The believers were very kind to all of them: Manx, calico, Siamese. They brought strays in and gave them an honored position in their households. They taught their children to treat them in an affectionate and cherishing way.
And they truly grieved whenever a cat, in the course of things, died a natural death.
One day a person arrived on the scene who had no “sacred” regard for felines at all. Even worse, he supported a scheme to snuff out cats — and not just a few: he wanted to authorize the crushing of huge numbers of kittens, effective immediately.
Yet this cat-disdainer wanted to join the devout Cattadocians! Why? In order to gain — he imagined — some sort of religious benefit. With no real devotion to the tenets of their faith, he demanded to participate in the most sacred rites of the believers. Some of them, sincerely shocked, began to object, seeing his participation as “sacrilegious.”
But he acted affronted. He loudly insisted that he had a right to insert himself into the deepest rituals of the temple. And when the believers begged him, with tears, to renounce cat-killing, he called them a bunch of stuck-up meanies.
The infamy of his cat-killing spread. Soon everyone knew that he considered it OK to slice off their fur, dismember them, cut off their heads. At the same time, he frequented the ceremonies of the Cattadocian faith, blowing a trumpet before him, helping himself to their sacred meals, ignoring the suffering of the cats and the pain and anguish of the devoted Cattadocians.
A fable. A tale for children, nothing more.
But even so, ask your children, for even they would know: who's the stuck-up meanie here?
Juli Loesch Wiley is a homeschooling Mater et Magistra in Johnson City, TN. Her email address is jlw509@earthlnk.net.
