Jonah

Jonah flees from God's instruction to go to Nineveh; Jonah, like most of us, does not want to face his responsibilities. Then God, angry, flings a storm upon the sea where Jonah has tried to flee in a boat. Jonah runs away again--he also flees from the consequences of his actions; he does not like to face uncomfortable truths--that which is reality in life. He runs from problems. Wait, sounds familiar. Drinking, smoking, drugs, sex, entertainment (massive interest and focus on entertainment in our society): all are ways that we often look to for avoidance of our problems, feelings, lives...

Jonah does not see or care how his problems are affecting those around him--also familiar. The other men on the boat are kind and generous and try to save all of them before they toss Jonah overboard. Image: raging sea.

Jonah and suffering: Jonah is tossed into the raging sea--into the depths of the storm. Life with its dramatic changes and problems and intense grief feels sometimes like we are caught in the depths of an angry sea. We try to keep our head above water and continue to breathe--for this is all we can do. But we feel small and powerless and waves crash over and over our head. Intense emotion feels like this to me. I have felt often out of control and as though I am swimming through some intense storm as I try to cope with my life and my emotions. Emotions crash and crash over me and I feel out of control. Angry outbursts, tears, sometimes intense joy. I never know what the next wave will bring.

Then Jonah enters the belly of the FISH. A quote from a conversation with our professor: "Scars are to be paraded as evidence that we have been through the fire". Or in this case, that we have been tossed into the stormy sea and swallowed by a fish. We will emerge from the belly of the whale as a wiser person.

Mike Miles told me I am in the undertow of intense grief, of coping with a completely new reality and new experience of life. He said I must trust that I will be spit out the other side, and that I will grow from this pain and suffering. I hope blindly. Hope, memories, and the knowledge that suffering is universal and no matter how hard we try to protect ourselves from it, no matter how we try to run or to hide, we are all tossed into the raging waters and find ourselves in the belly of the fish. And all we can do is be there, in the experience, and trust that if we can bare the pain of no longer running, we will be spit back out and we will have gained a deep knowledge of the world and experience and wisdom.

Jonah, while in the belly of the fish, learns to be grateful. He is humbled--he has nothing and so he must simply trust in God. And when he says this, "the Lord spoke to the fish, and it spewed Jonah out upon the dry land" (2.10).
And when he is called again, Jonah does not flee, but faces his responsibility.

Jonah has expectation of his future: that the Lord's wrath will rain on the city of Nineveh. He probably has conjured up selfish images of how he will be viewed in greatness as his prophecy comes true yada yada. But then his expectations are destroyed by the Lord. His future is suddenly not as he envisioned it; so and Jonah responds with a temper-tantrum. Jonah still must learn to be thankful for what he has--God demonstrates this lesson again to him with the presence of the bush. Jonah waits in the heat and sun to watch the city and God gives him a bush for shade. But the lord giveth and the lord taketh away. And he causes the bush to wither. Jonah again responds with anger, and believes he is justified in his anger, but God responds: "You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night" (4.10). God tells Jonah that the fate of the city is in His hands. Jonah has no power over the course of events in his life. Expectation leads to anger as things turn out differently. So Jonah should just relax, become a little more zen, go with the flow, and be thankful for what he has. Because he cannot know what his future will bring. We should all be grateful for what we have now, in this very moment. For none of us knows what the next moment will bring. We should not rely on dreams for our futures, because this moment is all we KNOW we have for sure. This is our life, now. Life does not begin in the future when we see ourselves with a job, a spouse, etcetera. Life is now. Appreciation for what we have is now. We will all find joy and we will all find suffering in life. We will all be tossed into the turmoil of grief and sudden change. We will go into the belly of the fish. But the beauty is that we will again emerge. We will deal with what we have been given, and we will learn from our experiences.