Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale

My friend Deborah Leiter sent me this poem when I was in a period of discernment a few years ago. It strikes me as the perfect poem for the quarantine of 2020. 

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale
Dan Albergotti

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

This poem names pretty well my current state of being. We are facing down a pretty unprecedented calamity and I want to fight or flee, but fight what and flee to where? I want to prep and prepare, but prep and prepare for what and how? The feeling of powerlessness is overwhelming. The poem names pretty accurately the activities that we can undertake: marking the long days; looking for blue sky; calling old friends; I think this blog might be my version of smoke signals.

The whale in scripture is a powerful metaphor for chaos and disorder. It is this vision of the whale that Herman Melville reflects on in Moby Dick—the whale evincing all that is perilous about our world, all that is dangerous and ungovernable, all that humans cannot control. The only thing that is more perilous in Scripture than the Leviathan is the murky depths of the sea itself—these primordial waters of chaos. These are the waters that God hovers over in Genesis. 

In the story of Jonah he is stuck between Leviathan and the deep blue sea. This might be where we are as well, the only thing worse than being quarantined in the belly of the whale is to not be in quarantined. The writer speaks powerfully about such a state: we should be thankful that we are not 

treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

What can we learn while we are in the belly of the whale? People have lots of ideas—the dangers of social isolation and our increasingly atomistic society. That we can face other collective dangers—especially climate change--with bold and concerted action. The problems intrinsic in a for profit medical system. The more liberal among us will see a call to social justice and the more conservative a call to return to God. Many will see calls to frugality or simplicity or nurturing the good of family. 

This is good work to do when you are in the belly of the whale. This is certainly a time for “reviewing each of life’s ten million choices and enduring moments and for some self-loathing.”

But what is demanded of us right this moment: I think a one thing above all else: What are we going to do for people still stuck in the deep blue sea.

For today, right now, we need to be asking: who is not in the belly of the whale? Who doesn’t have a place to go? Who cannot shelter in place? 

How can we work to get everyone to a place of safety? I think particularly of the calamity that faces the homeless if something isn’t done immediately!

I confess that Jonah is about the last biblical character that I want to identify with in any way whatsoever. He is miserable and petty. It doesn’t matter to me that he is reluctant to do what God is asking of him—that is true of all of the prophets. It is the reason! He hates the people of Nineveh so much that he doesn’t want them to repent. Jonah is enraged that God might want to show mercy on his enemies. Jonah discovers in the belly of the whale that he is just as dependent on the grace of God as the people of Nineveh. This is an impossibly difficult lesson to learn, but once we have learned it, we no longer possess anything in the same way quite again. Understanding God's grace always leads to a different understanding of economy. 

To learn this lesson is to become swallowed up in the uncanny hope of the Gospel. That we can exist for others and not just for ourselves. 

Pursued by steadfast love

Recently, our family watched Mary Poppins Returns together. I found myself particularly captivated by a song from that movie entitled Where the lost things go.

It begins:

Do you ever lie awake at night?

Just between the dark and the morning light

Searching for the things you used to know

Looking for the place

Where the lost things go?

And continues:

Do you ever dream or reminisce?

Wondering where to find

What you truly miss
. . . . . .

Memories you shared.
Gone for good you feared
They're all around you still
Though they've disappeared
Nothing's really left or lost without a trace
Nothing's gone forever
Only out of place

I was moved by this song. I think it part because it reminds me of a song we sing frequently at church and at funerals:

Nothing is lost on the breath of God; 

Nothing is lost forever. 

God’s breath is love and that love will remain

Holding the world forever.

Mary Poppins Returns, although a children’s movie, is dealing with the universal human experience of loss: death, loss of capacity, loss of possessions, loss of a shared past.

And the song articulates a kind of basic human longing....a desire to know: where do all the lost things go?It is both comforting and vague.

So maybe now the dish

And my best spoon

Are playing hide and seek

Just behind the moon

The hymn Nothing is Lost also is working with this question: Where do the lost things go?” A feather so light, a hair so fine … a life cut short, our stilted intentions? This hymn does not offer a vague articulation of hope, but a statement of faith. It is God who holds the bits, baubles, fragments, pieces, the lost, forsaken, forgotten.

