The gospel of cats and faith

I had no idea what to write today. I’m enjoying blogging, and I want to get better at this. Typically this would mean taking time on my posts, but I think for the beginning, at least, I need to keep posting often, so that I develop the habit of writing here, and writing steadily. There’s no substitution for doing the work, after all, a lesson that is slowly, after a few dozen years of life, sinking in. So I asked myself today: What makes me happy? And the answer was: my cat. Because this is the Internet, I am contractually obligated to post about cats every now and then, so this fits right in.

I started writing a little thingie about how my cat, Regina, has taken to trying to eat my face. Perhaps she’s a closet Walking Dead fan (impressive, since I don’t have cable). Maybe my moisturizer has gone off and now carries a subtle scent of dead fish, kitty’s favorite. Or it could simply be that she’s practicing for the day she gets to eat my corpse when I have a heart attack and die and no one is around to remove my body. Whatever the case, one of these days I might let her have an eyeball or something, just so the poor thing doesn’t feel discouraged.

But the little thingie was somehow not what I wanted to write, really. I did write a line there that I liked: Regina is just a little cat who shares my life.

She is small. She’s maybe 10 pounds – a sliver of what I weigh. She has black fur and green eyes and I get the feeling she is always a little confused about what’s going on, even though she tries to hide it. Loud noises make her jump, she has never tried to escape from the apartment and she once ran away from an ant.

But Regina shares my life with me. She reminds me of the time I saw the Blind Boys of Alabama performing, back at the Waterfront Blues Festival one July in Portland, Ore. Three blind gospel singers, older men, in front of a roaring crowd, thousands of people that the men could not see. They sang, and that was extraordinary enough. But they did more: They started jumping on the stage, up and down, a kind of joyful bounce that looked like they were getting ready to take off and fly someday. They couldn’t see the stage. They couldn’t see the people before them. There was sound everywhere, coming from them, from the musicians behind them, from the monitors, from the crowd. I used to get cranky and disoriented after just a few hours at the blues festival each year, though my then-job as a music critic meant I had to endure the crowds and discomfort anyway.

But there the men were, and their joy was easy to see. I was amazed – try jumping up and down in your living room, with your eyes closed, for a minute. Less than a minute – try doing it for as long as the average television commercial. They did this over and over and over. There was no fear. This was faith, right in front of me. Faith in what wasn’t and isn’t for me to say; for all that the universe takes my breath away sometimes, I’m an atheist, and religion puzzles me. But though faith and religion are often conflated, you can have the former without the latter.

And that’s what Regina has. I used to think of her as a little fearful, because so many things spooked her. But she has faith in me. Once, on the plane ride when we moved back to the United States from New York, I woke up to feel something bumping against my leg. I looked down and saw Regina had somehow escaped her little bag, placed under the seat beside me. A nightmare flashed into my mind, of the pilot having to ground the flight because a cat somehow managed to crawl into some duct or other and threatened to take out an engine.

But instead Regina just looked up at me, then jumped onto my lap. She lay in a quiet ball as I pet her. No one saw us, and after awhile she started to purr.