In the Belly of the Whale

When I was a boy, and I found myself making a mistake, I would often panic and immediately make several  more mistakes in rapid succession.  Maybe I’d spill my milk when pouring it into my cereal, try to catch myself and drop the entire milk jug on the floor, reaching to catch the milk jug only to knock the cereal bowl itself and several neighboring dishes of stuff all over the kitchen floor.  A dropped and broken glass could become three or four broken glasses, and maybe a couple of plates to boot, in a matter of seconds.  My parents learned to just try and grab me as soon as possible if I spilled or broke something.

I’d like to say that adulthood has cured me of that pattern, but I’m afraid I can’t.   That package I forgot to send my sister for Christmas might not get there by Valentines Day, even though I realized weeks ago  I forgot to send it.  For me, I can despair so much over the mistakes I’ve made, I lose sight of my ability to resolve the issue while things slowly get worse and worse.  And before I know it, I’m a hot mess – agonizing over what a terrible person I am.

I used to believe I was uniquely terrible, but I’ve been lucky enough to have people in my life who are willing to share their own struggles with me.  Maybe it’s an estranged friend or family member that they got into a tiff with several months ago and won’t call back because they just figure the person hates them.  Or a bill that is long enough overdue that the collection company is considering resorting to a brut squad to get their money back.  Or a visit to the dentist that they know is going to be painful, expensive, and full of bad news about their prospects of eating solid food in the near future.   I’m glad I have friends I can talk to about this stuff – being a disaster is so much easier when you have company.

The pattern is easy enough to identify.  There’s that flood of negative feelings when we fail at something, or don’t achieve what we had hoped, or experience a difficult and unexpected hardship, and we are left to cope with those feelings.  Do we run away?  Do we dive into our hidey holes and hope no one finds us?  Do we allow despair to  engulf us to the point of nearly drowning?  How we cope with these storms is one of the most important challenges of a spiritual life.

God calls to Jonah, a Prophet, to go to Ninevah and Jonah, though a prophet jumps a ship in the other direction – as far away from Ninevah as possible.  A big storm comes and every guy on the ship tries to figure out whose God is angry. Taking no chances, they begin praying each to their own God and tossing everything they can get their hands on overboard.  Everyone, that is, except Jonah, who is mysteriously passed out downstairs despite the storm.  They rouse Jonah and ask him to beseech his God, the God of Israel , for help.  Jonah tells them to throw him in the sea.  After trying to row to shore, they give up and toss Jonah in, as he wishes.  Instead of allowing Jonah to drown, God sends a whale to swallow him.  Inside the whale, Jonah prays in thanksgiving for his deliverance from the darkness.

One thing that really struck me about the story of Jonah was that this guy running away wasn’t just any guy – he was a prophet.  He was not a centurian or a farmer or a fisherman, he was a man who had answered God’ call to ministry.  A prophet.  There is no doubt he had a strong relationship with God, and had been chosen by God as a representative of God’s word to people like the Ninevites.  And yet, away he ran, just as fast as he could, prophet or not.  I think about my own call to ministry 20 years ago, and how it wasn’t until a couple of months ago that I finally got around to answering it.

It makes me wonder – what was going on for Jonah?  Why was he so afraid to go the Ninevah that he jumped the first ship out of Dodge?  And why did he hide for so long from his own calling that it took him getting thrown overboard and almost dying to find his way home again? 

Listen to Jonah’s prayer after he’s swallowed by the whale.  “The waters encompassed me, even to my soul, the deep closed around me, weeds were wrapped around my head, I went down to the foundations of the mountains, the earth with it’s bars closed around me forever.”  Now if I went into my therapists office and told them this, I’m pretty sure I’d walk out with a prescription to Celexa, and rightly so.  This is a man who is describing depression.  If you read later on in the book of Jonah, he actually asks God, repeatedly, just to take his life. 

When I read this scripture, I found the symbolism to be remarkable.  Many of us have found ourselves on these metaphoric liferafts, clinging for life against the storms raging against us – trying to figure out how to survive.  In the middle of those storms, it feels like it takes every last bit of strength you have to hold on for one more day.   Maybe you’re that person, or maybe someone you know or love is that person.  When the depression hits, it’s based on a very rational notion that it’s a waste of energy to fight.  In fact, biological research on depression suggests that it is an adaptive behavioral trait in the animal kingdom – allowing animals to save their energy to fight another day.  But the feeling is what Jonah describes – sinking down, drowning, getting scraped down to the foundations of our souls until it feels like there’s nothing left.

It hurts like hell.

And just when you think it can’t get any worse, you get swallowed up by a whale.  That last vicious blow comes when we’re at that weakest point.  For people who have experienced Jonah’s story, this can take many forms – maybe it’s losing a job or a home, maybe it’s the death of a loved one, or a divorce, of flunking a class, or an arrest for drugs or alcohol.  Either way, it is often a moment of feeling utterly forsaken by the world, by ourselves, and by God.  Rock bottom, if you will. 

Jonah was an interesting guy, though.  Unlike some people who feel this overwhelming sense of abandonment by God, he was aware that it was he who had abandoned God.  And so, overcome by his own guilt and shame and self hatred, he believes that God should abandon him because he was a no-good rotten piece of garbage.

But this is where the spiritual message makes it’s entrance into the Scripture, and in ways that surprised and humbled Jonah.

Did God abandon Jonah, even when Jonah pleaded for it?

What does God do in this story?

He calls Jonah to go to Ninevah.  When Jonah bails out of the job, God creates a storm that causes Jonah to be thrown into the sea.  When Jonah settles on his fate of drowning in the bottom of the sea, God  saves Jonah from drowning via the whale.  And when Jonah is at the absolute end of his rope, to the absolute bottom of his soul, God  has the whale deposit Jonah on dry land, giving him a second chance.  It was far from pleasant, due to the very natural consequences of Jonah’s choices, but at every single step of the way, God is attending to Jonah’s redemption.  Even if all Jonah is aware of at the time is being in a pool of whale vomit.

Wherever Jonah was and whatever Jonah had done (or not done), God met him there.  God emerged as a graceful and loving God.  God showed up for Jonah, had mercy for Jonah, even when Jonah had trouble showing up for much of anything and had zero mercy for himself.  Everything that “happened” to Jonah was not to abandon him or leave him to the storm, but to save him and redeem him to his rightful place as a beloved child of God.  As Jonah says, “you have brought me up from the pit.  When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord.”

I have experienced personally much of this story – the running away, the storms of suffering and struggle, the depression, and the unpleasant feeling of being scraped down to the rawest threads of my soul.  I remember times when my soul felt like the landscape after a volcano erupted – nothing left but scorched earth.  It was not pleasant.  It will probably happen again, periodically, and that won’t be pleasant either.

However, I am immensely grateful for it.  Because it is in these dark and hard places at the bottom of things, seemingly at the end of things, that I have found and learned to trust God.  It is in these very painful and unpleasant times that I have experienced redemption – not the redemption that you think of as being an awful terrible person that is saved by some jujitsu move of faith or good deeds, but the redemption of becoming aware that you are always, no matter what, being attended to by God.  The redemption of knowing that, no matter how lost you become, you can always be found by God. The redemption of knowing that wherever you are and whatever you’ve done (or not done), God will meet you there.  That God is a graceful and loving God.  That God is a merciful God. 

And that feels very, very good.