Pro Junipera Sancta

Memoir of a Feline Guru

I am the great Cat, who frequenteth the Persea tree in Heliopolis, on that night of battle wherein is effected the defeat of the Sebau, and that day upon which the adversaries of the Inviolate god are exterminated. // Who is that great Cat? It is Râ himself.
Egyptian Book of the Dead, XVII.15-16

I was fortunate enough to form a number of happy friendships in the months since Christmas. None more reputable, however, than that of Juniper Jones, an eminent member of my university’s intelligentsia who resided in a homely abode, aloft in the higher echelons of my own dormitory building, a room I was fortunate enough to frequent over the course of the last semester. I remember our initial greeting well: I, timorous and bashful, made cautious entry, before seeing a flash of my own ginger colour come before my feet. Her eyes were at first both curious and sceptical, but she measured my soul with a glance and deemed it suitable for catechism.¹ She rubbed her soft head against my leg, meowed, and then with vatic poise purred at a volume only I could hear: ‘fils d’homme, tiens-toi sur tes pieds, et je te parlerai’.

Quite how she knew that I was a (very) humble student of French was beyond me; it was but one of many insights into her vast knowledge that I would be afforded. This set the precedent for our relationship. She the master, endowed with sacred wisdom, and I the student, patiently awaiting her elliptical bestowal. As with many master-student relationships—especially in the tradition of Zen—this was at times imbued with an agonising mysteriousness: I would pose her a question directly, begging for an honest answer in the midst of my quotidian troubles, and she would carry on with her day, imperturbed, stretching or yawning, offering no balm for my despair. At others, when I seemed to be doing perfectly well, I heard unsolicited interruption: in the midst of watching television, reading philosophy, or typing away at my senior dissertation, she would whisper a kōan in my ear to seize my attention, and then prompt me with intense gaze to reflect on what had just been revealed.

So I write this piece in great approbation. I could exhaust many articles on Juniper, but will have to limit myself to a particular query that she deigned to clarify in the time that I spent under her tutelage. Specifically, I want to provide a few notes on the relationship of one’s being and mind in their attempted union in God. Thus what follows will be a brief but concentrated reflection on the limits of language, the immediacy of the Divine, and the ecstatic, transcendental nexus at the unifying pinnacle of the ordo essendi and ordo cognoscendi. But really it will just be a shameless excuse to post some of my favourite Junie photos.

One of her earliest remarks to me was on my good taste in Doctors - seems she too was a fan of Eleven.

It is a fairly common trope in many religions to extol both animals and children as the exemplars of a truly pious life. Most immediately memorable might be the young Krishna, makhan chor, a mischevious yet deeply endearing child whose carefree playfulness stands in parallel to the more broadly metaphysical understanding of creation as God’s lila; his sport or pasttime, a happy and gratuitous addition to an otherwise lackless Being.² Jesus also exhibits his own cheeky saintliness in youth (Lk. 2:42-51) and then later famously celebrates children as inheritors of the Kingdom, chiding those who would diminish their role on account of their age (Mk. 10:14, Mt. 19:14, Lk. 18:16). Animals as bearers of sacred value almost go without saying, being endemic to all manner of traditions. Cattle in Hinduism and Zoroastrianism, cats in Egyptian religion, not to mention all deities which signify or take after animalistic archetypes; again, Hinduism boasts a gorgeous array of godly beasts, from Nandi the cow to Hanuman the monkey to Ganesha the elephant, all to varying anthropomorphic degrees.

Many of these associations, bearing an inherent and apparently unquestionable sanctity, are rooted in those rather basic observations of the contrast between adult humans and those around them. We tend to envy a certain innocence, a purity, a blissful ignorance of life’s suffering, either by way of lack of exposure or an incapacity to comprehend it. As a result, the child’s proclivity for play or the animal’s contentment with habitual simplicity seem to reflect something truer to life, unscathed by the beseigements of all those social contracts we come to subtly and invisibly sign throughout our adolescence.

But, there is also good reason to be sceptical of any adulation that would put them on a pristine pedestal. I imagine that those who present them as blemishless in contrast with the benighted sins of grown humans are often those least exposed to their domestic demands. No new parent, jolted awake at three a.m. for the fifth consecutive morning to attend to the soothing sound of an infant’s wails, is well-slept enough to allow such a naive depiction. Beyond this, to be more serious, it is not wholly abnormal for children to sometimes exhibit a real cruelty that we would find nigh unforgivable in adults. And no one truly acquainted with the at times brutish ways of animals would paint all as perfectly saintly, or indeed preclude the possibility that they would have been just as maligned as us had evolution endowed them with the same swollen pre-frontal cortex.

