Including what began on Ash Wednesday, we are now the third day into Lent. What began with a certain gravitas, ecclesiastical pomp and circumstance is finally beginning to set in. Preparing for the inevitable is something few of us are good at precisely because of the uncertainty of the nature of the inevitable. We come to church Ash Wednesday with a lot of ideas about what we want to give up, how we’re going to improve only to find a mere seventy-two hours later that maybe we bit off a little more than we could chew. While the story of Jonah specifically has a lot of relevance to Easter Triduum – something I hope to explore later during Holy Week – it may be relevant to look at this particular narrative at the start of the season that we may find a little bit of hope before we go down too deeply and subvert our Lenten intentions.
Jonah’s story exemplifies the inversions seen within as it is really the closest thing to a comedy found in the Bible. Commanded by God to go eastward to the city of Nineveh to prophesy against it, Jonah eventually decides to take a detour in the opposite direction because, really, being a prophet is messy enough of a job-description and being a prophet to the people who are your peoples’ de facto enemies is doubly so. Heading westward, Jonah finds himself on a ship when suddenly a storm picks up and lots are drawn and the prophet wins a trip to Davey Jones’ Locker. Well, crap. Fortunately for our prophet, Jonah is miraculously saved by being swallowed by a large whale-like fish in whose belly he spends three days and three nights and remains there considering his poor life choices.
Twenty-four hours really isn’t a terribly long time to start to notice changes in behavior, much less the flaws of our original Lenten intentions. It’s easy to wake up one morning and decide we’re going to pray more, not have coffee or tea, watch television or spend less time on the internet. Then day two kicks in. We know we have to do something because we committed ourselves to it, so we continue on as we did the day before, but perhaps a little more reluctantly; our fingers are itching to play that game on our smart phones, a new season of whatever show just started but we promised ourselves not to watch television after a certain hour, we had a crappy day at work and want just one more drink to ease our woes but can’t. Come day three, we really start to notice where we may have been overzealous and find ourselves accidentally doing the things we promised not to do or doing less, or less-intentionally, the things we promised we’d do.
The beauty of the mythic cycles we experience in the liturgical calendar is one of paradox: we know what to expect, just not how we’re going to experience them when the time comes. We become characters in a liturgical cycle where it’s easy to either be heroes or the brunt of a cosmic joke but oftentimes find ourselves playing both roles.
In another whale of a tale, we have another hero, Ahab, whose tremendous overconfidence, or hubris, leads him to defy common sense and believe that, like a god, he can enact his will and remain immune to the forces of nature. He considers Moby Dick the embodiment of evil in the world, and he pursues the White Whale monomaniacally because he believes it his inescapable fate to destroy this evil. I suspect many of ourselves start our Lent in a similar way, trying to deliver ourselves from every evil and put aside the “sins of the flesh”, only to discover our fatal flaw in being unable to escape and in the end and unable to save ourselves. We’re so self-convinced of our own superiority, that even if we end up finding that one thing that is preventing ourselves from our own self-ordained perfection, we end up going down to the depths not truly understanding the lessons that one thing was teaching us all along. We become aggressors as much as victims of our own ideological pursuits.
If we’re lucky, we end up like Jonah. We realize we’re poor schmucks who, even if we fail at first are granted the opportunity and grace to get a second chance. We get put in time out for a bit, are given a chance to see things a little differently even if it’s to our chagrin then move forward. There’s no telling what the outcome is even if we know the story by heart because what we’re experiencing in this liturgical drama is as deeply personal as it is communal and mythic. So, let us consider for a moment what the Spirit is saying to us as we’re in our rocky vessels during the fickle ebb and flow of Lent and remember that we’re not perfect, but in recognizing our own character flaws we may become bit by bit a little more perfected in our love and trust in ourselves and in our other ship-mates.
