Cat Fights in Cowboy Towns

There is nothing like waking up with a nightmare in the middle of the night and not being able to go back to sleep. There are even fewer things like waking up with a nightmare, not being able to return to sleep, and having a job interview the next day for which one had previously held out the hope of seeming collected, focused, and semi-smart. Oh, well, even if the black circles under the eyes are egregious, I can still hope for 'interesting,' clean, fully dressed, and amusingly small.

The dream, though! I was driving in a car with the neighbor's cat in the passenger seat. I know I was driving the Mazda car, because when we pulled over there was no dome light. We had to pull over because I couldn't find my house keys, keys that belong to a house I have never lived in except in dreams, a small Victorian in an old mining town in NE Washington, Nevada, or Central California. I had to find the keys because I had to give them to someone, and where we pulled over was next to a swamp alongside a highway that was also the road that the megachurch pastor who interviewed the Presidential candidates last week has his church on now, and which used to be across the street from an orange grove. But his church wasn't in the dream; it didn't exist yet, or maybe the dream only existed in a world devoid of megachurches. I don't know, but I was on the side opposite the orange grove, and down the street from a row of saloons, blacksmiths, and rooming houses that I've also only been near in my dreams.

It was hard to find the key without a dome light or streetlights, but then I remembered I thought it was in this pretty green carved box with turtles on it from Indonesia. Naturally, I knew exactly where the box was, but as I started to open the secret compartment on the box that had always worked before, it turned out just to be a a decoration and came off in my hand. At that point, I noticed that there was a cat sitting on the windowledge of the car and trying to get in. The neighbor's cat hadn't noticed the stranger yet, and I was starting to get scared of what else might be lurking on the roadside in the middle of nowhere so, although my fingers were shaking, I figured out how to open the regular compartment of the box to get out the key. I managed to open it, but inside were only hallucinogenic and shiitake mushrooms, the latter of which is of as little interest to me as the former, and as soon as I was realizing that, the outside cat figured out how to get inside, leapt at the other cat, they started fighting, and I woke up.

Now, I used dried shiitakes today, so they were in my head and I don't need to believe my subconscious is telling me to eat more mushrooms. We were also talking at the soup kitchen about people getting addicted to opiates after surgery, and how someone's tolerance for pain might decrease while on them and cause dependence, so maybe that's how the other kind of mushroom got in there. My brain should also not be telling me to replace the dome light, as I already succeeded masterfully in performing that bit of highly technical auto repair. It may have been saying, 'Be sure to take the GPS to the interview, idiot,' and 'If you got another cat of your own, maybe the wandering one would want to stay inside and you wouldn't have to worry if he is okay, since his owners will never care one way or the other.' Or maybe just 'Get copies of your keys made, don't drive around with cats, and don't move to a ghost town.' Either way, I woke up in the middle of a fight between two cats on my lap in a tiny car, with my heart pounding, and sitting straight up in bed.

More from our Correspondent in Geneva

Well, very excitingly (to me, anyway) today is St. Jane Frances de Chantal's day. It is exciting to me not just because I love her and her story, but because also this not only brings us back to Savoy (yikes! who would have thought!) and Geneva and all its Calvinists, and gets back to that issue of historicity that I snarkily mentioned a few posts back. Which I'll get to a few lines down, or a few posts down the road, but first: St. Jane Frances, or Ste. Jeanne Françoise, if you like your French names to stay in French.


She is sort of another St. Francis' St. Clare: his student, his peer, his friend, his spiritual companion, and his travel partner on a long and profound journey. This time, it is a François-Francis instead of a Francesco one, the sixteenth century instead of the thirteenth, the Renaissance rather than the Middle Ages, and a Francis born of Savoyard nobility rather than of wealthy Umbrian merchants. This Francis, Francis de Sales, was a carefree and competent student, then lawyer, and then a bishop, rather than an apathetic student turned playboy-dandy turned mendicant, and before joining and guiding Jane Frances on her spiritual journey, he set out like Francis of Assisi on a way of life quite unlike that his family had intended for him, turning his back on his wealth like Francis, but going over to Geneva to convert Calvinists à la St. Dominic instead of founding an order à la the Franciscan Francis.


Both St. Francis de Sales' and St. Jane Frances' stories are stories of waiting. Francis felt a strong vocation before he went to law school, but he waited and waited, wanting to make sure it was truly a vocation rather than his ego leading him. St. Jane was a young devout widow with children when she felt overcome with a desire to serve God more fully. When Jane asked the now Bishop Francis to undertake her spiritual direction, he counseled her to patience: 'I had to know fully what God himself wanted. I had to be sure that everything in this should be done as though his hand had done it.' Just as he had waited for his calling and for his Calvinists, and as he would later for his new sister's convent, Francis counseled Jane again to wait when she told him of her overwhelming desire to take vows: 'Be patient until you get the wings of a dove, and then you can fly. I am very much afraid that you are a little too ardent and headlong, that you pursue too many desires rather too eagerly. Courage, my dear sister; if our will belongs to God, we ourselves are surely His.'

And this moderation was an essential element of the institute, and then order, the two founded in 1610, the Order of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin. So that religious aspirants of older age or less robust health, 'strong souls with weak bodies,' might be able to fulfill their calling, Francis and Jane dispensed with the sort of physical austerities Poor Clares and other orders endured. St. Francis advised the community's new members and superior, 'Let your humility be boundless; let it be the source of your virtues; let it be manifested in all your actions, till gentleness towards your neighbor become natural to you by force of your frequent use of it.' Later, St. Jane described the charism of the order as essentially 'a spirit of deep humility before God and of great gentleness toward our neighbor.'

This gentleness was modeled already by Jane the wife and widow as she fed the town's poor and sick, and in the very gentleness of the rule itself: St. Jane accepted into the order a woman in her eighties and those young and old women whose infirmities would have barred them from religious life were it not for the inclusiveness of Salesian spirituality and its insistence that all people, regardless of health, wealth, status, occupation, age, or education, are called to love and holiness, and that we can manifest our love in small but profound acts of mercy and compassion. As Thomas Dailey said in Praying with Francis de Sales, 'Enabled and ennobled by this love, human beings are capable of much more than might well be imagined. They are capable of living a true life of devotion in the midst of worldly pursuits. They are capable of giving birth, through faith, to a new culture of life and of love.'

Also, unlike Savonarola, Francis de Sales in The Devout Life reveals that he thought games and jokes and dancing were okay, if in moderation: 'I am inclined to say about balls what doctors say of certain articles of food, such as mushrooms and the like--the best are not good for much; but if eat them you must, at least mind that they are properly cooked,' and 'if you would dance or play rightly, it must be done as a recreation, not as a pursuit, for a brief space of time, not so as make you unfit for other things.' I like anyone who has bad things to say about mushrooms.