The Loss of Tradition…Cat, That Is!
WORDS FROM W.W. November 28, 2012
We lost our cat on Sunday night, but lest you think this is going to be one of those articles that get all weepy, it’s not! Perhaps it is a bit therapeutic for me to write it, but it is also about some things I’ve been pondering.
Permit me a moment to recap. Carol and I came home Sunday afternoon only to be greeted by a cat in obvious pain. A trip to the emergency veterinarian clinic revealed it wasn’t a good situation, and the vet advised us to put Princess Malibu- Boo for short- to sleep.
Don’t be too amused by her name. She follows in a long line of head-shaking names that our daughters have christened our cats with, including “Tickles”, “Prince Charming Kisses”, “Duke”, and “Katie Katie Cocoa Puffs.” Some of our cats have had more names than I have.
On Monday I found myself looking for Boo around the house. Passing by the front door my habit returned of looking out the window of the door to see if she was waiting on the front step to get back in the house. Opening the door into the garage later that day I instinctively looked at the hood of my car to see if she was laying on it. (I seldom get bird droppings, but paw prints are like a hood design for me.) As I sat in my home study I looked at the ledge by the window where she quite often laid when the sun was shining through.
I realized that I had not only lost a cat, but also some of my daily traditions. I no longer have my hide-and-seek playmate for the evening. I can’t convince Carol to fill that role. If I went out to out hot tub for an evening soak the tradition has been that Boo would sit on top of the tub cover and peer into the night.
A part of my life was lost on Sunday, because things I’ve always done for the past eight years suddenly were finished.
I thought about that in regards to the church. Not cats dying, mind you, but rather traditions being lost.
There are many traditions that should never be lost, but there are a lot of traditions that just become lost. It is neither a good thing nor a bad, it just is. Like a cat that is not destined to live forever, but rather one day to just no longer be.
That is a hard thing for people of the church to hear. We make sacred cows out of a lot of baloney. We look for a world that is filled with things that suit us, while prickly points are vacuumed away.
I remember the first time Carol and I put up a Christmas tree, and she decorated it all wrong, because I was raised to think that there was only one way to decorate a Christmas tree…and she was brought up in a family that had found a different way. My tradition died, but in its place was born a new tradition that has suited our family of five well. Letting go of my understanding, however, was hard!
All of us have our areas of inflexibility. All congregations battle a desire for attracting new people with an addiction to keeping things the way we like it.
Will we ever get another cat? I don’t know. I’m still looking for the one we just lost.
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