Phil Baisley is pastor of Greenfield Friends Church.
I am an ailurophile. Look it up. I prefer cats to dogs, although we have almost as many of those as we do cats at our house.
Hundreds of people “like” and comment on my #Caturday photos each week on social media. Drew, Mayhem, Marble and Malbec are the “photogenic foursome.” They’re also aggressive cuddlers, vying for space on my lap, shoulders, or head.
In spite of my affinity for felines, I’m not a fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s famous musical Cats. I know it gave Broadway a much-needed boost when the show arrived in New York in 1982. I know it was a groundbreaker in terms of content and costume, but when I saw it in the 1990s I was underwhelmed.
April was already old by the 1990s. Her glorious orange tabby coat was showing its age. But she’d been with us since kittenhood. She and her brother, Adino, had traveled with us from Pennsylvania to new homes in Ohio and Indiana, where Adino died of feline leukemia.
April made the cross-country move to Oregon with us in 1994. By the winter of 1999, she was ancient.
Grizabella the Glamour Cat in Webber’s musical is also ancient, a matted-fur shadow of her former self. And while I’m not a fan of the show (see above), her song, “Memory,” is, no pun intended, unforgettable.
I can smile at the old days
I was beautiful then
Near the end of her life, April’s fur was also matted and her beauty faded. She no longer bathed herself. She was greasy to the touch, and she smelled. My wife and children didn’t like being around her. Still, when I’d be lying on the sofa trying to read, April would drag her tired body onto my chest and purr — a greasy, stinky purr. I imagine that she, like Grizabella, was remembering her “days in the sun.”
Smelly and yucky as April was at the end, she was still my cat and I was her person. I would never turn her away.
Isaiah describes our human condition in chapter 64.
“We’re all sin-infected, sin-contaminated. Our best efforts are grease-stained rags.”
Grease-stained rags, matted fur, the stench of sins still fresh in the memory. Yeah, that’s me.
You too, probably. But when we drag our weary souls onto God’s metaphorical sofa and curl up our sin-stained spirits in God’s enormous welcome, we will never be turned away.
That’s worth remembering.
Phil Baisley is pastor of Greenfield Friends Church. This weekly column is written by local clergy members.
