Waking to a blessedly cool and rainy morning, to find Jenny-cat curled up at the end of the bed, looking particularly boneless. Of course when she got up, stretched langorously, and ambled up for a fuss, bonking her solid little skull up against me, I could feel the sturdiness under her silky fur, good bone and muscle. Cats are good at this particular illusion: looking as limp as a bag of warm tapioca when they're relaxed, but being able to morph instantaneously into strong and competent predators at need. Boneless Wonder to Fanged Terror in 0.1 of a second.

Not all cats are created equal. Jenny is particularly good at the warm-tapioca trick, but Max-cat, the solemn grey tabby, always seems stiff and clunky, while Dynamite the feral black cat, while almost heart-breakingly graceful, is always tense and edgy. Even when he's asleep, he's ready to levitate and spring off at the slightest startlement. Jenny, on the other hand, can feel utterly limp when she's being held, perhaps because we got her as a small kitten and she's always been able to trust us. If she's in the mood to be picked up, and I hold her the way she likes to be held, she curls up against my chest and goes blissfully soft. It's almost as satisfying as holding a baby (but not quite!)

It occured to me, watching Jenny roll over on her back and curl her white paws ridiculously in the air, that we should all feel able to be this boneless in the presence of God--that it is a sweet and wonderfully wholesome thing sometimes to lie as relaxed and trusting on the Ground of our Being as Jenny-cat lies at the end of my futon. Don't know too many people who can manage it, though. I have my moments, but they are momentary indeed.

Part of the problem is that we're brought up to believe that we have to do something--and indeed, by times, we do. "A good tub stands on its own bottom", "the Lord helps those who help themselves," "there's no such thing as a free lunch"--all the conventional wisdom says, put a hitch in your get-along, get off your duff, find a job, make it happen. And at times, that is indeed exactly true. Dinner isn't going to get cooked by magic, nor will the laundry bring itself off the line, sort itself out, and put itself away.

But it's all too easy to take this frame of mind a step or ten further and to believe that doing is automatically Good and not-doing is automatically Bad. It's easy to get our whole identities wrapped up in what we do--putting the office first, identifying our souls with our jobs or professions, believing in a theology of Works (earning God's grace by our own efforts).

For doing makes us feel in control. At least nobody, ourselves included, can criticize us for laziness if we're working hard, even if the work isn't sensible or productive. We start seeing doing as an end in itself, something that must improve the situation somehow. We value doing so much that we plunge into it in a sort of panicky rush: "ready, fire, aim!" And of course, that usually only makes things worse.

Yes, doing matters; but so, sometimes, does simply *being*. Being matters enough that sometimes Life or God or whatever lays us flat--holds us immobilized, pinned down and unable to move in the direction we want to go in, while we do the being-work we need to accomplish before we can get on with the doing-work we're being called toward. There are times when we are supposed to sit there with our hands in our lap and simply wait--and if that sounds easier than doing, just try it.

We can wait tensely, peering up at the sky and praying that God will do a little sky-writing and cut our waiting short. It's sort of the same way that cat Dynamite rests--not resting at all, really, coiled up tight as a steel spring, ready to pop at the slightest touch. But you can't do being-work under those circumstances, and waiting tensely is exhausting and counterproductive, like pushing at the wrong time in birthing a baby. What we need to do is to wait loosely, getting on with the present day in trust that God will look after whatever-it-is, and will bring it to us, or us to it, in God's good time.

Resting in trust ... it sounds so simple. But in fact, it is a radically difficult choice. Partly because most of the rest of the world looks at us and says, "You've got to be kidding!" and partly because trust has, in the past, often seemed to let us down so painfully. But mostly it's difficult because resting in trust demands our gut faith--far more than mere intellectual assertion--that there really is a God and that he is active and involved in our lives. This, when we're still struggling with the Problem of Evil, is like trying to swallow a beachball. Even more deeply, since not one of us doesn't somewhere have the inner conviction that nothing truly exists outside ourselves, it's very hard to turn over planning the Big Important Stuff to a potentially non-existent entity.

My own experience is that trusting in God isn't an all-or-nothing one-time event, but an angel I have to wrestle to the mat on a daily basis. Others seem to be able to make that single choice and never turn back, and I envy them. They lie in their trust of God the way Jenny-cat lies sleeping, totally relaxed, lucky them. Wish I were more like that.

What I have found, though, is having made the decision to try to trust God--however imperfectly and transiently--things in my life do start to come round right, a little at a time, often in ways I could never have asked or imagined. And when they don't come round right in the ways I want, I find that there's usually some good reason why, and that I can manage better than I had in the past.

But I still envy Jenny's boneless ease. Maybe in the next life, I get to be a cat?

Luke 12:22-34
(for JMW)