Dear Parishioner,
A cat is an eternal reality grounded in infinite depth; I read the other day. Which means, I think, that cats don’t do deals. They don’t negotiate; they don’t depend. They do, or they don’t; it’s up to them. Rewards for good behaviour work fine with dogs and are essential for instilling the elements of civilised behaviour in small humans (they work quite well with big ones too), but not with cats. There is a cat that spends a good deal of time in the monastery, but she doesn’t belong to the monastery, rather, the monastery and its inhabitants belong to her.
I mention this because I think it helps us understand the rather odd, challenging series of gospel passages we have been listening to over the past weeks. These episodes are taken from the long middle section of Luke’s gospel, in which Jesus is on the road (the road or way is an important image for Luke) from Galilee to Jerusalem, and on the way he meets people and tells stories. But the stories are odd and the central characters unpleasant; stewards who defraud their masters, judges who will not give just judgments, tax collectors. This week we have the unjust judge and the equally unappealing importunate widow. We can read this parable as if it were about perseverance in, but perhaps it’s also about gift. The widow, who won’t let up but goes on and on, finally wears the selfish judge down and he gives her the justice she requires. He has undergone no change of heart, he’s still the same, yet somehow, she has given him the undeserved gift of being able to act justly, to do good for once. We do not deserve the graces we receive, just as we did not earn being made in the first place. This annoys since we think there should be a reward for virtue, or even better, we ask God for something we really need and promise to be good for ever, or at least a week in return. But God doesn’t do deals; the goodness we receive, the good thing we do, is the reward, or rather, an unearned gift. How so? Because God does not act inside our world, God is our world.
The theological principle of the analogia entis, the analogy of being says that the closer we feel to God, the more it seems we understand Him, then the more we realise how ever less we really know. So, we come back to the cat, who is for us an analogy for God (an Analogia catti?), since however much we understand her, her mystery deepens. Not that God is an eternal reality, of course, for God is reality, and we are grounded in Him.
Happy Autumn, season of mysteries.
Abbot Martin Shipperlee OSB
