Wondering Where the Lions Are

Repose.
I love that word. Joyful stillness. Dignified calm. Deep-down serenity. It is not languor, repose, nor listlessness, nor sluggishness. There’s mettle here. Hard resolve and sturdy discipline. Repose is being awake, fully awake, and yet not moving a muscle. It is being aware, wholly aware, and yet not straining one thought.

Repose is rest on purpose.
Hyphenate the word – re-pose – and it means something else again: to pose once more, to take your position over. Most of us need to re-pose into repose. Dogs can do this, and cats, and oxen, and birds. Dumb beasts are the perfection of form when it comes to repose. They have a rhythm for it. An instinct. I once, with a small group, came across a pride of lions in the savannahs of Africa, nine felines stretched beneath a canopy of acacia branches. Each was a sculpture of repose. None slept. There was not even a hint of drowsiness in their demeanour. But neither was there a hint of anxiousness. Each looked as if, at any moment, it could coil and spring into pure ravenousness, a wild terror of tooth and claw. Each appeared completely aware of our presence, just indifferent to it. They were lions at rest, not lions at war, and nothing at that moment was going to change their minds about that.Yes, animals are good at this. Humans, not so. Our pose is mostly two things: headlong busyness and mindless collapse. We live between the hurricane and the doldrums, but rarely in the zephyr. If I’m not careful, my days fluctuate between rush and sloth. The rush is not fruitful, the sloth not restful, and each pushes the other into a downward spiral of exhaustion. So I must re-pose, and repose. This has a biblical name. Sabbath.

Reclining with Jesus
I’ve a new Bible hero of late. Lazarus. Not Luke’s scabrous beggar (Lk. 16:19ff), but Mary and Martha’s ill-begotten brother. Most of his story is told in John 11 – Lazarus’s sickness, Jesus’ (reposeful) delay, Lazarus’s death, Mary’s and Martha’s upset with Jesus, Jesus’ own upset (“Jesus wept”), and then the piece de resistance: Jesus’ command to a corpse, “Lazarus, come forth!”