When the Tiger Roared

I heard the Tigerman open the front door and enter the foyer of the church. He comes around a couple of times each week, usually looking for money or for work to get money. Sometimes to talk. In fact, most times, underneath it all, to talk.

The Tigerman is fierce in appearance and presence. His long, black hair hangs bedraggled over his shoulders. His thick mustache is trimmed, to the extent that it is trimmed at all, at a peculiar angle, so that one side is a good inch further down his chin than the other. A Fu Manchu askew.

You don't have to know the Tigerman long or well for him to offer to take off his shirt for you. He is proud of his tigers—21 of them tattooed on his stomach, chest, back, and arms. Tigers in every conceivable pose, but always with an evil look in their eyes or blood dripping from their teeth.

When he smiles, which he does broadly on good days, the gaps and broken teeth show. And when he growls ...

The Tigerman growls. A heavy, gravelly growl, more like a roar, that begins in his massive chest, rumbles over his broad vocal chords, and builds in a rising crescendo like the cry of a wounded, death-bound animal damning its fate.

The growl comes from deep inside, down in a pit of hatred and bitterness as dark as hell itself. Bitterness about the way things are for him. Hatred for those he feels are responsible for the way things are—mostly his parents, who abandoned him, a grown man but clearly unable to make it on his own. To be fair, they sold the house and left for parts unknown, leaving him to walk the streets—four years now—out of fear for their own safety. Still, a man-child experiencing every child's fear of being left alone in an unknown and frightening world, he responds with incredible hatred.

"You wanta see something?" he asks demandingly. Taking a cigarette from his mouth, he turns it end on end and places it between his thumb and index finger, and keeps right on talking. You don't hear anything he says. All you are aware of is the end of the lighted cigarette pressed against his thumb.

"You think that hurts?" he wants to know. Five seconds, ten seconds. "Huh? You think that bothers me?" Fifteen seconds. "That's nothing compared to the fire in my guts when I think of what they did to me! Nothing!"

Finally, mercifully, he puts the cigarette back into his mouth.

"Mr. Groves," he bellowed up the stairwell, his deep, sonorous bass voice evidencing a tiredness that steals into his powerful body, a world-weariness that eventually becomes life-threatening. "You up there?"

The fall of his steps weighed heavy on the stairs, the scraping thud of one foot being placed, laboriously, after another. His breathing was coarse, amplified by the masonry walls of the stairwell.

When finally he sat in the red vinyl armchair opposite my desk, he stared at me. I could not figure out the look on his face. Bewilderment, terror, shock? It was unlike the Tigerman to sit in silence. More typically he strode into my office and began to lecture in a forceful "let's get a few things straight" tone of voice. But not this time.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

No response. I reasoned that he would talk when he was ready, so for a few moments we sat staring at each other in a strange silence.

AT LONG LAST he spoke.

"Last night it finally got to me." His voice was flat but frighteningly intense. "It was cold. The snow was piling up everywhere. And I couldn't get into any of the shelters. They were full up.

"I was walking the streets with nowhere to go, and I began to think: things ain't never gonna get better for me. I can't get no money. And when I get it I can't keep it. I'm not gonna get a room. My mother is not gonna send any money. Nothing's ever gonna change for me."

He paused, and I remained silent. This was not his usual tirade. This was a serious, subdued statement of the facts of his life as he saw them.

"So I went down to the Charles Street Bridge. I stood there with the snow coming down and the wind cutting through me. I stood there and I cried. My insides were churning. It was like the devil was saying, 'Go ahead. Get it over with. Jump! No more walking, no more having no place to be. Go ahead!'

"And I prayed, 'Dear Jesus, help me!' I was praying and crying and holding to that rail for my life! After about ten minutes, it was like the devil just left me. I felt all calm inside. I let go of the rail and walked off the bridge."

The Tigerman stopped, but I knew the story was not over. Somehow I knew he had spent the rest of the night walking through the snow, thinking about what had happened and what it meant. There was something else that needed to be said, and he needed to say it.

Suddenly he sat erect in the chair, looked me straight in the eye, and said angrily, "That's the trouble with Jesus! He always keeps me from going over the rail, but he never does anything about the problems that keep me going back to the bridge!"

I sat there, stunned. The Tigerman had a complaint against Jesus, and I was Jesus' duly appointed representative. But before such a terrible insight into the sometimes tragic nature of our existence, I could not bring myself to defend Jesus. I was not sure I wanted to. Would Jesus have defended himself? Would he have shielded himself against the Tigerman's rage? Or would he have taken the big man in his arms and cried?

I did not know what to do. So, on behalf of Jesus, I just sat there and took it.

Richard Groves was pastor of Metropolitan Baptist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and worked in ministry with students, families, and homeless people at the time this article appeared.