But all the same, being unfortunately bereft of the common company of both young children and animals (excepting cattle in surrounding fields, whom I really should talk to more frequently…), I am wont to their idealisations. So even many weeks after meeting Junie, my eyes were still starry. I was soon to discover that my clinging to this image entailed a cunctation in my development.

Passing a careless yet critical eye over my senior dissertation. All wholly beneath her.

My wide-eyed admiration first became tested once she—likely as a reaction to certain stressing factors at the time—began to overgroom around her neck area, broaching a deep gash that her habit gave no chance to heal. She required a cone to prevent her from scratching at and constantly reopening the wound (hence the charming lilac flower you see around her neck in some photos), and even then would constantly lick and scratch at the impediment in frustration, incapable of understanding its purpose.

I remember making a passing joke, chiding her for her bad habit and insisting that ‘human beings would never consistently engage in a behaviour that directly harmed them’. But the more I thought about it, the more curious it became. I happily accepted that humans would be so fallible… but Junie? From this itchy hamartia, awareness of my master’s imperfections grew. I took note of the way she would wake her cohabiting humans with importunate meows at ungodly hours when she decided that the day was to start: a damning disregard for their welfare and rest. I saw how she would complain about and even boycott her meals when they were not doused in the finest gourmet gravy: a worrying taste for the luxurious that so often corrupts the noble. And I heard and saw accounts of her at best chilly and at worst outright hostile interactions with her fellow felines: a concerning quickness to anger.

What did this mean for my twofold reverence: first, of her as animal, and second, of her as master? It had become clear (despite my reluctance to admit it) that she was prone to error, was not a beacon of perfection, but was—implicated as she is in the fabric of fallen reality—subject to certain failures of will, certain damaging ignorances. So I was left with an aporia. On the one hand, I knew (and had not wavered in this conviction, remembering what she first said to me) that in her eyes she held the most arcane and dazzling wisdom, that her sagacity was limitless, and she possessed a true and abiding peace that could prevail against all the darknesses that assail human psychologies. But on the other, she was finite, at times taken by ignorance, and bluntly imperfect.

her mirror eyes set my soul astir / drawn to burning auburn fur

The epiphany came to me on an unsuspecting Wednesday (as the best epiphanies always do), as I was reading Meister Eckhart, and came over that famous phrase of his again: ‘I pray to God to free me of “God”’.³ In one fell swoop, the impenetrable enigmas of her kōans became pellucid to me. It was suddenly clear, in spite of all my doubting, that Junie’s pedagogical genius was without equal. She had accepted me with my starry eyes, and entertained my illusions of her perfection until it was time for me to advance. And then, utterly uncaring for the pride of her own esteem (and who other than a bodhisattva can throw this away so freely?), made me gradually acquainted with the reality of being in a fallen world, the silliness of supposing that anyone, even her, could act perfectly, even when enlightened, and—most brilliantly—thereby dissolved all dualisms that I implicitly presumed between imperfection and perfection, between me and her, between the real and the ideal. It was an educative coup de maître, to say the least. Junie the master saw in me a desire to cling to her mastership, and so dissembled it to reveal that it, too, like everything else, is śūnya.

My misapprehension proceeded from an inherited Protestant ethic with which I still struggle: an ethic that exhorts us to make alterations, to work in order to approach acceptance. But, of course, acceptance never quite arrives, and so work is made perpetual. Part of Junie’s revelation is that we cannot even accept ourselves by moving from our daily frenzy to a calm zazen. We cannot ‘work’ to make ourselves into a saint, and then have enlightenment. We cannot make any change at all, not really. Not if we are really being honest about unity. How far must a fish swim to find water? How near must you hold an object to have vision? If our practice begins with the dissolving of grand, dangerous, violent dualisms, we cannot stop halfway. We cannot even stop just short of the finish line. This is only Zeno’s paradox: how marginal must our movements be before we can stand still? It matters not. So long as we are moving, we are not standing still. So long as we feel obliged to change ourselves before we can accept ourselves, we will have failed to accept ourselves completely.

An adequate oblation?

So—Juniper the cat has shown me God. God is a distant word for me oftentimes, and I have worked mightily hard to bring Him into myself. But Juniper the cat does not know the word God. She does not repeat the liturgy. She does not sing hymns. She does not say the Lord’s Prayer, neither in Latin nor English nor even French. She does not mutter the name kyrie beneath her breath. She sleeps, she wakes, she meows, she eats, she shits, she stretches, she grooms, she walks, she plays. She does not know the word God. Meister Eckhart tried his best to attain to the Godliness of Juniper the cat. He prayed (Junie never had to do this), saying ‘I pray to God to free me of “God”’. He was trying to become like Junie. He did very well, for a human. When we forget the word God, we shall have known God. It is oftentimes at my most religious that I have been farthest from Him. When I have laboured under the yoke of my Protestant guilt, or indeed fallen for that Occidental illusion that has you believe the Truth is outside of you, somewhere else, some stubbornly elusive Grail that shall finally consummate all this yearning. If only you try hard enough—strain further away from yourself, make enough money, consume enough products, change yourself enough—only then shall you have what it is desire so ruthlessly propels you toward.

