My little cat Wendell is a goofball. He has two modes: play and rest. When resting, his preferred situation is snuggles. He will find your legs and flop on them, and if you try to get up, he will move fast to pin your legs down and do all he can to keep the snuggles going until he is ready for them to end. When playing, he’s zooming around, pouncing on his mom repeatedly, and attacking every toy (and every not-toy) he can. Activities that don’t logically fit into one of these two modes? He will make them fit. 

Because he was born in our closet and has been doted on and pampered since his first breaths, he’s always had plenty of food, and the only chasing he has ever known has been for fun. When he started eating solid food, we would scoop him up in our arms at his mealtimes, smother him with kisses he tolerated, and sit him directly in front of his food bowl. When he was a few months old, it dawned on him: he could make a game out of this. He began making us chase him at mealtimes. Since then, my husband and I have had to work together to capture him so that we can feed him. Sometimes, he runs and hides too well, and we can’t get to him; he, wanting food but also wanting the thrill of being chased, will sit in that one middle spot underneath the bed where he is unreachable: a hungry winner. 

I see myself in him in these moments: stubborn, unwilling to shift out of the mode I’m in to take in the spiritual nourishment waiting for me, running away from the very thing my soul is really longing for. I’m slowly learning though how to operate in the growth-filled spaces that exist between “Doing all the things!” or “Why even try today?”, my two default spiritual modes. I’m learning bit-by-bit, year-by-year how to listen to and honor the spiritual hunger within me, how not to run from my own well-being. Lent is such a beautiful opportunity for cultivating that ability to listen to the hungers in us that go deeper than our immediate concerns and desires. 

I was reminded of this last Monday night when I finished up work after back-to-back therapy sessions all day. I love my work, but I was exhausted and had to choose between going home and immediately getting into cozy pajamas or making it to at least the last part of the Lenten service that first night of Lent. Knowing my work schedule would keep me from most of the rest of the services that week, I slightly begrudgingly chose to delay pajamas an hour and go. I walked in to the dimly-lit church to find Lenten hymns, incense, and sweet friends, and it fed a hunger in me I hadn’t realized was even there, a desire deeper than the simultaneous one I had for pajamas. 

My husband frequently tells the story of an impromptu homily Archbishop Alexander Golitzin gave at the end of a vespers service one night when my husband was in seminary. Archbishop Alexander talked about the verse in the 23rd/22nd Psalm that says: “Thy mercy, O Lord, will follow me all the days of my life…” He said that the puppy imagery of the poetic translation of that verse loses the intensity of the original text and that a more accurate translation would be “Thy mercy, O Lord, will hunt me down...” I love this. I need this. Thank God for Love that knows me better than I know myself, that chases me when I foolishly run from it, and that can reach me no matter how well I hide.