Loving Tessa
by Michael Nagler
Which I do a lot. To head off any misunderstanding you might be having, however, Tessa is a six-month-old tuxedo kitten; playful and sweet like all of her kind when they have a decent place to live and thrive, grow up and be loved.
Right now, she’s chewing on my wicker wastebasket, pulling it apart systematically and dropping the pieces on the floor, playing with them the way of kittens everywhere, batting them around and pouncing on them as though they had a life of their own. She’s so sweet. It’s well worth a wicker basket to see her frolic.
Ok, I’m a softie. Guilty as charged.
But the point is, I have this love for Tessa: what shall I do with it? Because it has dawned on me that I could use this relatively pure, uncomplicated love for this creature to help me model, or train, something more complicated and critical 𑁋 if it really is more important 𑁋 how to love people. There are guidelines for this; think of Gandhi. Everything he did, he candidly said, arose from his ‘insatiable love of mankind.’ And what he did changed history 𑁋 and showed us how to change history. He, and others, before him, left us guidelines.
I try to remind myself what I love when I love this kitten. Of course, she’s pretty, but I have to think of that as a symbol, an expression, more than just a thing in itself. I’m going to say it: Tessa is an expression of God’s beauty. The beauty of the universe. Think of it: there are 600,000 cats in this country, by last count. Their beauty varies with the eye of the beholder, no doubt, but it’s there in all of them. What I really love is the spark of divine consciousness in this creature, and it’s a real lesson to remember that. At least one great mystic, Meister Eckhart, wrote about this Funke, ‘spark’ in all of us. In all that lives.
To the extent that I’m aware that that’s what I love in this little one it becomes easier to love it in all kittens, all animals 𑁋 all life. That’s the ladder of perfection here. After all, Tessa is not “my” kitten even in the superficial, legal sense; she “belongs” to Stephanie and her friend Derek, who adopted her from the animal shelter. But the point is that we can’t ‘own’ any living thing; except in a certain legal sense we can’t own anything because we ‘can’t take it with us’ when we depart this chapter that we call our life.
When I focus on that spark, my love for little Tessa is no longer at the expense of whatever love I get to feel for other cats, creatures, people, life. She becomes a lens. And we all have to start with such a lens. Otherwise, as the saying goes, ‘I love mankind, it’s just people that I can’t stand’. The critical thing is not to stop at your particular lens, because then your love collapses in on itself and becomes a selfish attachment. Without a lens, though, most of us would be at a loss how to love anything or anyone beyond our selves.
A friend of mine, Lilly, owes her life to the lens effect. Her parents were Polish Jews, in the Warsaw underground, and alas, one day the Gestapo raided their apartment and discovered incriminating papers on top of the refrigerator. They were about to march them off, when to their horror their little boy went up to one of the men and started playing with the shiny buttons on his uniform! For one interminable moment he stared down at the boy, and then he looked up and said in a partly choked voice, “I have a little boy just like him at home, and I love him very much. Your son has saved your life.” And he ordered his men out of the apartment.
Most of life for most of us is much less dramatic, but the issue is the same: find something you love, identify what you love in it, or them; then try to find it in everyone. It’s our personal ticket out of a violent world.
Thank you, Tessa.
