Less about the roar
In one Buddhist strain (can’t remember now which), teachers speak of a choice we have in relating with the Real, with the Divine…with God, if that word can be understood broadly. Monkeys or cats, they say.
We can relate with God as baby monkeys to their mothers: holding on to mother’s back or chest, carried along, yet requiring effort to be so. The image is a partnership, where the supplicant sees self and God both putting out effort, and self somewhat stranded if the effort of holding on gives way.
Another option is relating with God as newborn kittens. The image is of being carried by the mother’s effort entirely. A kitten can no more cling than a lump of clay; it can only cry when it’s hungry, rooting blindly for milk. Its shelter, its protection, its very survival depend on mother’s care. My doctor has a poster in one of her receiving rooms of a mother lion with a baby in her jaw, gently carrying it to safer ground. I think of the cat-teaching every time I’m there.
The teachers say the choice of approach is ours: monkey or cat. Neither is better or worse. Just options we always have.
My roots are Christian, and I’ve often heard Christian teachers exhorting the monkey way. Through doubts, through hardships, through seasons when life makes no sense and God appears dead (or on serious vacation), hang on. Maybe especially through such times. Be faithful. Let not your heart be swayed. “Though all else forsake you, still I’ll remain true,” the Psalmist says.
I think the monkey way may be necessary sometimes. I think it may even be crucial, sometimes, to an important kind of survival. But I wonder whether the kitten way can sometimes be crucial, too…whether there are cases when the deepest kind of survival requires a complete letting go. A going limp. An admitting that this clinging business just isn’t working anymore, and, come to think of it, I couldn’t keep clinging if I tried. God help me, but I can’t do it anymore.
Maybe falling into the “den” isn’t always a fearsome thing, and can actually be the only path, for some, of finding God. Could those who preach the monkey way most relentlessly be those whose inner voices sound a lot like hungry kittens? Kittens who think mother monkey’s the only thing they’ve got?
If God is like a roaring lion, as Hebrew scriptures say, maybe God’s lion-ness goes a whole lot further than that.