CatEcumen the Ecumenical Cat

When I look back at this time in my life, I won't remember the arguments over money or dinner. I will remember having coffee with my old friend Christine Bunt at Borders, and I will remember that the New Mutants have brought back my dear Poor Dead Doug (Ramsey). With Cypher, Magik, Rachel Grey (she's calling herself Marvel Girl these days, right?) and Pete Wisdom all currently active in the Marvel universe, somebody's going to have to launch that rescue mission to recover Kitty Pryde sometime soon.

Did you ever get the feeling that the reality we're living in right now is an alternate universe created by someone's wishes? Let's look at just the fannish wishes we might have made, and which might have sounded totally impossible, if things had happened differently.

A world in which ....

Christian Slater and Robert Downey, Jr., are alive and well and starring in new projects;

A recast "Star Trek" movie was a huge success, after multiple theatrical movies and four spinoffs, one of which starred Kate Mulgrew of "Ryan's Hope" as a starship captain;

"Smallville" is in its ninth season;

Madonna did get to play "Evita" in the movie version, and there are musical versions of "Wicked" and "Legally Blonde," and a stage adaptation of "Xanadu";

Joss Whedon wrote an "X-Men" title, and the "X-Men" comics have become a successful movie franchise (although the Dark Phoenix storyline had to be changed to allow one of the stars to defect to "Superman Returns");

After a successful "Battlestar Galactica" remake, there is now a major-network remake of "V" .....

I could go on and on about the fannish improbabilities which have happened.

What improbable realities sometimes make YOU feel as if THIS is an alternate reality?

Could some Calvinist out there explain to me why someone can say with a peaceful mind, "True justice would be hell for the whole human race, wouldn't it?" (Source: "Calvinism, Arminianism, so what?" - but that's only one succinct statement of something which is widely believed by many.)

I can never quite understand how anyone can calmly believe that true justice requires that every human being who ever drew a single breath SHOULD suffer eternal conscious torment, that any exception to this rule is a miraculously gracious concession to which no human being could ever be entitled, and that the never-ending agony of each and every person ever born would be righteous and beautiful and perfect, and that we should joyfully worship the God who made it so.

This had been the kitten's scheduled spay-day, but since her digestive problems continue, I didn't think that she was in good enough shape for surgery yet, so we postponed the spay for two weeks. Her latest new food, Taste of the Wild grain-free, seems to be helping somewhat - she has put on a bit of weight, and her coat feels silkier to the touch - but it hasn't fully resolved the problem.

This morning the kitten particularly impressed me with what seemed to be logical thinking from a cat's point of view. She was watching me scooping out the litterbox. With clumping litter, I use little plastic poop-disposal bags. After observing what I was doing for awhile, she came up next to me, squatted and pooped right directly on a plastic bag. I guess she figured she was helping me cut out the middle step by delivering right to the destination! I gently picked her up and put her back into the litter box to finish her business. I hope she got the message, but I couldn't scold her for what probably seemed to her like a very helpful thing to do.

In order to try to keep the kitten (and the dogs) out of the kitchen garbage, I have been tying up the half-empty bags, but that makes it difficult for Ken and Jess to use them, so this weekend we bought two tall, covered kitchen trash containers for the kitchen, the kind that are operated by a foot-pedal to open and close the top.

So, how well do they work at keeping the critters out of the trash?

When we arrived home after dinner this evening, Jess commented that she hadn't seen our little mischief-making kitten since she came in. Only moments after she left the kitchen, I heard a "pop" and I turned around to see the lid of one of the trash containers opening and the kitten shooting out. :-)

For at least the rest of September, I'm going to be studying a Jewish spiritual path called "Mussar," and doing what is called an "accounting of the soul," to be more honest with myself about my flaws and make some real effort to be a better person.

One of the issues that I have run across in every attempt I make to learn and practice better conflict resolution and peacemaking skills, in trying to show more respect for other people, is that we are all locked into so much habitual black-and-white, either/or thinking. Any acknowledgement that "yes, Person A has done some significant good in the past to help Person B" gets immediately translated into "Person A can do no wrong, Person B can do no right" when it doesn't mean that at all. So I'm afraid to speak when I feel that I should.

We each make mistakes and we need to take responsibility for our actions. Certainly forgiveness delivered to the wrongdoer is premature until the wrongdoer acknowledges the wrongdoing, although the offended person may voluntarily choose to forgive for his/her own peace of mind rather than for the wrongdoer's sake.

I myself and others need to recognize that each individual can do both good things and bad things, and the good doesn't negate the bad nor does the bad negate the good. None of us are cardboard cut-outs. We are three-dimensional and full of shades of grey. It's so difficult to remember this, though, when our emotions tell us that people must be either bad or good, and that if someone did something wrong, that person must have been a bad person from the beginning and all the apparent good the person may have done was meaningless.

So, as an ethical and moral question rather than a legal one, if a person has done some good things, should that carry any weight in determining whether that person should be forgiven when they do wrong? Should it affect the severity of the consequences to be imposed upon that person even after the person has acknowledged and taken responsibility for a mistake?

Dear kitten: This is MY keyboard. I type words on it. I know that you find it to be a nice, warm place for you to take a nap. I have a keyboard blocker so that you can do that, when I'm NOT using it. However, I am using it now. MINE.

A post from a friend reminded me about some of the ways in which I'm trying to change my thinking and how I still have quite a bit farther to go on that.

A moment of anger and frustration very quickly gets translated into my mind into global self-condemnation. "I made a mistake" turns into "I never do anything right." Someone else's momentary annoyance at me, which the other person probably forgot within thirty seconds, turns into "so-and-so hates me and is totally right to hate me because I'm a bad person." I am well aware that I'm not the only person who takes something trivial and pounces on it and turns it into a referendum on my value in the world, but I can't stop anyone else from doing it; I can only change myself.

This morning, I remind myself to claim the right to be imperfect, to be human, and to be OK with that.