God Is Like A Cat (Mother Teresa)

Happy Sunday. What is the lesson of Mother Teresa?

The lesson of Mother Teresa is that you can find God—really, truly find God—so that it gives you purpose. Real, true purpose. So you’ve done conversion one, done conversion two. Boom—you’re there. You’re fucking mother Teresa, man. There’s no doubts right now.

Really?

You should go read the truth about Mother Teresa after she got the award. And by truth, I don’t mean some stupid conspiracy theory, or like, something that isn’t public. I mean, what she said about her own faith after she got the award.

Which is that she thought she felt often that God was not visiting her as often or the same way that he had before; and, if I can paraphrase: that fact, I believe, to her, felt like a comparatively lonely experience after the experience of revelation. The conversion—using my terminology, you know, the knowing suddenly, “oh, I’m dedicated to giving, that’s my purpose”—even after that happens, you can lose God. Or it can feel that way.

Because God is like a cat.

God is not like a dog. We love dogs and dogs are magnificent animals because, you know, from our perspective (especially we egotistical humans), they live to serve us. And that dedication and that honor is something really to be admired. We feel that in our bones. To see those qualities, and to see that love in their eyes—I mean, dogs are just amazing animals.

(At first, in American culture, generally speaking, men were really into this, and they had hunting dogs and, you know, a real companion for life. No divorces. You have a heart companion with a dog. And now, especially in Los Angeles, women are really onto this. Women and dogs in the last 25 years have just taken off, which is awesome.)

But with a cat, you might live with a cat for, like, eight years, and one day it just goes away. And now you have to get comfortable with the fact that God is more like a cat than a dog. Because yes, he lives to serve you, because you are part of God, but he lives to serve himself, which is all of us combined, which means something bigger than you.

A dog will serve one person, a master—one human master. But God is not going to wait at your door for you to get up in the morning and tell him what your prayers are today, so that he can go fetch them for you.

You have to invite God in and then you have to wait. And you have to sort of coax. And God might piss you off, even after you fully fucking believe, even after the second conversion, God just might fucking piss you off. Like a cat. Oh well.

That’s life. That’s you. That’s God. That’s your human body in transformation, struggling to express the flower that is the knowledge that we really do not have to kill each other, that we can all actually find love and acceptance. The knowledge that lies in your DNA.

Please get comfortable with this idea. That you don’t get to talk to him or know him with the same intensity your whole life, because that would be living on the mountain instead of visiting it. And then that’s just not what we’re supposed to do. That’s not how transformation works in this dimension.

We’re supposed to feed and heal human beings, and animals, and institutions, and ideals, and yes whales—and the whole fucking planet—because we’re all one. So that human beings, specifically as the most versatile communicators of that ecology’s knowledge, can come together in peace and then go spread God’s word.