Another common claim of those who view animals as impeccable is that their diminished rational ability—in contrast to ours—is a blessing in disguise, and conversely we are cursed with knowledge that impedes our access to the peace they have. But at the same time, of course, a greater mental faculty is not an obstacle. It is an opportunity. Junie is a mystic supreme, certainly. But she is no better than you or me. Not really. Imagine what Junie thinks of you and me. She watches us closely. She sees us. We wake, we shit, we groom, we eat, we talk, we work, we laugh, we cry, we sleep. We become concerned with things. We become engrossed in things. We see one interesting thing, and then see another, and get distracted from the first interesting thing. We get angry when things don’t go our way. We get happy when they do. Junie does not know the word God—and she does not know the word God when she watches us. Nothing in us produces the word God. Because in us there is only God. We Protestant fish might well traverse the entire Atlantic in search of water. But the wisest knows we are already Home. Juniper Jones has seen as much, and so lets whole be whole.

What love is evoked by those who live in God!

The promise made to us by the Divine is one of perichoretic dance, of perfect union without the relinquishment of created dynamism. Each step of that dance that falls out of rhythm is what we call sin. This is a fallen world, and ours is the Kali Yuga, so our feet tend to be all over the place. But, unlike modern understandings of ‘original sin’ which see this as something innately corrupting, Maximus the Confessor distinguishes between a gnomic and a divine will, and understands the telos of humanity to be in ultimately emptying the former in kenosis so that it can assume the ‘deiform’ of the latter. That is to say that we are never truly lost, and can only think so by misunderstanding.⁴ John Scotus Eriugena likewise writes that human nature consists of one substance

…conceived under two aspects. Under one aspect the human substance is perceived as created among the intelligible Causes, under the other as generated among their effects; under the former free from all mutability, under the latter subject to change (De Periphyseon IV.771a).

As such, the redemption of humanity ‘is implanted in human nature although it is concealed from her that she has it until she is restored to her pristine and integral condition’ (DP IV.769b). When Junie falls to her foibles, as we all do, she knows very well that she has lost nothing truly.

This is really the very same message borne by Eastern traditions which toy with ideas of subitism and gradualism, recognising the paradoxical truth that, yes, there is real progress needed to make yourself a better person, but also that the inner glory such progress moves toward is something you always already are. To subscribe to a moralistic clinging to perfect action—to insist with draconian aggression that there be no missteps—is to have lost the joy of the dance entirely, to forget that all possible errors are always already forgiven, and so to let the lila that we really must learn from children and animals alike be clouded by the severity of obligation. The ‘is’ shines with a repletion of goodness as it is; it has no need for the asphyxiation of the ‘ought’. It is always good to aim to make the world a better place, but this should be accompanied by the knowledge that there is nothing that an individual can do to completely overturn a history marred by sin.

All that we can do is realise the flame within, and let that light permeate the external darkness without clinging to its beams. Eckhart’s rebellion against language, seeking to reach this inner flame, is mirrored by the magisterial Sufi poetry of Ibn al-Farid:

My Spirit is the Spirit to all the spirits that exist: and what you see of the creation’s beauty, from my nature is flowing.
And so leave to me that Knowledge that I alone had known before my friends had met me, before birth, my manifesting.
Don’t give to me the name of ‘aspirant’ among our circle, for even one called ‘master’ drawn to Her, my help is needing.
Let all names of honour fall away from me… such nonsense!⁵

‘Let all names of honour fall away from me’. Let nothing remain. Just pure, nameless abidance in endless love. And, because I can’t help it, I’ll end with a smattering of my own poetry (a pale homage to Rilke) evoked by this tabby-cat muse.

Some slouched thing, licking its wounds,
has crept with weight upon the carpet.
Each nail hooks the thread, tail afloat like branch
in the gentle sway of easterly wind, the
soft, ginger paw indifferent as it presses.

A light flickers in those eyes, chartreuse,
perceiving something invisible, some gleam
of innocuous warmth, passing.
Juniper the mystic meditates on her being
and rests mighty upon the silence.

1. Pun intended.

2. See, for instance, Bhagavata Purana III.26.24, and for Krishna’s own hagiography see the whole of canto X.

3. Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Oliver Davies (London: Penguin Classics, 1994), 205.

4. See Maximus’ Ambiguum 3 for a soteriological model which understands original sin with a greater maturity than us moderns. See also Eriugena, De Periphyseon V.871d.

5. Ibn al-Farid, Wine & The Mystic’s Progress, trans. Paul Smith (Victoria, Australia: Book Heaven, 2012), 115.