My Lion

            I attended a men’s Bible study last Sunday evening, while Channa and I were in Virginia to visit our daughter, her husband, and our two grandchildren.  One of our two sons and the other of our daughters was there, too.  We had a rollicking good time.  My son-in-law invited me to attend the Bible study with him, and I was flattered that he desired me to be there, since I had only that one time to make a contribution. 

            An anecdote from the empowering-men book which the group uses for its study caught my attention.  The author of the book recounts a dream sequence in which, every night, the dreamer is chased by an enormous lion.  This terrifying beast seems always just about to catch the dreamer and—obviously, this being a hungry lion—to eat him up.  Each morning, the dreamer awakes, trembling and terrified.

            The dreamer consults his pastor about this repeated visitation, and the pastor suggests that the lion should be confronted.  Instead of running when the lion appears, the pastor suggests, what if the dreamer stands firmly in place and asks the lion who he is and what he wants?  Maybe the lion—and the dream—would vanish.  On the other hand, maybe the man would learn something important.

            So, the next time the lion appeared in his dream, the dreamer did not run.  He held his ground.  Aggressively, the lion came up to the dreamer.  The dreamer, afraid but stalwart, asked the lion, “Who are you, and what do you want with me?”

            Here’s what the lion said.  “I am your courage and your strength.  Why do you keep running away from me?”

            Good stuff for a men's empowerment group!

                                                                        ******           

            But I have a lion tale to tell, too.

            Once, in Detroit, when my last sales appointment of the afternoon cancelled, I went to the zoo.  One of the things they have at that zoo is a lion house.  That is, there is an outside yard for the lions, with rocks and a cliff, and with greensward and trees.  But there is also a house for the lions to retreat into which is behind where the cliff comes down. 

            Visitors may watch the lions outside, but they may go into the lions’ lair and watch the big cats there, too. 

            I stood for quite a long time outside, pressed against the fence around the lion’s yard, watching the beasts as they sauntered or lay still.  I had owned many cats in my life, and I entertained myself with the assurance that I held a deep appreciation for them as a species and enjoyed an unusually canny level of communication with them.  Of course, the lions in the yard were too far away to show me any special attention of their own, but it was fine with me if our mutual regard remained essentially one-sided at this juncture of my visit.  There was still the inside lion house to explore. 

            Most noteworthy among the lions was a magnificent male at the height of his nobility and kingliness. Perhaps eight feet long his body was, rippling with muscle at the shoulders and hips, his regal head topped with a full mane of black hair, his tail a whip with which to express his emotion. 

            The favorite among my cats had been Beamish (“Come to my arms, my beamish boy,” as Lewis Carroll has it in Jabberwocky).  Beamish was a magnificent big male in his own house-cat’s right.  He possessed the strength and the dexterity, from a sitting position, next to an open door, suddenly to spring into the air and to land, balanced perfectly, on the top edge of the door itself, without his landing having caused the door to swing at all.     

            My big male lion was my principle fixation as I ranged back and forth along the fence, trying to stay close to him as he surveyed the scene and kept the lionesses under the strictness of his eye.  In time, though, for all of the loveliness of his lionesses, he grew weary of this entertainment and made his way to the door into the cliff and went inside. 

            I followed him through the human door into the cliff and discovered, inside, that I could get nearer to him inside than outside.  He was in a single, vertically barred enclosure, alone at the moment.  Between the bars which enclosed him and a rail which kept me at a distance from the bars there was a gap of about eight feet.  Outside, I had been no closer to him than about forty feet, and now, for all love, I was standing next to him!

            Ah!  Here was Beamish, but in his wildest imagining. Beamish and I were used to stare deeply into one another’s souls, nose to nose, sometimes for thirty minutes at a time, not blinking, drinking in the holy similitude of our natures, under God, despite the inconsequential species differentiation which seemed to the unenlightened to deny our cousinhood.  My lion and I stared thus at one another. 

            Here was a lion of Daniel’s command.  Due to our depth of sharing of all that is weighty in God’s fine universe, we two—his amber eye and my brown one—we knew things together, and if the godly need arose, we knew together that he would mute his savagery and lie his chin on his forepaws and purr at me and allow his nose to be stroked, so as not to rend so true a friend as I was to him, limb from limb, as otherwise he would surely do.    

            We knew other things together, we two Romantics.  We knew how Keats or Shelley or Wordsworth should have sung of us, or of how the German Romantics should have painted us.  Casper David Friedrich would have shown us as two travelers looking over a sea of fog from atop a crag.  Our eyes would reflect our deep ponder and our wild surmise at the abyss of cosmic possibility.  I speak of those same eyes which now held one another, held one another as shining amulets of affection and—dare I say it, reader—of love! 

