Scripture: Daniel 6:10-24
I can’t read the story of Daniel in the lion’s den without remembering an experience Lisa and I had many years ago while visiting South Africa. We were touring the Kruger National Park, one of Africa’s largest game reserves. Our naturalist guide loaded our group into big topless Land Rovers with tiered seating and explained the rules.
He said that we didn’t need to worry if we encountered any dangerous animals. They had grown used to the Rovers and experienced them as moving parts of the landscape rather than as sources of food. We’d be completely safe as long as we stayed inside the vehicle and remained seated. Stepping outside of the vehicle or standing up inside it, on the other hand, would get us all into trouble, fast.
At one point during our travels through the park, we turned a corner, went down a small hill through a tangle of brush, broke into a little clearing, and found ourselves surrounded by a pride of lions. There we were, nestled in the immediate company of multiple beasts for whom we could easily serve as a pleasant mid-morning snack. I’m restless by nature but I have never sat so absolutely still in my entire life.
Many things rush through your brain when life presents you with the imminent possibility of getting eaten alive. My own thoughts turned to one Walter B. Cannon. As you may recall, Cannon was a pioneering physiologist who developed the theory that we are chemically programmed to react to stressful situations with one of two instincts: fight or flight. Cannon argued that those instincts have proved essential to the survival of our species. That’s why we feel them so powerfully.
Cannon’s theory doubtless provides an important insight into human nature. And I suspect we have all experienced the overwhelming impulses to fight or to flee at various points in our life. But I invite you to notice that in the situation I’ve described Lisa and I had neither of those options available to us. Let’s review the relevant data.
As to flight: A lion can run for a short burst of up to 50 miles per hour. Our Rover couldn’t get out of the tight spot where it had landed that quickly. And certainly none of us could run that fast. I was further unsettled by the sneaking suspicion that Lisa realized she didn’t need to outrun the lion; she just needed to outrun me.
As to fight: An adult male lion can weigh 500 pounds, can lift twice its body weight, and can have a bite force of 1,000 pounds per square inch. We can’t, and we can’t, and we can’t. In a fight with a lion, my best hope was to give it a bad case of acid reflux.
With neither flight nor fight available, we had only one choice: Sit, wait, watch, and trust in our guide. Let me say that again: We could do nothing but sit, wait, watch, and trust in our guide.
Wow, you’re thinking to yourself. He got to the punchline of this sermon mighty quickly. Can we go now?
Well, I do think that we find this message embedded in the story of Daniel in the lion’s den. Trapped in the company of lions, Daniel could neither fight nor flee. Like us, he could do nothing but sit, wait, watch, and trust in his guide. Go forth and do likewise, the scripture suggests.
Fine, but please don’t stand for the benediction quite yet. There’s more to be said about these impulses of fight and flight and about how we conduct ourselves when they’re not plausible choices. And I think there are deeper lessons here for how we can and should conduct ourselves when we feel surrounded by lions, even if they are of the figurative and not the literal variety.
Let’s start here, with our gravitational pull toward the option of fight. For some of us, the image of the warrior holds great appeal. We find it ennobling and empowering. And the impulse to fight obeys its own moral multiplication table: The tougher the odds, the greater the heroics. David’s victory over Goliath inspires us exactly because it comes through a boy with a sling and over an outsized opponent.
I have a good friend who years ago received a very worrisome cancer diagnosis. When she disclosed it on Facebook, she asked people please NOT to respond by posting messages of sadness, concern, or even sympathy. She asked that everyone instead post encouraging messages about her strength, her resilience, her doggedness, and her indomitable spirit. She wanted to identify as a fighter, not a victim.
I took the lesson, and when I later got a cancer diagnosis of my own I posted a similar message. No anxious, weak, or fawning words, I pleaded. Tell me I’m tough. Tell me I’m strong. Tell me I’m Batman. That’s what I wanted and needed and my wonderful friends, being who they are, cheerfully delivered. I have the Batman mugs and tchotchkes to prove it.
If you feel yourself attracted to this sort of martial symbolism then you’re in good company. In his letters, Paul talks about “fighting the good fight.” And he often trades heavily in soldierly imagery, alluding to the “sword of the Spirit,” “the helmet of Salvation,” “the breastplate of righteousness,” and “the shield of Faith.”
One of my favorite psalms, Psalm 91, relies on similar ideas of strength, fortitude, and even conquest—all of which come to us through the good graces of the Lord. That Psalm says:
For he will command his angels concerning you
to guard you in all your ways.
On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.
You will tread on the lion and the adder;
the young lion and the serpent you will trample under foot.
Of course, we don’t do this on our own strength. We do it courtesy of the most powerful force in the universe.
As I say, some people want and need the language and imagery of the fight when confronting a challenging time. But not everyone feels this way. Others among us want and need something quite different.
