 
presence of really great art -- a diamond of the first water. Truly, truly, 
I say unto you: I was fussing a large, handsome but still quite ordinary 
tortoiseshell domestic shorthair.  There are God only knows how many house 
cats in this world -- hundreds of millions, most likely -- ranging from the 
scrawny to the beachball-configuration, from the starved and abused to the 
grossly over-indulged. And that's just the cats. Then there are the dogs, 
the hedgehogs, the frogs, the tilapia fish, the beetles (probably as many 
as a million species -- God's inordinant fondness for the coleoptera), the 
starlings.... Yesterday, going outside, I heard what sounded like a very 
large, long-distance dog fight and realized that several hundred Canada 
geese were down by the shore, organizing themselves into great Vs to take 
off for northern marshes.  And suddenly, my neighbourhood is full of 
mourning doves in hot pursuit of other mourning doves.

We are so proud of what we make, we humans; we focus with such unending 
loving delight on our own creations. Sometimes, as in that big, glorious 
Rembrandt, we really do make something of superlative workmanship and 
enduring importance. But the home artist laboriously painting a moose on 
black velvet is just as delighted -- maybe even more so -- with the product 
of her art as the master was. (The really good ones are rarely satisfied.)

But compared to Creation, all of our creations, even the very best, are so 
small, so limited, so transient. There is no painter now and never has been 
who could adequately represent Maggie-cat's particular feline beauty. No 
photograph or digital image, however masterfully manipulated, could quite 
capture the texture of her fur or the gleam of her greeny-yellow eyes. The 
very best human creativity could manage is an aesthetically pleasing symbol 
of a reality we're not capable of capturing, at least not perfectly.  And 
that's the just the reality that's visible to our limited human senses. 
What about the other realities, the ones Maggie is in close touch with when 
she's prowling the neighbourhood at dusk?

This is the realest of realities: there is no other cat exactly like this 
one, and never could be; she is a work of Creation, inimitable and of 
formidable beauty. And she's *still* only an ordinary, if handsome, 
domestic shorthair. If she has a soul (I suspect she does), it's a 
cat-sized soul, with the inevitable limitations of feline nature.  She can 
rise to contentment but not to disinterested love. She's pretty bright, by 
cat standards, but quantum physics isn't on her mental horizons in any 
conceivable world. She can hunt, but she can't create. She can play, but 
she can't achieve. That's just being a cat.

I am one of some several billion human souls on this planet, each of which 
is *real* to God, utterly different, one-of-a-kind, and infinitely 
precious. Why is this reality so hard to grasp and take in? Why is it so 
much easier for me to spend a minute or two contemplating Maggie's unique 
and particular beauty than it is for me to do as much for any other human 
being? What causes us to focus on the flaws and uglinesses and wrongness of 
ourselves and each other, instead of on what God sees to love in us?

I'm doing this all wrong, of course: I've set Maggie and the Rembrandt up 
as an either-or thing, when in fact it's both-and: there is Maggie's beauty 
and there is the beauty of human endeavour at its best, and there's nothing 
to choose between them. Merely, Maggie's here on my bed and the Rembrandt 
is back in Windsor Castle or whatever, and Maggie is warm to my touch as a 
painting never can be. Maggie can turn under and into my hand, as I can 
turn under and into God's love. When I remember.


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