            Perhaps, even, here in my Detroit lion was the very type of Aslan, as C.S. Lewis had known him, the Christ of Narnia, who loved the children so.  Here was the kingly nobility that called for a sacrifice of self, of such purity and absoluteness as, finally, to thaw the witch herself and to turn all the Narnain captives free.  Yes, I thought to myself, yes, I can see it, there in the amber eye of my lion. 

            Oh—and I gave a figurative toss of my hand—what of his bars?  Do not we, all of us, have bars of our own?  Was not the Romantic tinge of my soul a bar to true, raw experience?  Was it so very big a thing in the cosmos that I should be able to walk away from my lion's house any time I wished and change my surroundings, when he could not do the same?  Were we both not one in our shared captivity?  From his amber eye, I understood that he too saw our fates as the Romantic conundra they were, since we were fellow travelers on God’s green earth, and I was pleased to learn that we both took these conundra with the sardonic humor to which they were entitled. 

            Then my lion spoke to me! 

            At the very height of my one-sided conversation, my lion turned his head, turned his body, then turned away comletely, and, shifting his tail aside, shot a long stream of hot urine between the bars and accurately across the front of my shirt. 


                                                                     *****
           
            
            Message to Romantics such as me: Remember to distinguish reality from poetry.             

 

           

The Existence of a Giraffe

            If you are a secularist with a sense of humor, and you read the Pensees, I suppose you might judge that Pascal was right.  For all of the fact that he was a seventeenth century French rationalist, his musing on chance resonates with us today. 

 

            Are we humans able to prove God?  No, said Pascal, and he was correct; we can’t.  Even the Christians can’t, if the validity of the test is to prove God's existence to someone who will not be persuaded by the evidence…since the evidence, this doubter will say, is just such evidence as proves God's existence to those who already believe in His existence.    

 

            God’s existence is just a tautology, this doubter will say, in the same way that love or art or anything else which claims to be ultimate truth is a tautology.  There isn’t any such thing as ultimate truth…and, even if there were, it wouldn’t be your ultimate truth. 

 

This doubter will say that what we are able to prove is only those things we can record with our senses.  Yet—this makes their so-called logical construct even funnier—every one of us has evidence from our own experience that we cannot always trust our own senses!

 

“I saw my keys on the hall table, just yesterday. So how can they possibly be in the refrigerator right now?”      

 

                                        ***

 

            Some of us believe in the religion of God, and some others believe in the religion of No-God.  Still others keep their feet in each camp, and they resist taking a chance.  That was Pascal, before he logic-ed himself into taking a chance.       

 

His chance was a wager.  Here’s how his wager stacks up. 

 

n  It is impossible to prove that God exists, that heaven exists, that Jesus is Christ.  Nevertheless, Pascal felt he must make a choice in order, purposefully, to live.

n  One choice is to act as though nothing is ultimately true and to live accordingly, basing decisions only on personal desire and anticipating after death no mighty thing. 

n  The other choice is to act as though the Christian assertion is true and to live according to its injunctions, anticipating after death a very mighty thing.

n  If you choose the first choice, and you’re right…no harm done (except probably to others around you), since, really, nothing was at stake after all. But if you are wrong…well, then, you’ve lost your soul.

n  If you choose the second choice, and you’re wrong…again, no harm done.  And on the positive side, you may have been of some help to people around you while you played out your role as a helpful person in a world in which neither help nor harm is of any great matter. But if you are right…ah!  Heaven!

 

Pascal concluded that the only rational choice was to proceed through life as though God does exist, as though morality has a basis in something larger than our own desires for sensation, and that Jesus is Christ.  This, he said, is the rationalist’s proper gamble. 

 

                                                ***

 

         We all make these gambles.  To illustrate, here’s one of mine.  Thirty-nine years ago, I met a woman who was captivating.  I fell in love with her.  I wanted a wife and also a mother for the children I hoped I might sire. This woman was smart, and beautiful, and funny, and joyful and possessed of a strong character and stood upon a steady emotional foundation.  She had been hurt, but the scars disfigured neither her character nor her sense of humor.

 

On the one hand, might this woman be she?  On the other hand, I had been badly wounded by the demise of an earlier marriage; renewed marital pain I did not want.     

 

            I found myself at the gambler’s table, with Pascal, daring whether to hold ‘em or fold ‘em. 

 

There is no way to prove that today’s love will have the character to be sustained through life.  So the gamble is this. 

