The Bottom Rung 20 comments

By Tony Woodlief

Something is eating my cats.

I don’t mean that they are troubled, as is so often the case for cats in these confusing times. I live on 20 acres in the middle of Kansas, and I don’t let animals—other than my children—live in the house.

So I mean it literally: something is eating my cats.

We started the month with five. They don’t have names. We had a cat when we moved out here. He had a name. Something unspeakable happened to him, and while the name was helpful during his funeral, we decided from then on that our animals will just be noted by their descriptors. “Black kitty,” “goldfish,” and so on.

We started with five, but there was a horrible kitty shriek one night a couple of weeks ago, and before I could get outside with a gun (because while I have accepted the reality of nature red in tooth and claw, it’s good policy to shoot coyotes or bobcats bold enough to slink up onto your porch), it was all over.

Then another disappeared in the night, and then there was more shrieking last night, and now there are just two traumatized cats eyeing me reproachfully at the back door even as I type this.

I was raised a non-practicing Protestant in the Christ-haunted South, which means I learned there’s a Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, that Catholics are bad because they want to work their way to Heaven, and that lots of people are going to burn in hell because they didn’t, well, work hard enough.

I used to say that I came to faith at age thirty in a Presbyterian church. Then I got self-consciously deeper, and started saying that faith came to me. The truth is that I’ve always known God was there, and often feared He was there, and sometimes wished He would go away.

It is an understatement to say that I have, since that day in the Presbyterian church, rejected the teachings of Jean Calvin. (Why Jean instead of the prevalent but inexplicable John? Because he was a French lawyer, not a kindly old preacher from Iowa.) The notion of a god who intentionally causes man to fall so that he can torture a wide swath of humanity for eternity is not only abhorrent, it is at odds with what the Church believed for over a millennium.

There’s a security that I lost when I walked away from Calvinism, however. All my life I’d been tacitly taught that we have to be good enough to get into Heaven. I knew I could never be good enough. Then I heard a good, well-intentioned man announce in a church one Sunday that I can neither earn nor lose my salvation.

Once saved, always saved. What a beautiful idea, if you can forget Calvin’s corollary.

I couldn’t forget the corollary, and I didn’t realize how this would make everything unravel until the moment came when I had to teach it to one of my children, and I flinched. Then began months of prayer, and study, and a slow-rolling explosion erupted along the foundations of my faith.

My journey brought me to Eastern Orthodoxy, but I got here on fumes.

Now I sit outside the Church, my life and my marriage such a wreck that I can’t go in. I bring my sons to the cathedral every Sunday and we watch everyone take communion and sometimes I bite the inside of my mouth so hard that it bleeds, because we all of us need the Blood, and we take it where we can get it.

There are times I’ve given up on my soul, and I think: If only I can see these babies into the Church. If only I can see them down the path toward salvation. So I take them to the cathedral and pray that something in the icons and the liturgy and the incense—the Word seen and sung and breathed—will embed itself in them.

And most days, and especially most nights, I think on those cats outside my house, being dragged down one by one. Something is prowling after them, and something is prowling after us, and I am outside the Church and outside hope and outside my own skin.

The first icon I came to own is the Ladder of Divine Ascent. It captures the fear that has haunted me since childhood, when I would curl myself into a ball every night and try to forestall dreams of demons. It shows mankind struggling one by one up the ladder toward heaven, and all along are fiends with hooks, dragging us down, dragging us down.

I don’t know if I am already falling, or if it’s just the weight of the hooks I feel, but I don’t know how a man is supposed to climb one more rung when he has four sons he’s struggling to carry along and a whole pack of demons tugging him downward and barely the breath to whisper, “Please,” which is all I know to pray any more.

I think some days that this is how my Savior will find me, straining at that bottom rung and stumbling off it again and again, feeling goddamned and hopeless. I think maybe he will feel the way I feel when I pick up one of my little ones who has fallen, and carry him where he needs to be, and whisper to him that I love him more than all the treasures of the world.