THE TIGER IS NOT IN THE CLOSET
David Robb
July 17, 2005
Text: Numbers 13: 17—14: 4
There is a strange story in the Book of Numbers, one of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible that were originally ascribed to Moses. After the miraculous escape from centuries of life as slaves in Egypt, the Hebrew children wander for forty years in the Sinai desert, barely eking out a living. But their ancestors, many hundreds of years before, had once lived peacefully in the area that today is occupied by Israelis and Palestinians. There had been an implicit promise that they would one day be allowed to return to claim some of that land as their rightful home. Now that time is near, and Moses selects a small squad of men under the leadership of Joshua to secretly enter the land of Canaan and reconnoiter:
Go up into the Negev yonder, (Moses instructs them), and go up into the hill country, and see what the land is, and whether the people in it are strong or weak, whether they are few or many. And look to see if the land they dwell in is good or bad, whether the cities they dwell in are camps and strongholds, whether the land is rich or poor, whether there is wood in it or not. Be of good courage and bring back some fruit of the land. (Num. 13: 17-20)
So the group leaves to accomplish its mission and they are gone for forty days.
When they return they report that the land indeed is abundant, a rich and fertile place to grow crops, a land—as they describe it "flowing in milk and honey." A few of those who have made this trip are enthusiastic, and like Caleb they forcefully and eagerly encourage Moses and the people to proceed into the land and settle there. But apparently these are very much in the minority. Most of the cadre who have scoped out the land have come back with a message of fear, and what the story calls an "evil report:"
The land that we went to spy out is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw there are men of great stature. There we saw the Nephilim, sons of Anak, and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we also seemed to them. (Num. 13: 32-33)
Upon hearing this report the people are appalled; they are angry and cry out against Moses and his brother Aaron: "Would that we had died in the land of Egypt! Or would that we had died in this wilderness! Why does the Lord drag us into this land in order to die by the sword? Our wives and little ones will become prey!" And they say, "Let us chose a captain and return straight away to Egypt!" (Num. 14: 2-4)
In other words, they have had it up to here with this freedom business, and they seem to be falling back upon a rather ubiquitous and time-tested philosophy: The devil you know is always better than the devil you don't!
To many of us stories like this from a period some four thousand years ago seem
upon first glance to be so remote as to appear quite irrelevant. That is until it begins to dawn upon us that this is not just a story about an ancient tribe of people. It is also our story. It is the very situation in which all of us have found ourselves over and over again.
For at the heart of it, this is a story about opportunity and fear:
Opportunity says: "Let's do this. There is so much possibility here. There is so much to be gained. There is so much to be accomplished. This is such a splendid adventure."
But fear says: "Who, me? What if I fail? I refuse to make a fool of myself. There are so many others smarter than I. Or more experienced. Or more sure of themselves. Look: there are giants in that land. They make me feel like a grasshopper.
Like that body of spies that Moses sent into the land of Canaan, there are always two sides within each of us. One side always seems to be urging us to take that leap of faith, to risk doing the unexpected thing, or to do the right thing even when so many of our friends or family are trying to persuade us that it is a foolhardy thing, or one that will bring dishonor upon us and them. The other side keeps warning that the odds are too great, that no one will appreciate your efforts, or worse, even if your heart and thoughts are in the right place you will certainly fall on your face, because, frankly, you are just not good enough. There are giants out there. And next to them you are like a grasshopper.
That is the language of fear. And to overcome the fear that would keep us as inconspicuous as possible, the fear that would keep us from risking anything lest we make a fool of ourselves, we need to learn a different language: the language of courage.
But where do we turn to discover that most precious commodity, courage? The good news is that we do not have to search very far. In fact we all have it, though it often seems to be very hidden from view when we are most in need of it. In his wonderful book, Freedom From Fear, our own pastor Forrest Church gives us a very good signpost when he reminds us that our word "courage" and the French word for heart—coeur--have both evolved from a common root. The courage that most of us think we sorely lack is almost always there all along. But as the song puts it "You've gotta have heart!'"
i
I learned a great deal about these matters a number of years ago from a surprising source. The year was 1970, and I was a young father of my first born son, Matthew, who was at that time about a year and half old. I remember having anticipated his birth with some trepidation. I did not really believe that I was ready to be a father, and I had many fears about becoming the poster child for the Murphy's Law of parenting: everything that could go wrong was bound to. To make matters worse, just weeks before Matthew was born, and within weeks of each other, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy were both assassinated.
I was profoundly shaken by these events. At the time I had been working as a liaison between the religious community of Washington D.C. and Dr. King's organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in their planning for a large movement event in the nation's capitol that summer--The Poor Peoples' Campaign. I had also worked locally in the primary electoral campaigns on behalf of Senator Kennedy. These deaths were personally painful to me. But more than that, they were quite shattering to my sense of what was happening to my country. I was anxious about bringing a child into a world that was becoming more frightening, and dangerous, and unpredictable. I worried a great deal about how I would manage as a father, how to protect my son, how to impart a sense of hope and values in a world that seemed to be going mad.