 

n  Live life as an unbeliever and refrain from chance.  If you are correct, and there is no future in love, after all, you will have lost nothing and will come to the end of your existence, burdened perhaps with an occasional sadness, but buoyed by the knowledge that your sternness of reason has kept you safe. 

n  But what if you are wrong?  What if original love may be strengthened through time, by persistent and concerted effort, so that its original allure endures and grows ever more compelling and rises to a triumph at the end? 

 

I gambled, proposed, married, survived 37 and 11/12^th years in martial happiness, and I have won.    

 

                                                  ***

 

Doubters who struggle against Christianity usually do so because they feel most comfortable when distance is maintained between themselves and a powerful choice, that is, any choice which resounds with absoluteness.  They comfort themselves by taking the stance neatly articulated by Lawrence Durrell in Justine, Book One of his tetralogy The Alexandria Quartet (1957):

 

“For years one has to put up with the feeling that people do not care,

 really care, about one; then one day…one realizes it is God who does

 not care: and not merely that he does not care, he does not care one

 way or the other.” (emphasis in the original).

 

How world-weary and sophisticated a stance this is!  If even God doesn’t care, we are free men indeed. 

 

Durrell has said of his four interconnected novels about Egyptian life from the late 1920s through to the mid-1940s that, principally, they are about religion and sex. Indeed, there is much on both subjects in them, particularly on the first.  What is revelatory, though, for my purpose here, is that despite the existence in the novel of a myriad of religions, all of them well articulated and forming the bases for the actions of a score of major characters, there is scarcely ever a reaction to any of the novel’s lurid events on the basis of the moral code of any of the religions.  The novel throbs with marital infidelity, drunkenness, chicanery, false prophesy, child prostitution, incest, financial skullduggery, political corruption, even outright murder.  The city of Alexandria, and its environs, as seen through the eyes of a supreme prose stylist—Durrell—and a world-weary British mid-century ex-pat—his protagonist, Darley—is an agnostic carnival.    

 

But my stance is different.  Here’s what I say: do your due-diligence, yes.  But then dare.  Make a moral—an absolutist—choice.  Leap. 

 

                                       ***

 

From about 1850 to 1950, it’s been one hell of a hundred years.  For the church—though the church is an organization that’s been under the same management for 2,000 years—it’s been a tough slog. 

 

Human events in the West: the Franco-Prussian War irritated the perpetual antagonism between its two peoples and left them both, and their neighbors, bristling. Then the Great War slew ten million over possession of a few hundred yards of bombarded mud on either side of the line. Though it stopped, no one truly won.  The Great War dribbled out into the Spanish Influenza, which slaughtered many more who had survived the guns.  Germany suffered hyperinflation and glanced more favorably at the scoundrel Hitler.  As the Great War wound down, Soviet Russia reared up, defeated the Whites, and, in 1929, Stalin instituted Collectivization, which slew another ten million in its first three years alone.  Then the Great Depression, worldwide.  Following this, the Second World War, which slaughtered its own millions and introduced the world to genocide of such industrial magnitude and human indifference as Stalin and Hitler could deliver in their tyranny.    

 

Intellectual events in the West: there are the God-debunking theories of Darwin’s survival of the fittest, and of Marx’s dialectical materialism.  There is the challenge of Freud, of his assertion that God Himself—the very belief in God—is just the Id against which the Ego mightily struggles: that Christianity is all about sex and about the Ur family, that Oedipal one.  There are the aesthetic challenges against artistic standards, modernism in verse, cubism and Dadaism in painting, mere cacophony in music.  There is Fraser also, who, in The Golden Bough, showed us that all peoples of whatsoever culture have the same structure of myths, indeed the same myths of dying and then rising gods, the same propitiations of the divine to secure a favorable harvest, next time. Jung is there too, explaining the ubiquity of dying gods as archetypes of the collective unconscious, further humanizing what before had been numinous.  Spengler in in the mix, who taught that history isn’t going anywhere, just around in circles.  Too, there is Einstein, who showed us that even the security of a Newtonian universe is not to be counted upon, and that time itself is curved, light is susceptible to gravity, and nothing you thought you could point to is really quite there. 

 

By 1950, how was Christianity to survive?  It did, and more to the point, not only did it survive, its fundamental division throve. 

 

                                        ***

 

The doubters have every secularist reason not to believe.  It would be so much easier, wouldn’t it, if their unbelief were right? 

 

But, with G.K. Chesterton, when confronted by a friend amazed at the idea of griffons and gorgons, we respond: “I am even more amazed at the existence of a giraffe.”