Ghost Cats, And Other Small Graces

In America, believing in ghosts is akin to liking Barry Manilow:   people won’t admit to it, but secretly, they do.

Take all those ‘Haunted This’ and ‘GhostHunter That’ TV shows.   You’re flipping channels, you tune in, you stay with the show “just to laugh at how fake it all is”…but before you know it, you’ve watched the whole show.  Again!

Then there are the Legends that every camp has.  A jaded camp counselor might overhear a group of young and impressionable campers scaring themselves silly with one of the legends, and even as she laughs out loud – “oh, is THAT old story still going around? it was baloney thirty years ago!” – she still, later that night, looks over her shoulder.

But closer to home, and closer to ‘Barry Manilow’ territory – in terms of being something we’re a little embarrassed to admit but still secretly hold on to – are the Family Ghosts.  Many of us – regardless of our religion, or lack thereof – believe that our departed ones, human and animal alike, can and perhaps do come back to us, from time to time.

That Big Dream that felt like a visitation?

That pot of dead flowers which mysteriously sprung up and bloomed like crazy on her birthday?

That small grey shadow just outside our field of vision?

The way that picture always tilts itself on the wall, or the familiar-sounding footstep in the upstairs hall?

Skeptics will say that there’s no proof, that there’s no such thing, that all those stories and ‘evidences’ can be explained by combinations of natural phenomena and wishful thinking.  Maybe…but given that science is revealing the universe to be more rather than less weird as it goes on, I’m not quite so quick to dismiss.  Maybe our electromagnetic energies can and do hang about for awhile after our bodies quit.  Or maybe – to speak more theologically – our souls can and sometimes do hang about the places and people we have known and loved in life, if God so wills/permits.  Who knows.

I’m thinking of this, not because I have designs on being the next Shirley Maclaine, but simply because the other night I was thinking privately of my familiar, Mischief, who died untimely in July 2008, and I was missing him very much, and later that evening, Son glanced over his shoulder and suddenly exclaimed:  “Whoa! I just saw Mischief over there for a minute!”

I looked over and saw only the sofa, none of our current living cats anywhere in sight, nothing that could have been mistaken, on quick glance, for a cat.  In the old house, I had occasionally seen little shadows, felt pawprints on me in the morning, and heard what sounded like Mischief’s colorful meow, but had never been certain if it was really him, or just my own combination of memory and longing.  But for someone besides me to “see” my friend in the new space was, I’ll admit it (like I’ll admit to liking Barry Manilow)…very comforting.

I’m not one who obsesses about ghosts and all the rest; there’s quite enough to interest and challenge me in this world, and whenya think about it, we’re really not in this world for very long, so why rush to know everything about the next one? …but I am a believer in God:  God of grace, and life, and love, and above all, surprise.  There is always more than meets the eye, God is always bigger than any living human can fathom, and there is always something new to be discovered.

Our “ghost cat” was, and is, an angel – as in its root-word meaning of ‘messenger’ – a quick reassurance that in God’s surprising and very-big-yet-very-small, very-complicated-yet-very-simple universe, nothing and no one, living or dead, present, past, or yet to come, is ever lost or gone forever.  Not even a little black cat.  Not even you.  Not even me.

Maybe it’s not ‘real’ as we currently define ‘real’, but it’s grace, and grace is real enough.

~ by Mad God Woman on September 16, 2009.