The Naming of Cats is a Difficult Matter

When I was four years old, my parents brought home a Cocker Spaniel puppy.  I was so excited.  What little kid doesn’t want a puppy? My parents told me that I could name her, and I took one look at that sweet little girl and her beautiful black curls and knew exactly what I would call her. 

The Lady and the Tramp was my favorite movie at the time. 

And so, I named her—Tramp. 

Tramp was not a member of our family for very long.  She was very sweet, but kept my mom up at night and, to borrow from another Disney movie, nothing turned my mom into Cruella de Vil quicker than lack of sleep. 

But we would have other pets over the years.  Next was an orange-striped, big-foot tabby who I named Scuffy after my favorite stuffed animal.  Then came another cat, Dickens.  My mom named her.  And then finally a sweet, black and white tuxedo cat who I named Caspian.  Would you expect anything different from a child who loved C.S. Lewis and Narnia? 

“The naming of cats is a difficult matter,” poet, T.S. Eliot wrote. 

My cat Rumble told me his name when I brought him home for the first time.  He ran behind the Bibles on my bookshelf and hid in the shadows.  I couldn’t see him.  I didn’t know him, know his temperament, but I reached back to touch him.  For all I knew, he would shred my hand, but when my fingertips brushed his back, he began to purr and not just purr, but rumble. 

He was a cat that lived up to his name.  He was energetic.  He treated my condo like a parkour course.  Why walk around the ottoman, when you can run and jump and fly over it?  He loved opening and closing doors.  He devoured books, literally.  He was a kitten that never grew up. 

No cat has ever driven me crazier than Rumble and I have never loved another cat as much as I loved Rumble. 

Unfortunately, I had to put Rumble to sleep just before Christmas.  He had leukemia and had stopped eating and drinking.  He was in constant pain, but he still walked with his tail up. 

Whenever I have lost a pet, or have been particularly touched by close family or a friend losing a pet, I always turn to C.S. Lewis’ book The Problem of Pain.  In his book, Lewis devotes a whole chapter to animal pain. 

There are two Lewises on display here, C.S. Lewis the pet owner and C.S. Lewis the theologian as he tries to answer a question every pet owner has asked.  Do our pets go to heaven? 

For C.S. Lewis, the pet owner, you get the feeling that he absolutely believes that our pets will be waiting for us in heaven, but he acknowledges, that as a theologian, he must try and avoid sentimentality. 

And so, he begins, what is, honestly, a complicated look at the nature of pets, their sentience, their soulfulness and their relationship to both God and us. 

I will try and do my best to summarize his argument. 

Lewis begins with this statement, “Man is to be understood only in his relation to God.” 

In other words, we are defined by our relationship with God.  Who we are as people, as human beings, is dependent on the relationship or lack of relationship that we have with God. 

We see this in today’s Gospel reading from James 3:13-18.  In verse 13, “Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom.”  And then in verse 17, “But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.” 

When we engage in a life that is honest and pure and righteous, filled with mercy and lacking in hypocrisy, we are showing our engagement with God.  Such things come from above. 

Whereas behavior that is envious or selfish does not come from God. 

Or to put it in terms more personal to me.  When I am doing God’s will, everything in this world seems right.  I have zero doubt.  I have courage.  I feel fulfilled. 

But when I am not doing God’s will, my life is disrupted.  I feel lost or angry and bitter. 

We are at our best, when we are in relationship with God. 

And I am my truest self when I am doing God’s will. 

What C.S. Lewis says in his chapter on animal pain is this, if “man is [only] to be understood in his relation to God,” then “the beasts are to be understood only in their relation to man and, through man, to God.” 

In other words, if I am defined by my relationship to God, then our pets are defined by their relationship to us and through our relationship with us, also have a relationship with God. 

It’s complicated but Lewis makes it work, saying later, “that their mere sentience is reborn to soulhood in us as our mere soulhood is reborn to spirituality in Christ.” 

What’s amazing is that C.S. Lewis isn’t just answering the question of whether or not our pets will join us in heaven, but he’s also addressing whether or not our pets have souls. 

And the answer is … yes, through God’s grace and our love for them. 

I have often read Lewis’ words to say that the reason why it hurts so much when we lose a pet, is because we are losing part of our souls when they die, the part of our soul that we have gifted and given them through the years.  It’s more than just the personality of the pet, our cats and dogs and horses and ferrets, are a piece of us, a piece of us that we have sacrificed to share with them. 

If you have ever been with an animal at the time of their death, then I have no doubt that you have felt that spirit and the loss.

The age-old question is this: 

Do all dogs go to heaven? 

Oh yes. 

And cats too.

Amen.