Well, Matthew did come into my life, and it was he more than anything else that calmed my fears. That was because he was such a wonderful child, so full of life, so curious, adventurous, and eager to explore his world, so relatively anxiety-free and delighted in everything around him. In the middle of his second year he was beginning to learn the fundamentals of language—first the names of things, and then slowly, imperceptibly, some rudimentary elements of syntax. The whole process fascinated and astonished me. I had recently seen the film version of The Miracle Worker the drama based on the slow and nearly miraculous process by which Helen Keller came to that remarkable breakthrough discovery that two sounds—two syllables of a word—stood for a thing, in this case "water." Imagine that! An entire drama fashioned around the remarkable discovery of the meaning of a single word. Well, that drama was also taking place daily in the life of my son, and I was eager to observe as much of it as possible.
One beautiful spring day Matthew's mother and I took him for an outing to the Washington zoo. It was his first visit and he was enormously intrigued and curious about the wondrous assortment of wildlife. But one animal especially drew his rapt attention—the large white Bengal tiger that was a prize possession of the Washington zoo. Several times he asked to return to observe the tiger, and we were glad to oblige him, as it was a magnificent animal. Still it was difficult to comprehend what the tiger may have meant to Matthew and why it fascinated him so.
After returning home and having our dinner, Nancy read to Matthew and then put him down for the night. He was a sound sleeper, and normally drifted off soon after he was put into his crib. But on this particular evening, after a time we both noticed that he seemed to be talking quietly to himself. I went to his bedroom and stood outside the door to determine if he were all right. He seemed to be quite calm, but as I stood there it became quite obvious what it was he was doing. He was creating with language a simple litany. And this is what he was saying:
The tiger is not in the closet; the tiger is in the zoo.
The tiger is not in the tree outside; the tiger is in the zoo.
The tiger is not under my bed; the tiger is in the zoo.Matthew went on for a little while just repeating those lines over and over, until he just talked himself into a very sound sleep.
On that wonderful evening in 1970, my very young son taught me more about facing my fears than any other mentor had ever done either before or since. Matthew was a very little boy, but he was a little boy with a very big heart. And he was learning to do what each of us must learn to do when confronted with demons and forces—both outer and inner—that seem to overwhelm us and constellate our fears. Matthew was learning to name the terror and to put it in its proper place: "The tiger is not in the closet; the tiger is in the zoo." Naming the terror, and putting it in its place: that is what heart is all about. And that is the essence of courage. Not just "conquering" our fear. Certainly not pretending it does not exist or willing it away. And not even "just whistling a happy tune." Courage is the ability to name the fear and to put it in its proper place. That is how we assert ourselves over against those things or other people that terrify us. That is how we stop behaving as if we had all the authority of a grasshopper. By the way, Matthew has not turned out so badly. He was just graduated this spring with a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the New School. I guess his sense of wonder never stopped; he just grew "curioser and curioser."
ii
You of course remember Frank Baum's wonderful story The Wizard of Oz. The central motif is journey undertaken by four unlikely characters: Dorothy, who wants desperately to find a way to return to her home; a scarecrow who wants to have a brain; a tin man, who wants a heart; and a lion, who wants more than anything in the world to have courage. They are told they can all receive what they are longing for from the Wizard of Oz, and so they all set "off to see the Wizard." He sends them off on a dangerous assignment and promises he will grant their wish if they can complete the task. When they overcome all odds and accomplish the mission, they return to Oz and an audience with the wizard to receive what they had been promised. They discover, of course, that he is a humbug, and they are terribly disappointed. Until they realize that by rising to the occasion they have each actually utilized the very thing they each thought he lacked. By staring down his fear, and acting in support of his friends the lion has been brave beyond his wildest imagination. By acting with courage he has "received" what he believed he was missing. In a similar fashion, each of the characters acts to help each other out by using the very capacity he thinks he is lacking—the tin man a heart, and the scarecrow a brain. And Dorothy discovers that all she has had to do all along to return home was to click her heels.
Perhaps Marianne Williamson got it just right and expressed most precisely for most of us the way fear tends to operate to convince us to abandon ourselves and potential opportunities. She wrote these lines in her book, A Return To Love:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?" Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
And so, dear friends, any time you or I are tempted to do something large and adventurous, something that will enlarge our world and that of others—any time we are tempted to something like that but shrink back and allow our fears to overwhelm us and convince us we are as small as grasshoppers, let us all remember a little boy with a great big heart and say to ourselves:
The tiger is not in the closet.
The tiger is in the zoo.