We Are the Lion | Marc McAleavey

There is an Ethiopian proverb that people love to put on posters, in grant reports, and on the first slide of a coalition meeting. “When spiderwebs unite, they can tie up a lion.” It is usually offered as a lesson about working together, about how small and fragile things can hold something powerful in place when enough of them join. I have heard it at nonprofit retreats, in church basements, and at the front of conference rooms where the coffee had already gone cold. I have used it myself.

The same country gave the world another lion. Haile Selassie, Ethiopia’s last emperor, carried the title Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, and a crowned lion holding a cross stood at the center of the imperial flag. In 1936, after Mussolini’s army invaded Ethiopia and used poison gas on its people, Haile Selassie stood before the League of Nations in Geneva and asked the nations of the world to keep their promises to a small country. He spoke as the lion, and he spoke for a whole people.

Thinking about him turned the proverb over for me. For years I had pictured myself as one of the little webs, doing my small part, joining with others to hold some big problem still. Haile Selassie put me, and all of us, inside the lion. We are the lion.

So I went back and read the proverb again, slowly, and I noticed an assumption it carries that none of us had questioned. A grown lion stands about four feet at the shoulder and can weigh more than four hundred pounds. It shakes off rain, pushes through brush, and walks for miles at night. The only way a system of spiderwebs could tie up a lion is if the lion were dead. Or, perhaps, if the lion had forgotten it could move.

Spider silk is remarkably strong for its weight, and a big enough web could hold a living animal in principle, so I mean this the way proverbs mean things, as a picture to think with. The picture still holds. The spiders do not have to kill the lion. They only have to convince it that moving is impossible.

The webs

If you have worked in a nonprofit, a school, a hospital, a church, or a city agency in the last twenty years, you know what the threads are made of. Take the training. Attend the workshop. Complete the assessment. Learn the terminology. Adopt the framework. Follow the toolkit. Demonstrate understanding. Get certified. Use the right language. Each strand was spun by someone who meant well, and each one is light enough that you hardly feel it land.

No single strand could hold a lion. The trouble comes from the pile. A neighbor who wants to feed the kids on her block learns she needs a food handler permit, a fiscal sponsor, a logic model, and a board. A congregation that wants to welcome a family finds a policy for every room in the building. A grandfather who has fixed cars for forty years learns he should not work on anyone’s car without insurance. Thread by thread, the ordinary things people have always done for one another start to feel like things only an institution is allowed to do.

These are webs of dependence. They teach us to wait for permission, to wait for funding, to wait for the expert, and to wait for the next cohort to open. The imperial core depends on that waiting. It depends on our inactivity, on our distance from one another, and on our belief that the systems around us are stronger than our own capacity to live.

Illich saw the trap

Ivan Illich gave this a name in 1973. He called it radical monopoly. A radical monopoly happens when a product or a profession becomes so dominant that people lose the ability to do the thing at all without it. His favorite example was the car. When a city is built for cars, walking stops being a way to get anywhere, and the person without a car is stuck. Illich saw the same pattern in schools, which came to own learning, and in medicine, which came to own healing.

The global marketplace has confused our dependence with its own indispensability. The system’s greatest achievement is persuading people that the ordinary functions of human life, like raising children, feeding neighbors, caring for the sick, burying the dead, and settling an argument, cannot exist without its mediation. Once we believe that, the webs hardly need to be strong. We hold still on our own.

The only way spiderwebs could tie up a lion is if the lion were dead.Or if the lion had forgotten it could move.

What a living lion does

When a lion wakes, it stretches, it yawns, and it begins to groom. A lion’s tongue is covered with hundreds of tiny hooks that point backward, made of keratin, the same material as our fingernails. Those hooks pull dirt, burrs, and parasites out of the fur. Lions in a pride also groom one another, mostly on the head and neck, which are the places a lion cannot reach by itself. Biologists believe this shared grooming is part of what keeps the pride together.

The lion does not have to understand the spiders, negotiate with them, or ask their permission. It simply resumes living. Slowly, methodically, and almost joyfully, it cleans its fur, and then it cleans the fur of the lion lying next to it.

I watched this happen in Indianapolis years ago. Around Broadway United Methodist Church, De’Amon Harges walked the neighborhood as a roving listener. He knocked on doors and asked people what they were good at and what they loved to do. He met people who could cook for a crowd, sew, fix a furnace, cut hair, and sing. Mike Mather, the pastor, and De’Amon and I helped those gifts find each other through the Zawadi Exchange. Nobody was trained first. Nobody was certified. Neighbors who had been told they were the problem turned out to be the answer, and they knew it before we did.

Later, at the Indianapolis Neighborhood Resource Center, we put neighborhood leaders on the committee that decided where the IMAGINE grant money went. The money moved through people who lived on the blocks it was meant for. That was grooming too. It was one set of tongues working on fur the institution could not reach.

The iddir

Ethiopia, the same country that gave us the proverb, also gave us a picture of lions grooming one another. In Addis Ababa and in towns across the country, neighbors belong to an iddir. An iddir is a burial society that people run for themselves. Each household pays a small amount every month, and when someone in the iddir dies, the members put up a tent outside the family’s home, bring chairs, cook, carry the body, dig the grave, and sit with the family through the days of mourning. Nobody calls an agency, and nobody waits for a grant.

Iddirs spread in the early 1900s, when people moved from the countryside into Addis Ababa and left their home villages behind. They rebuilt on city blocks what their villages had always done for one another. Over the years many iddirs took on more, helping members through illness, lending money, and looking after children whose parents had died. Most households in Addis Ababa belong to at least one, and many families belong to several.

An iddir works because it is ordinary. People pay a little every month whether anyone has died or not, and they show up for one neighbor’s funeral knowing their neighbors will show up for theirs. We have treated liberation like an appendectomy, a rare and dramatic operation performed by professionals when the pain gets unbearable. The iddir shows that it looks much more like brushing your teeth. It is ordinary, preventive, and done with other people, and it is never finished. You floss tonight, and you floss again tomorrow.

That is why the second lion matters more to me than any rescue. In the painting I keep imagining, there is no battle, no podium, no conference, and no expert directing the work. There is one lion, calm and patient, licking the webs from another lion’s fur. Liberation is maintenance. Repair is ordinary. We lick the webs from one another’s fur.

The wilderness is still there

In the Book of Job, God asks Job, “Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion? or fill the appetite of the young lions?” The lion in that chapter belongs to a wilderness older than every human system of explanation. It hunts, it hungers, and it lives. It never has to justify its existence or become legible to an institution.

That wilderness has not gone anywhere. It is the part of life that is still alive beyond administration, measurement, and control. It is the kitchen table, the front porch, the pew, the barbershop, and the phone call to a cousin. The work in front of us is to restore the conditions in which the lion can live, and to return one another, patiently, to what we already are.

The lion is alive.

It’s time to lick our fur.