It is no fun being in the belly of the whale. No fun at all.
Have you ever been there?
You would know it if you have.
The feeling of being stuck. Isolated.
Groping around a bit for answers, for a way out.
That is the hardest part. There answers don’t come very easily, if at
all. The way out can take a while to
happen. When will this end?
…
But, let’s back up. Let’s
back up and consider how we can end up in the belly of the whale in the first
place.
And for that, we’ll rely upon two stories: story of Jonah, which we just heard, and the
story of St. John of the Cross.
We know why Jonah ended up in the belly of the whale. There was a stubborn streak in the man. There was a good bit of ego. God had a specific desire for Jonah, and
Jonah couldn’t accept God’s plan for his life.
He wasn’t humble enough to embrace the charge, the call, the mission,
the invitation. So instead of following
the Lord’s command and heading for Nineveh, Jonah set sail for Tarshish. And we all know where it went from there.
And we know because we’ve taken this trip a time or two
ourselves, haven’t we?… the trip fueled by … stubbornness, ego, doing it our
way.
And this is the first way that we can end up in that belly
of the whale: by our own sinfulness.
By our own hard-headedness or laziness, by our own apathy,
by our pride, by our caving into fear, by any number of ways where we lost
trust in God’s hand and took our eyes off God’s plan for our life.
The results are usually about the same. There’s a good deal of pretending like
everything is going to be okay. There’s
a good deal of trying to convince others that there’s nothing to worry about.
But, then the winds begin to blow and the waves begin to
toss a bit. And the questions start to
come. Are you trying to hide
something? How did you get
yourself in this predicament?
When we are like this, when we are like Jonah, God will
take us into that belly of the whale as a sort of last resort, to wake us up, and
to capture us before we really do some real harm. God will sometimes topple us in order to
bring us back around.
But that isn’t the only reason God can take us into this dark
space.
Sometimes, yes, it’s our
shortcomings, our lethargic spiritual condition. In that case, we do need to be jarred a
little. We need to be taken by the
shoulders and shaken a bit.
But sometimes we land there for reasons that have nothing
to do with what we’ve done. We can land
there because of what is being done to us.
This is the story of St. John of the Cross.
John grew up under the care of a good, loving, Christian
mother. And though they didn’t have much
by way of worldly things, they had a deep grounding in faith and in God’s
love. And John lived into that faith
very well. By the time he was a young
man, John was actively doing the Lord’s work in his own beautiful way, the
Jesus-way. He was living a simple life
of being there for his brothers and sisters in need, living a life of charity
and prayer and care for those around him.
He was seeking to build up the church and to be a witness of the Kingdom
of Jesus in the world.
That’s, unfortunately, precisely what landed him in
trouble. John’s quiet, dignified life of
faith and righteousness made others look bad.
And certain people just can’t handle that.
So, in December of 1577, John was arrested, bound and seized. He was dragged to a prison cell high atop an
ecclesial tower in the city of Toledo, Spain, and there he would stay for the
next nine months.
In the belly of the whale.
For 23 hours each day, his captors kept him in solitary
confinement. And for the other hour,
they would feed him through a small opening in his cell door. It was the only time he had any semblance of
human interaction, which is probably why the prison guards decided to turn the
screws on him in a most devilish manner.
They would stand outside of his cell and whisper about as low as they
could, and pretend to have conversations with each other, knowing this would
agonize poor John.
And so it went … for nine months. Until he daringly escaped one night.
Sometimes, yes, this is how it is. We land in the belly of the whale not by our
own choosing, and really not even by our own doing. We land there because sometimes the winds of
this world will blow cold and out of the north against us.
A sickness overtakes us.
Work becomes difficult.
The road ahead becomes much harder to see for whatever
reason.
And, regardless of how much we might seek to resist it, here
we are all the same … like John of the Cross … captured … bound and stuck away
for a time in a cell where there doesn’t seem to be much light or much of a way
to connect with those around us … even God, perhaps.
Have you been in that place? That place of aching for this season to be
over? That place of yearning to be set
free?
Stuck like Jonah … for three days and three nights … the
biblical equation to let us know that the journey down for Jonah was intense
and deep and full.
Stuck like John of the Cross for nine months, pining for the
sunshine just beyond his cell’s upper window.
…
Well, that’s how we can get there.
But there’s another important question.
The one you’re probably already asking.
What do we do when we are there?
Is there anything to do?
Why, yes!
Why, most certainly!
We cry out! We raise
our voices in prayer and anguish. We beg
God to help us, from the very depths of our prison.
And, how do we do that?
Well, that’s the hard part.
Because the only way we can cry out is to get deeper in touch with our
weakness, our brokenness, our stubbornness, … to put it simply … our
woundedness.
We must cry out from our need … uppermost our need for
God.
Listen to these words from Iain Matthew’s book about St.
John of the Cross:
‘The most real thing about us,
we hear John say, is our need for God.
But this need is also our greatest claim. ‘The immense love of Christ the Word cannot
bear to see one who loves him suffer, without coming to her aid.’ If our anxieties are, at root, tokens of our
deeper need, then when it begins to ache, when it cuts into our flesh, this
is not an obstacle to prayer. It can be
the point which opens one to God. Rather
than first dressing the wound with analyses and excuses, John would have us locate
the wound, and, without explanation, stand in it, hold it, before God …
“If my spirit is bleeding
inside, I can approach him with that and grasp the hem of his garment [and beg
for healing]. My prayer can be holding
that garment; power continues to go out from him.
“If my spirit aches sorrow or
loneliness, I can sit with him as at table, in a prayer that holds the ache
before him; his presence still speaks welcome and healing into that. If I am aware of the waters of death, prayer
can mean stretching out my hand, in the faith that he clasps my wrist. Prayer could be staying with that: the hand clasping the wrist.”[1]
The bravest thing you will do sometimes in Lent is just to
stand in your woundedness, your weakness, and to cry out to God.
Help me.
Heal me.
See me.
Rescue me from this prison that I am in.
And to each and every one of those prayers, the answer is
clear: I do. I will.
I can. I desire to make this
happen for you.
And we know this, friends, … we know it with certainty and
with hope because of the one sign that Jesus told us that he would give us leading
up to his arrest and crucifixion and resurrection.
Do you know which sign that was?
Yes, that’s right.
The sign of Jonah.
The sign of God’s very own Son going into the depths of the
whale’s belly with us.
The sign of Jesus Christ entering into the prisons of
mistreatment and isolation and crying out for help.
The sign of God’s love fully plunging into every depth and
reality of what takes us under … what takes us into that place we do not wish
to go …
One more time from Iain Matthew:
John [of the Cross’s] story
began here, with his need for the one who had ‘wounded’ him. There he found Christ, poor enough to share
the wound, risen enough to heal it. Out of
that, he confidently proposes prayer to us, not as an escape from the darkness
that lies beyond our threshold, but as a journey into it. Prayer renames that darkness, not chaos, but
the inner cavern, the space within the heart of the risen Christ.
Today, we begin our journey further into the risen heart of
Christ.
Today, we begin our Lenten fast and our Lenten prayer.
Let us pray:
Come, Lord Jesus, teach us the depths of your
love, and so help us to enter more fully into our own weakness and
anguish. Teach us to go with you when our
shortcomings and the winter winds of this world open up an ache within us. Teach us to follow the ache into your loving
presence, where you extend your arm to touch, to heal, and your heart to love
us and see us in our pain. Amen.
[1] Matthew,
Fr. Iain. The Impact of God: Soundings from St. John of the Cross. (London, UK:
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 1995).
Pgs. 152-153.
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