It is impossible for me [blogger] to order up this maze of files of meditations of over 30 years (or more) on a beautiful fall day, cloudless and cool, and not stop to read an old paper. It was a meditation on holiness. No idea when. I saw the text of Walker Percy from “The Second Coming” and began (wasting time) to read:
Just in case the point is not evident: the fat cat is the iconic contradiction of Christian anthropology: “man, the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds himself only by the sincere gift of himself” (Gaudium et Spes #24)
“There was the cat. Sitting there in the sun with its needs satisfied, for whom one place was the same as any other place as long as it was sunny – no nonsense about old haunted patches of weeds in Mississippi of a brand-new life in a brand new place in Carolina – the cat was exactly a hundred percent cat, no more, no less. As for Will Barrett, as for people nowadays – they were never a hundred percent themselves. They occupied a place uneasily and more or less successfully. More likely they were forty seven percent themselves or rarely, as in the case of Einstein on the streetcar, three hundred percent. All too often these days they were two percent themselves, specters who hardly occupied a place at all. How can the great suck of self ever hope to be a fat cat dozing in the sun” [The Second Coming]
Just in case you don’t jump out of your seat at the truth of what has just be written, the truth of the above is the agony on a perfect fall afternoon of not being who I am supposed to be: Christ – serving someone who needs Him desperately. That’s coming into yourself! The cat is always itself, but you have to become yourself by giftedness. That is the pain and glory of imaging God as a wounded creature.
The Truth Will Make You Free 