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!

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            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. 


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