PRAYER AND THE CAT AS A METAPHOR FOR GRATITUDE, POET OF THE WEEK

Shabbat Shalom, and with immense gratitude for fortitude and friendship through a difficult week, here is an introduction to a new poet for me. I have been thinking about how to explain meditation and prayer as a daily discipline to an agnostic, and how prayer does not have to be aligned with any formal religion. Look again at how Mary Oliver asks us to consider the idea of staring at weeds as “the doorway into thanks”.
Abigail Carroll writes in Ruminate Magazine: “I don’t know where the voice came from. Words began welling up in me that did not sound like my own, yet they were very much my own. They emerged as pleas addressed to the Divine with an urgency, brazenness, and depth that startled me, each imperative a longing expressed in metaphor: Make me river, Make me chalice, Make me plow blade, Make me willow. As I filled out these images, crafting each into a poem, I found that I was writing lament.
During hard seasons of life, I have intentionally chosen, as a kind of spiritual exercise, to write about topics of delight: finches, peonies, loosestrife bending in the wind at the edge of the lake—anything but darkness. But during the particularly excruciating season of my life out of which this series of poems flowed, I learned to lament in poetry, and lamenting in poetry taught me something important about prayer.”
Prayer has often been compared to poetry, and with good reason. Like poetry, prayer emphasizes careful choice of words. Because of the careful, deliberated choices each word represents, the language of prayer, like the language of poetry, carries a greater amount of meaning than casual conversation or mere prose. The words of a prayer are thick with significance, pregnant with possibility. Like poetry, prayer contains pause. In both modes of expression, the silence surrounding words is as important as the words themselves. And in their own ways, both poetry and prayer engage the spirit. They are not merely a fanciful description of beauty on the one hand, and on the other hand, a functional request for the divine provision of needs, but occasions for deeply engaging the soul. – Ruminate Magazine
To read or listen to poetry requires unmixed attention just as writing it does. And when a poem is read aloud, there’s a communal, at times ritualistic, element that can make a reading feel like collective prayer, even if there are only a few listeners in the audience or I’m listening by myself. (Please check the Further Reading list at the foot of this post, and visit Talking Writing.) Consider, in the poem below, how Edward Hirsch’s cat, Jeoffry can teach us to praise—purring in their own language. This picture is not Jeoffry, but my own Dear David, aka The Most Holy Dov.

WILD GRATITUDE

by EDWARD HIRSCH

Tonight when I knelt down next to our cat, Zooey,

And put my fingers into her clean cat’s mouth,

And rubbed her swollen belly that will never know kittens,

And watched her wriggle onto her side, pawing the air,

And listened to her solemn little squeals of delight,

I was thinking about the poet, Christopher Smart,

Who wanted to kneel down and pray without ceasing

In every one of the splintered London streets,

And was locked away in the madhouse at St. Luke’s

With his sad religious mania, and his wild gratitude,

And his grave prayers for the other lunatics,

And his great love for his speckled cat, Jeoffry.

All day today—August 13, 1983—I remembered how

Christopher Smart blessed this same day in August, 1759,

For its calm bravery and ordinary good conscience.

This was the day that he blessed the Postmaster General

“And all conveyancers of letters” for their warm humanity,

And the gardeners for their private benevolence

And intricate knowledge of the language of flowers,

And the milkmen for their universal human kindness.

This morning I understood that he loved to hear—

As I have heard—the soft clink of milk bottles

On the rickety stairs in the early morning,

And how terrible it must have seemed

When even this small pleasure was denied him.

But it wasn’t until tonight when I knelt down

And slipped my hand into Zooey’s waggling mouth

That I remembered how he’d called Jeoffry “the servant

Of the Living God duly and daily serving Him,”

And for the first time understood what it meant.

Because it wasn’t until I saw my own cat

Whine and roll over on her fluffy back

That I realized how gratefully he had watched

Jeoffry fetch and carry his wooden cork

Across the grass in the wet garden, patiently

Jumping over a high stick, calmly sharpening

His claws on the woodpile, rubbing his nose

Against the nose of another cat, stretching, or

Slowly stalking his traditional enemy, the mouse,

A rodent, “a creature of great personal valour,”

And then dallying so much that his enemy escaped.

And only then did I understand

It is Jeoffry—and every creature like him—

Who can teach us how to praise—purring

In their own language,

Wreathing themselves in the living fire.

From Wild Gratitude by Edward Hirsch Copyright © 1986 by Edward Hirsch. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. 

Edward M. Hirsch (born January 20, 1950) is an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry. He has published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work, and Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length elegy for his son that The New Yorker called “a masterpiece of sorrow.” He has also published five prose books about poetry. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City.

FURTHER READING AND REFERENCES/SOURCES:

1. The World Almanac and Book of Facts 1985. New York: Newspaper Enterprise Association, Inc. 1984. p. 414. ISBN 0-911818-71-5.
2. “Edward Hirsch”. Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 16 September 2022
3. TALKING WRITING

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