My deepest faith struggle is not between belief or unbelief; hope or a rejection of hope. My greatest faith struggle is how do I keep hold of a vision of a loving and personal God in the world such as it is? In truth, I am not so much tempted to no longer believe in God, but I am often tempted to radically depersonalize God. I am tempted towards vague answers to questions such as: Where do all the lost things go?

I might answer: “I am not sure-…. but surely there must be some force making things right. Mustn’t there?” And yet our scripture rarely speaks in vague affirmations. Instead, in scripture we are confronted with a personal God who actively seeks out what is lost and gathers the broken bits together.

I was reminded of this as I read through the 23rd Psalm recently in preparation for a sermon I was initially leery of preaching. What can be said about the passage that is the lectionary Psalm for today that has not already worn over like a garment that should have been thrown out a decade ago? 

Somehow, still, this is a piece of scripture within which all varieties of people seem to be able to find a place. There is a startling universality to this Scripture passage.

If you are looking for words of scripture to penetrate through the fog of dementia….

..then there is power is these words “The Lord is my Shepherd I shall not Want.

If you are seeking, words for a funeral for someone who has not darkened a church door in decades…

….these words: “thy rod and they staff they comfort me” somehow resonate.

When I visited in a prison, this Psalm was often mentioned...

…. “Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”

And even a child can find themselves between the stanzas both confused and comforted by the surely goodness and surely mercy of God.

It is beautiful poetry and for this reason the 23rd Psalm is frequently anthologized in books of global poetry. Its main poetic devise is a mixed metaphor. The poem begins by comparing God to a shepherd and ends by comparing God to a host. 

And yet this mixing of divine metaphors is not slapdash. Its is intentional.

We could say that in the 23rd Psalm that the shepherd becomes the host, or that the host proves to have been a shepherd all along. The shepherd is always a host--providing green grass and still, clean waters; beds and foods. And the table host remains the dutiful shepherd. A shepherd who doesn’t merely prepare a banquet, but also seeks out and follows the guests. God is a host who will keep providing goodness and mercy even when the guest has so since left the table.

Both Shepherd and Host are persistent metaphors used to describe God. Both metaphors are ones that Jesus employed to speak of himself. These metaphors shares similarities with other persistent metaphors that are used to describe God. God is a gatherer:

Like the farmer gather crops

Like a parent gathers a child in their arms

Like a mother hen gathers her chicks

God shall carry the lambs with his arms and

carry them next to her bosom.

God will gather God’s people from the four corners of the world for a great banquet

The table in 23rd Psalm is a shepherd’s table where we have been gathered: the rich, haughty, young, 

fearful, forsaken, tired and weary. In this Psalm God promises to pursue us. That is actually the word that gets translated in the NRSV as “follow.” It is a word that is used when Saul seeks David to kill him. It is a word that is used for a lion seeking its prey. The Psalmist says surely your goodness and mercy will hunt me down all the days of my life. The word here for mercy is hesed. It is a word that is sometimes translated faithful, loving kindness, or steadfast love. It is the word used to describe God’s love, God’s covenantal love: to affirm the love of God wherein God’s keeps God’s promises to humans even when human’s don’t hold up their end of the bargain. Hesed is saving love: Steady as a mountain, unmovable, unearned, unmerited. The closest English translation is neither mercy or love, but the word grace.

This 23rd Psalm speaks to the basic facts of our existence--we come into this world loved more than we will ever be able to merit, and this Psalm promises that we are being hotly pursued by this love for all of our days.

I find comfort in that. There are times it is hard for me to believe in a personal God. I think as a child I was too caught up in a vision of God that insured material blessings for God’s people. A God that will make your marriage better, and your family better, and your finances better. A god of clean living and secure futures. A God that will keep us safe.

But as the saint Julian of Norwich wrote

“If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.”

This is a time of losses. No matter how blessed you are: loss of dreams and capacity; loss of friends and family; loss of certainty and purpose. As Christians we have lost our capacity to gather together as a community. I am not going to flinch here. Who knows how much we are all going to lose from this pandemic? Will the shuttered business open again? When will our children gather in classrooms? When we hear the organ in our church or raise our voices all together in our sanctuaries? Will there be summer camps this year?  

We are on the cusp of a time of profound losing.  

