Catalysis

I look at him and he looks at me. There is always something lazy there, which binds curiosity with disdain. On one hand, the cat contemplates me with a certain mild wonder as to whether I might indeed be coming by with food, a back-scratch or some other companionable activity; on the other hand, that lazy looks says, "I might care, or I might not; and in the end, it is all one."

I think of cats, and I think of God. With all the running around and theological infighting and heresies, heterodoxies, 'ways to God' or 'ways to Hell', theisms, atheisms and other God-related isms, it is all too likely that He, at the very instant of creation (or is it 'at every instant of creation'?) has decided that the the price of free will is worth the near-unbearable egocentrism of the human condition — just as we too have learnt to deal with the near-unbearable egocentrism of the feline condition.

I look at the cat: I, his nominal master. His entire existence is below the radar. I have no idea what he thinks and yet I think that God knows everything I think. The cat has his own anthropology, but what it is, we do not know. It might not even exist. In that sense, our forbearance of the cat is rooted in our ignorance. But God, ah, God is a different matter; His forbearance is rooted in the fact that we think He forbears.

In fact, we know less of God and His mysterious ways than the cat knows of us. His motives are arbitrary, as befits the Arbiter of All Creation. His ways are not our ways, and as the Bible shows us again and again, He is perfectly willing to let us be deceived while not being the immediate origin of deception. Most times, we deceive ourselves or each other. All times, we are fools.

I look at the cat. He is not now looking at me, but is flumphed across his cushion in the sun. And I laugh.