For 22 years I’ve searched for something that doesn’t exist. I quit looking last week after standing in front of an angry, hungry lion. I watched and learned an important truth: Lions aren’t personal.
Brody is a male lion who lives at Turpentine Creek, just outside of Eureka Springs. I stood a few feet from Brody as one of his caretakers prepared to shove ten pounds of raw meat through the feeding hole in Brody’s pen. Brody swiped at the big hunk of meat with his huge paw as it started through the hole and he knocked it down on the wrong side of the pen. The raw meat landed a few inches from him but perfectly out of reach. He roared, as it were, exactly like an angry lion.
They say you can hear a lion roar five miles away. I believe it. He was loud. He was so angry and frustrated. He jumped at the steel mesh of his pen and looked at me, roaring all the while as if it were my fault. Brody’s mouth is huge, his legs are muscular, and he’s quick. I told my wife later, that if I’m ever in a jungle and a lion runs at me, he won’t kill me. I’ll die of fright before he gets to me. God made an awesome, fearful animal when he made the lion.
As he roared in anger and pawed and raged, shaking his huge mane in his fit, it struck me how quickly I and those around me who watched would be dead if he were loosed. A single swipe of his paw and claws and it would have been over.
But as he roared, instead of his huge paw, what struck me was a simple thought. Lions aren’t personal.
As he roared, I imagined living in a village and knowing the stories of other villagers or family members who had been attacked or eaten by lions. I remembered watching “The Ghost and the Darkness”, a movie about the Tsavo man-eaters, two lions who killed about 135 workers who were building the railway from Uganda to Mombassa in the late 1890′s.
No one eaten by a lion is eaten because lions are personal. Lions eat meat. Lions kill because lions kill. Lions are not personal.
Like most people, I try to find meaning in the events that happen around me and to me. Perhaps it’s too much ego, but I tend to expect things happen for a purpose, that there’s a message I should gather from events. And the more significant the event, surely, the more important the message must be.
22 years ago I sat in the aftermath of a knife attack by two men against three children. For 22 years, I’ve searched, longed to find some message, some purpose, some justification that seems just. And there is none. It does not exist.
And now, after experiencing a lion in a fitful, angry rage a few feet away, I know the only message is that lions aren’t personal. They kill because lions kill. Some bad things are simply bad. No matter how much they hurt, they aren’t personal. They just are. So I’m walking away from the cage.
Tags: brody the lion, lion attack, murder of children, theodicy, turpentine creek