We had a cat named Solomon, who could open doors and play pool in the middle of the night, but most amazingly this creature of tiny brain could sense when I was writing a paper without saving early and often and may, perhaps, have known when my writing was particularly bad. Once when finishing a paper due the next day, I looked over and saw him staring at me. He was smiling his cat smile and then he leaped into the air over the plug that powered my computer and knocked it from the wall.
I turned and looked at the screen and saw my paper vanish. Since this was the era when saving a long paper was very hard, Solomon destroyed my paper and my hopes. There was no sleep that night and though I graduated, it was without whatever insights were in a paper, gone forever, that Solomon, son of some cat somewhere, had destroyed.
Solomon had triumphed and there was no sense punishing him because he had gone into hiding. This is the life of a man chosen by a cat to provide care: we serve at their need and amuse them at our peril.
Many cats have stayed with us, but the best of them all has been Athena. She would have been able to dominate even Solomon the Cat because she is a Mighty Hunter before the Lord. I once saw her attack an opossum twice her size and the number of rats she has slain. . . no man can count. Our son Ian has always been the “cat whisperer” meaning Athena dominates him more than the rest of us. He feeds her, cleans up her gifts of prey, and provides her warmth by way of his bed.
Once I decided (in my insanity) to get a canary and put that canary in a safe place far from where Athena could reach it. Spike the canary, named after a vampire in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sang loudly, then sang not at all, as Athena, bird slayer, sat day after day looking at the cage. One day Ian found a gift and poor Spike, the bird with a cheep in his head, was dead.
Our dearest friends sang a concert partly based on the poetry that the monastics wrote while copying books. They copied, but also made notes in the binding and margins., thinking nobody would see. One of them wrote about a cat and as a man who has been owned by cats from Solomon to Biffen to Mac to Athena . . . I love the ideas.
Pangur, white Pangur
How happy we are
Alone together, Scholar and cat.
Each has his own work to do daily;
For you it is hunting, for me study
Your shining eye watches the wall;
my feeble eye is fixed on a book.
You rejoice when your claws entrap
a mouse;
I rejoice when my mind fathoms a
problem.
Pleased with his own art
Neither hinders the other;
Thus we live ever
without tedium and envy.
Pangur, white Pangur,
How happy we are
Alone together, Scholar and cat.
Animals have souls as we have souls, but are not immortal and in God’s image. They are mortal souls, doomed to die, where we are mortal bodies with immortal souls. We can, if we will, lift them up . . . make them more than they were by recognizing what they are: companions, fellow animals, and souls. We are more, but they are not less as a result. All the cats, the playful animals I have known, were not people, thank God, but cats.
We love animals and so are like God. God loves us, though even noticing us is amazing grace. We love our cats and that is an act of comparable grace. Only a brute of a man would harm a “dumb brute” . . . a “lower” animal . . . and only a gentleman can even be fit to have a cat.
I am thankful for Pangur, Solomon, and Athena. . . friends that are less than we are, but not unimportant despite this fact. God bless our cats, but God save those benighted humans who never know they are animals.
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(Translated by Keith H. Jackson) Taken from the program for Here is the City of Man for Wheatstone Ministries. This wonderful program of music was put together and performed by Kathleen and Randall Gremillion. You should hear them sing.
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