Sunday Afternoon With a Cat Named Niebuhr

(I wrote this after the adoption of a rather unusual kitten in need of a home, following the end of my January class on Reinhold Niebuhr)

In the end, it was the only name which seemed to fit.

We tried as many other possibilities as we could think of, names human and feline and traditional and unusual, but nothing seemed to match this strange creature that captured our attention and we felt compelled to bring home from the shelter last night. This morning, after close observation and failing to convince myself otherwise, I realized this name would simply have to do. She is neither all black nor white, but a combination somewhere in between; and the lines and patterns are not cleanly defined at all but a bit beyond our comprehension of what the Creator had in mind. She is somewhat gangly and her ears stick out a little too far in her young age, but perhaps she will outgrow that. I’m told she is verbose, and I see her extreme curiosity about the world around her. Clearly, in community with our other cat (named after the prophet Malachi), they are now both less moral than either appeared originally on each one’s own. Clearly, in cleaning up the houseplants they’ve dug into and moderating their squabbles, the progress in our household I had earlier envisioned was far from inevitable.

Meanwhile, as I move around the house I am surprised to find her everywhere I go. How did she get there? She has generated quite a stir and following from the other cat, always trying to get closer, helping himself out of her dish and prying constantly into her privacy, but so far falling just short of understanding all that she is or might be. Though shocked by her castigations of him, he is still encouraged enough by her invitations to keep trying.

All the metaphors with her namesake are not exact; she does still in our house seem a bit more guilty of the sin of hiding than the sin of pride—although our first cat does more than his part to compensate. With such a name as this, she has rather large ‘shoes’ to fill; in reality her feet are bigger than the rest of her, and despite her routine retreats just beneath my bed-skirt, there is a certain scrappiness and determination in her. This should not come as such a surprise, since we learned that she only weighed four pounds until recently, and had still raised two litters of kittens in her two years of existence!

Encountering this strange creature leaves more questions than answers, I am afraid, and I am wondering if I have done the right thing in bringing her into my own messy life. I am not sure if my brother James, knowing less of Reinhold’s legacy in our times, will find her new name as relevant as I do. And more seriously, neither James nor I are quite sure where our lives will take us after this year. So, I ask, just what is a seminary student who spent the past month having her head filled with Christian realism doing, taking on another pet? There are real questions in life, and one can only try to be faithful in response. Still, while we were told yesterday we could always take her back to the shelter, would I really want to? Despite all her troubles, she’s growing on me rapidly. I think in reality she is here for the long run, and life will never quite be the same