So, the story is told of a pride of
lions roaming the savannah when they came to a zoo. As they were padding along,
one of the lions roared and asked the others, “Who do people say that I am?”
The other lions said, “The k
ing! Felix the cat! Here, kitty-kitty. Top cat! A
predator!”
“But you? Who do you say that I am?”
“You are the cat’s meow! You are purr-fect!”
The pride leader said, “We all know that there is another way of living than being like these animals trapped in cages. We know that there is a way of living that is free and open—a place where a cat can be cool and laidback. We know that the ideal place for all cats is not locked up like the cats who live in this urbanized place of display and despair. What would you do if I gave you the keys to all these cages? What if I told you that what you locked up today would be locked forever and what you loosed today would live free forever?”
The other lions debated among themselves what their leader was talking about and then decided to ask if the keys were a metaphor for something? The leader said, “No, I have the keys to release all of these cats, and I give those keys to you. So now, what are you going to do with them?”
The other lions ran throughout the zoo unlocking the cages of all the animals and showed them the way to get to the land of openness and cool-cat-laidbackness, and the animals all found the new world to be as it had been created. And the mice learned to hide and travel quietly in this new place of freedom.
Or maybe you should hear the story Old Dad told us when we were growing up. There was once a beautiful mouse named Pandora. She was given a beautiful jar with pictures on the sides of mice playing and frolicking and dancing. The only problem was that this beautiful mouse was told that she could keep the jar anywhere she wanted, but she was never, never to open it.
For years the jar sat on a shelf of honor in her house. Other mice came and admired the jar and asked what the beautiful jar contained.
Pandora always said, “I don’t know now, and I will never know because I am never, never to open it.”
“What a shame,” one mouse said.
“I bet it’s something really good,” another mouse said.
“It must be something amazing with all those beautiful pictures,” another mouse said.
And the years ticked by on the old Grandfather’s clock, and then Pandora couldn’t take it anymore. One night, at midnight, she crept up the Old Grandfather’s clock and then to the honored shelf, and she pushed on the cork in the jar until, all-of-a-sudden, the cork popped out. A fog rose up out of the jar and all kinds of evil stuff entered into the room and, from there, the world while Pandora struggled to find the cork and put it back in the jar. When she got the cork back in the jar, the only thing that was left in it was hope. There hope sat until the great mousiah came and gave the mice that followed him the power to again pull the cork from the jar on the honored shelf.
When the cork was finally pulled, hope sprang out, and, to this day, hope continues to offer a better world—a world that is not filled with just evil and despair, but trust, hope, and love. It is not that evil and despair have been overcome and put back in the jar, but we now can live with the promise of a world that is better if all of the mice can learn to talk and work for the things hoped for instead of trying to prove that they are better than the other mice—if they can learn that trust and hope and love are not just released from the jar, but that they can grow and flourish in our world when we give them away to others who can then trust, hope, and love.
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