In one of his essays, Brian Doyle, the brilliant Catholic religious writer who I’ve quoted to you before, talks about his own experience with people facing extraordinary challenges. Also using cancer diagnoses as an example, he writes:
“I know men, women, and children who have cancer, had cancer, died from cancer, lived after their cancer retreated, and not one of them ever used military or sporting metaphors that I remember. All of them spoke of endurance, survival, the mad insistence of hope, the irrepressibility of grace, the love and affection and laughter and holy hands of their families and friends and churches and clans and tribes … All of them spoke not of winning, but of waiting.”
Doyle goes on to suggest that the people he knew didn’t find comfort in the idea of battling and beating cancer because they didn’t think that’s how things work. For them, he says, “cancer isn’t defeated, it only retreats, is held at bay, retires, bides its time, changes form, regroups.” In their view, you don’t so much fight cancer as dance with it—and try to keep standing as you do and to keep it going as long as possible.
I take Brian Doyle’s point, but I would add an observation. In my view, the two kinds of people we’re describing—the fighters and the hopeful, the warriors and the dancers—have something essential in common. At bottom, they want the same thing: they want to retain their agency; they want to hold onto their ability to define and process their experience on their own terms; they want to preserve their capacity to carry their burden in their way.Mary Oliver has a poem called “Heavy” that gets at the point. It goes like this:
That time I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying
I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had his hand in this,
as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,
was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel,
(brave even among lions),
“It’s not the weight you carry
but how you carry it –
books, bricks, grief –
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it
when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?
Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe
also troubled –
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?
Perhaps this is the great truth that we all know, fighters and dancers alike: It’s not about the things that life delivers unto us. It’s about the way that we embrace, balance, and carry them.
That’s how we testify to who we are.
That’s how we testify to whose we are.
That’s how we manage to get by when we find ourselves in the lion’s den.
I’m very fond of an engraving by Gustav Doré that depicts Daniel in the midst of his trying circumstances. In it, he appears calm. Self-possessed. Eyes toward heaven. His left hand gently resting on the back of one of the lions, who quietly submits to his caress.
A painting by the nineteenth century artist Briton Riviere conveys much of the same spirit. He shows us Daniel from the back, his hands bound, confronting a clutch of lions. We don’t see his face, but we can sense his deep inner calmness. His head is slightly bowed, perhaps in prayer. His shoulders are relaxed. “Look at the weight of his burden,” the painting seems to say, “and look how he carries it.”
He can carry it that way for one reason, and one reason only. He does not carry it alone.
In the architecture of human existence, Love is the weight-bearing wall.
That other instinct of ours—the flight instinct—can lead us into complicated places, too. Overwhelming circumstances can drive us into all sorts of dark corners. The impulse to flee can push us toward substance abuse, toward withdrawal and isolation, even toward self-destructive thoughts.
By coincidence, today is the birthday of Sergei Yesenin, who is no more a household name than Walter B. Cannon. Yesenin was a Russian poet from the early part of the twentieth century. He isn’t widely known, but he has an important connection to our little corner of the world. You see, he helped save a life here.
Yesenin was a favorite of the writer Jim Harrison, the great poet, novelist, and essayist who for many years lived just a couple of miles from Lisa and my home in Lake Leelanau. Some of you may have known him personally; from time to time we run into someone up here who did.
Harrison was drawn to Yesenin for a variety of reasons, including his tragic story. You see, Yesenin committed suicide in 1925 when he was thirty years old. Harrison turned to Yesenin’s work at a point in his life when he was struggling with his own acute depression.
During that period, Harrison wrote a book that presents as a series of letters to Sergei Yesenin. In it, he explores his pain, his suffering, his quest to find a way forward. A critical early moment in the book comes when Harrison happens to see something that helps pull him back from the edge. He writes: “My year-old daughter’s red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.”
There. Even in that darkest of places. Even in that darkest of places where it made no sense to talk about fighting. Even in that darkest of places where flight would not be an escape but an extinction. Even in that darkest of places It made itself known. The stubborn, holy, relentless, sacred, irresistible presence of Love made itself known. And it said: “Here. Here. Let’s carry that together.”
The Jacob of the Hebrew Bible knew the right time to flee when he saw it. He had stolen his father’s blessing from his brother, Esau, who was so outraged that he pledged to kill him. On the run, Jacob found himself in the middle of nowhere, sleeping with a stone for a pillow.
There he had an amazing dream of a stairway leading to heaven. The Lord spoke to him and blessed him: “Know that I am with you and that I will keep you wherever you go.” “Know that I am with you and that I will keep you wherever you go.”
When Jacob awoke, he exclaimed: “Surely, the Lord is in this place and I did not know it. This is none other than the house of God. This is none other than the Gate of Heaven.”
As are all the places in our lives.
This peninsula. This church. These pews.
Those forests. Those beaches. Those orchards. Those dunes.
That hospital ward. That emergency room. That food pantry. That rehab facility. That resale shop.
This lion’s den. That cold desert at night. This Roman prison. That corner of a house devoid of peace and comfort, save for a small red robe.
Surely, the Lord is in those places. Surely, He will teach us how to carry.
Surely, He will not leave us to carry it alone.
Oh, praise God that it is so.
And the people said: Amen.