Alright, now please stick with me here because the introduction to this article will remind you of that one elderly coworker whom you’d break your ankles trying to avoid conversing with. I promise you, though, there’s a point in my telling you that I’ve loved many cats. Of all these cats, my favorite one was called Gordon. He was a tuxedo cat, primarily black, besides a big gash of white upon his face and all over his belly, and sans a little patch of black on his chest that resembled a heart. He was lovely, and he’d follow me all around the house. He was an indoor cat, confined to the apartment. It was an awful anxiety for me to imagine the possibility of my beloved Gordon getting loose and running off. Although he was a big tom cat, he regularly got his behind kicked by his much smaller sisters, cats a fraction of his size. I knew getting out and getting lost would be a death sentence for my dear boy.

Now, as a teenager, during my misspent youth, I used to smoke in the backyard. To get out there, one would have to open the apartment door, go down the stairs, open the hallway door, then open the basement door, descend another flight of stairs, travel through the basement, and open the door to the storm cellar. To my surprise, I’m puffing away one sunny afternoon and hear a very clear and bright meow, a meow that sounded just like Gordon’s. I turned around, and to my absolute shock, there was little Gordon.

His eyes were wide like saucers, and he appeared even more terrified than me. Like something out of Scooby Doo, he jumped into my arms, and I took him back inside. I think of that experience from the eyes of my cat. He’d never seen the enormity of the bare sky. He’d never felt rough concrete on his paws. He’d never been face to face with the birds and squirrels he would safely harass from behind the second-story window pane. Yes, all of the knowledge of this great big world the cat had was collected from a privileged place two stories above the ground and protected by thick glass. He descended to where the water bugs and rats crawl about, stepped outside of all he knew, and did so in search of me.

It reminds me of something my spiritual father was telling me about the mind of God. He said that to God, we are almost like cats. The cat jumps up on the dining table, and we scold the cat and shoo it off. After a few times, the cat may eventually get the picture that it isn’t supposed to jump on the table. The cat will never, however, fully understand the mind of a human. Considering the massive jump in intellect between a cat and a human, we can imagine how much infinitely further we would have to jump between the mind of man and the mind of God. This convicted me and deepened my sense of pride.

I often boldly and wrongly presume to not only understand the minds of others but I am supposed to understand the mind of God. These preconceived notions usually serve to alienate me from my neighbor and God. In this vain sense of understanding, I effectively trespass into the interior world of another; I misinterpret the contents of the house, which is their soul, and by barging my way inside, I deny them the chance to invite me in. Now, the cat on the counter is not acting maliciously when he jumps upon the counter. Cats cannot act maliciously (for the most part, I have met a few reprobate cats: looking at you, Mr. Paws!) as they are animals. But we, being human, have quite the capacity for malice. We have quite a tendency toward weakness.

We have quite the comfort in ignorance, and we have quite the preference for concupiscence. Yet, how often does one sin take on several attributes, leading to graver and graver sins? Like a drunk man ice-skating, we fumble about, slip, and slide almost perpetually in this rink of a world. We know that the Lord God is holy, that He is just, and that He despises iniquity. Does He then despise us? Echoing the words of Azealia Banks on The Breakfast Club, I ask: “So… what now?”

In the 55th chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah, it has been written:

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,

Nor are your ways My ways,” says the LORD.

‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

So are My ways higher than your ways,

And My thoughts than your thoughts.”

Before I really prayed upon this topic, I always considered those verses a kind of doxology. That was foolish of me, and I am proven foolish every time I interpret the words of a Holy Prophet as lip service. Isaiah establishes the relationship between us and God, specifically between us and the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the eternally adorable Savior, Jesus Christ. The verse preceding the whole “my thoughts and your thoughts” thing reads: “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unjust man his thoughts, and let him return to the Lord, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God: for he is bountiful to forgive.” That’s what he says right before telling us that we are stupid! Isn’t that incredible? He tells us: “I do not care who you have been or what you have done, or how many times you have been and done it; I want you to return to my friendship. I forgive you, dummy! Cut it out and come home! Stop the B.S. I’m not one of your little friends!”

