A Place for Grace

When my wife is upset, my cats start fighting.

It’s pretty fascinating, actually. My wife has a reasonably high-stress job—she’s a therapist, with lots of marriage counseling and families in crisis—and sometimes she needs to process her day. She describes the dynamics of a particularly stressful session, and as she relives the experience, her voice gets louder, her countenance gets more intense, and the cats come running.

One cat runs up to her, makes eye contact and starts mewing inconsolably. The other lurks around the edges, waiting to reconnect with my wife till the stress subsides. They each have their own coping mechanisms, I guess. But then they take note of each other, and they act out on their own stress. One cat darts up to the other, takes a swipe at her head and hisses; the other cat growls in that uniquely other-worldly, vaguely demonic feline way. There’s no way around this; there’s only through it.

I suppose some people might call this a form of “kick the dog syndrome,” that phenomenon when stress in one setting is acted on in another. My wife occasionally has her clients wear heart-rate monitors during sessions so they can observe how their patterns of relating to one another affect themselves and each other: an ill-conceived comment here, a thoughtless word there, a carefully crafted slight or insult in passing all add up to temporary high blood pressure for all concerned. That passes on to my wife, and eventually to our cats.

But in turn, An employee is berated in front of coworkers, a teenager is slighted at school; you can’t easily leave those things behind when you get home or to the therapist’s office. We affect one another, not just in the moment but for a long time thereafter. And more than that, the impact of how we affect one another ripples out to affect the other spheres of our existence. Stress, anger, despair, frustration—these are more like viruses than we often think.

I recently read a little bit about “permaculture,” an ecological concept that’s been carried over into the science of social organization. The idea is that ecological systems are as interdependent as they are self-contained; an island may be an island, but it’s also a fragile ecosystem. One bad day for the island’s flora will have a negative impact on the island’s fauna, so to speak. The challenge facing each permaculture—and whatever ecologists are tending to its ecosystem—is to work regularly toward equilibrium, where all the stressors on the system are reconciled, and the island can once again flourish.

The parallels for human community are obvious; for the church they’re sacred. In his book Soaring in the Spirit Charles Conniry writes “To think of ourselves sensibly . . . is to reckon with two essential facts of our existence: our uniqueness as individual disciples and our interdependency with other Christ followers whose collective uniqueness is both complementary and essential to our own existence. . . . In every instance of core community the group feeds the individual and the individual feeds the group, which in turn feeds the individual, and so the cycle continues.” We’re feeding one another ourselves, in this analogy; and we are what we eat. So it becomes our responsibility to make of ourselves sustenance for one another. But we have limited control over what we can make of ourselves, and so the group has its own responsibility, to filter whatever toxicities it’s presented with and restore the system to equilibrium. The group itself has limited capacity to process toxicities and restore balance; in many cases, only an act of God can bring harmony back to a toxic system. In this sense community is necessarily dependent on a savior, because community is necessarily sacramental, a place for grace.

Sometimes we get to see our cats kiss and make up. It’s a remarkable moment, really: they’re like oil and water, but when equilibrium is restored, our home becomes like a land flowing with milk and honey.