Once upon a time …
(…with gratitude to Frederick Buechner who put these thoughts in my head)
Once upon a time, or so the fable goes, there was an orphaned, motherless lion cub who was adopted by goats and brought up by them to speak their language, eat their food, and in general, to believe that he was goat himself.
Then one day, the king of the lions happened by and all the goats scattered in fear leaving the young lion … that thought it was a goat … all alone, to confront the king of beasts. He was afraid, of course and yet somehow, strangely not afraid.
The great lion king asked the young one what he meant by the foolish masquerade of being a goat, but all the young one could do was bleat nervously as any goat would and tried to ignore the question by nibbling at the grass.
So the lion king picked up the young beast by the scruff of the neck and took him to a pond nearby where he was forced to look at their two reflections side by side in the pool and draw his own conclusions. The poor goat could only bleat in confusion.
Finally, the lion king took him to the carcass of a recent kill and offered him his first taste of raw meat. At first, the young lion was repulsed by the idea and recoiled at the unfamiliar taste of it.
But then, as he ate more and more of it, and began to feel it warming something deep within him, it began to dawn on him. Lashing his tail and digging his claws into the earth, the young lion finally raised his head high and the landscape trembled at the sound of his first, mighty roar.
This old fable illustrates a very basic point about life: that as human beings, we usually live life in this world at less than what we were created to be. We are supposed to be lions, but we usually live as goats.
The goat in this fable is really not a goat at all, of course, he is really a young lion. But he doesn’t know that. And as long as he believes he is a goat, in one sense, he really is a goat. Or at the very least, he is really not a lion.
To cast it then in terms of the humanity that is ours and the spirituality that is available to us in Jesus Christ, we were created in the image of God, a spiritual image, but something has gone desperately wrong. Like a young lion cub, orphaned, left to live among goats, we have been orphaned by our sin to live far below what we were meant to be.
What all this means is that we have wrenched ourselves out of the kind of spiritual relationship we were intended to have with God and with each other. Like Adam, we have all lost paradise … lost our birthright as lions … lost our full spiritual capacity for life. We have been orphaned by sin.
And yet … and yet… we all carry something of the original intentions of paradise around inside of us like a haunting memory … like a deep longing for what we have lost or a strong yearning for what we dream could one day be.
In the language of our fable, if the lion who thought he was a goat, could really be a goat, he wouldn’t have this problem. He’d just go on being a goat. But there is still enough lion left in him, as there is left in all of us, to make us discontented with being a goat.
So we may run with the other goats, ignore the larger question of identity and meaning, nibble at the grass and hope that the Lion of Judah will just leave us to bleat along with the rest. But real meaning in life seems to forever elude us, and life as a goat never seems to satisfy us … there is always some something we cannot name, dangling out there, twisting the in the wind of our soul, just beyond our reach. We may bleat well enough, but deep down …there is a gnawing suspicion that we were really made to roar.
SVE