St John Chrysostom, that golden-mouthed Church Father alive in the late third century, drove this point home for me in his letter to his friend Theodore. He and Theodore were both living holy lives, but Theodore seriously fell off. He was getting involved in fornication and avarice and all of that. Theodore began to despair. St Chrysostom wrote him some letters of encouragement, writing in one of them:

“Well, do I convince you, that one ought never to despair of the disorders of the soul as incurable? Or must I again set other arguments in motion? For even if you should despair of yourself ten thousand times, I will never despair of you, and I will never myself be guilty of that for which I reproach others; and yet it is not the same thing for a man to renounce hope of himself, as for another to renounce hope of him. For he who has this suspicion concerning another may readily obtain pardon; but he who has it of himself will not. Why so pray? Because the one has no controlling power over the zeal and repentance of the other, but over his own zeal and repentance a man has sole authority. Nevertheless even so I will not despair of you; though you should any number of times be affected in this way; for it may be, that there will be some return to virtue, and to restoration to your former manner of life. And now hear what follows: The Ninevites when they heard the prophet vehemently declaring, and plainly threatening; yet three days and Nineveh shall be overthrown, even then did not lose heart, but, although they had no confidence that they should be able to move the mind of God, or rather had reason to suspect the contrary from the divine message (for the utterance was not accompanied by any qualification, but was a simple declaration), even then they manifested repentance saying: Who knows whether God will repent and be entreated, and turn from the fierceness of His wrath, and that we perish not? And God saw their works that they turned from their evil ways, and God repented of the evil which He said He would do unto them and He did it not. Jonah 3:9-10 

Now if barbarian, and unreasoning men could perceive so much, much more ought we to do this who have been trained in the divine doctrines and have seen such a crowd of examples of this kind both in history and actual experience. For my counsels we read are not as your counsels nor my ways as your ways; but far as is the Heaven from the earth, so far are my thoughts from your mind, and my counsels from your counsels. Now if we admit to our favor household slaves when they have often offended against us, on their promising to become better, and place them again in their former portion, and sometimes even grant them greater freedom of speech than before; much more does God act thus. For if God had made us in order to punish us, you might well have despaired, and questioned the possibility of your own salvation; but if He created us for no reason than His own good will, and with a view to our enjoying everlasting blessings, and if He does and contrives everything for this end, from the first day until the present time, what is there which can ever cause you to doubt? Have we provoked Him severely, so as no other man ever did? This is just the reason why we ought specially to abstain from our present deeds and to repent for the past, and exhibit a great change. For the evils we have once perpetrated cannot provoke Him so much as our being unwilling to make any change in the future.”

One final word about pets. Saint Chrysostom writes: “For if God had made us in order to punish us, you might well have despaired, and questioned the possibility of your salvation; but if He created us for no reason than His own good will, and with a view to our enjoying everlasting blessings, and if He does and contrives everything for this end, from the first day until the present time, what is there which can ever cause you to doubt?” Reading that, I am again reminded of the cat on the counter and a little-known story of the excesses of medieval piety, a favorite of anti-Catholics everywhere.

In 1250, a knight went hunting and left his infant son with his favorite greyhound, Guinefort. He came back to find the nursery turned upside down—his son’s cradle overturned, furniture all over the place, his baby boy nowhere to be seen, and Guinefort happily greeting him at the door with blood all over his muzzle. Say what you will about the intelligence of those living in the dark ages because the knight quickly put two and two together. The dog must have eaten the child. The knight took his sword and quickly slaughtered the greyhound. But the knight made an error. Upon examining the nursery, he found his son safely asleep, and he saw a deadly viper mauled to death nearby. Guinefort, the “goodest” of all good boys, had saved the son from a potentially fatal snakebite. Overcome with grief, he buried Guinefort in a nearby well and planted a tree over him. It would be excellent for the story to end there. However, it doesn’t. The townspeople made the dog Guinefort out to be a sort of sainted martyr, and they turned the well at which he was buried into a shrine where mothers would pray for the intercession of the greyhound in an attempt to fetch healing for sick children.

Initially, I wanted to write about how it was against the natural order for man to worship an animal. I tried to connect this to the Holy Father rebuking those who opt for children over pets, and I wanted to make a point about our culture, which attempts to elevate animals and debase humanity. Instead, I choose to write about the good. The good here is that we have a God who is infinitely understanding. The good here is that we have a God who abounds in patience.

The good here is that if we were dogs, and God was a knight, he would not have killed us. The good here is that, unlike Guinefort, we did kill God’s son. We delivered Him to a horrific death, and we executed Him without mercy. And from this real evil, God has made it so that we may become actual saints—not mere denizens of medieval shrines, but partakers of His divinity—Him whose thoughts are so far above our thoughts.