And so it feels a bit stilted to merely say that God has promised to be with us and this Presence is going to be enough—no more than enough—a cup overflowing, a table of plenty, calm waters, quiet pastures.

Yet, these words find us here, 3,000 years after they were written, words that have hotly pursued people through plagues, battlefields, prisons, deformity, sickness, death.  Words that have been prayed before in quarantines, and in trenches, and in hospital wards, in exile, recited while hiding in jungles, or facing down the crematoriums.  Words that have seen gallows, sinking ships, bread lines, and locusts. 

These are not my words, but the words of God in hot pursuit of all the lost things: a God in the shadow of the valley of death.

Lamenting

Nothing makes much sense right now.

I started reading the book of Lamentation.

Confession: I am pretty sure I have never read it all the way through before. I have thought about lament as
an important form of communal and personal prayer. I know that God actually invites us to pour out our anguish and our complaints and that a significant number of the Psalms are Psalms of lamentation.


You know things aren't going well in your life when the Psalms of lament or the book of Lamentations feel prescient.

And yet, here we are at Lamentation's opening salvo:

How deserted lies the city,
once so full of people!
How like a widow is she,
who once was great among the nations!

So let's be honest one inadequate comfort that I received from reading Lamentations is that things could be worse.

I know people personally who have fled war and scenes like the writer describes: with children starving, people
displaced, bodies dead in the street.

And yet, as a friend recently posted you can drown as readily in a foot of water as 30 feet. There is no reason to downplay our personal experiences as we fear for our aged, our children, and their futures, and ourselves as we lose income and a full scope of movement.

There is plenty of trouble to drown within.

Moreover, God never issued forth valedictions forbidding mourning. Scripture does not preach stoicism or a stiff upper lip.

God is the friend who let's you cry it out in their presence without rushing to say "there, there, everything is going to be okay."

Or as the writer of Lamentations puts it:

Arise, cry out in the night,
as the watches of the night begin;
pour out your heart like water
in the presence of the Lord.


The writers of Hebrew Scripture are especially unflinching in their insistence that the world is a place filled with an almost overwhelming amount of sorrow. Moments of prosperity and joy are not things that human beings can cling to.

Why?

Well in part because of human sinfulness and this is where lamentations are especially suitable for Lent. Human sinfulness is constantly destroying human community and prosperity.

I know we don't like to talk about sin, but how else can we describe members of congress quickly selling off their stocks and buying shares in online meeting platforms?

How else do we describe the arrogance that saw what was happening in China and didn't think it could come to our shores?

How else do we describe the people partying on the beaches even as they are told that they are putting other people's lives in mortal danger?

How else do we describe years and years of tax cuts for the wealthiest and most powerful that have left any semblance of a social safety net frayed?

How else do we describe the hoarding of necessary supplies?

How else do we describe the arrogance of public officials that ignored doctors?

And yet, there is also the part that seems to rest on no one's shoulders but God's: the deadly pathogens and the strange biology that has made this virus both deadly and contagious.

Why, Oh God?


Why are you so far from us?

Why have you allowed this calamity fall on us?
Why do the rich prosper and hoard while others suffer?
Who will care for those without homes?
Who will care for the Prisoners? What will we do when there aren't enough ventilators?
How will anything ever be good again?


---------------------------------------

There is always these strange moments of whiplash in the Psalms of lament. Where all of sudden the writer pulls out of their torrent of anguished cries, invectives, and rage against God to express a moment of startling assurance. These always seem too abrupt. Are these forced? Did some later editor come through and feel like these texts needed to be cleaned up? What to make of these? And yet, I think this is how comfort finds us in difficult times. God enters in--if but a moment--powerfully--reminding us that we are loved.

The words of assurance from Lamentations is one of my favorites.


Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.


A song containing the first line was on almost endless repeat on my spotify list this past January:


Have no fear for your life
Turn your cheek, turn your cheek
Bear the yoke of love and death
The Lord will give all life and breath

Because of His great Love
We are not overcome
Because of His great Love
We are not overcome


May these words seep into your soul this morning--and mine--we are loved, we will not be consumed.

Julian of Norwich and Hope

Hope is not looking on the bright side of things, although looking on the bright side doesn't hurt. Hope is not optimism. Optimism predicts that things are going to be okay. Hope is something different. When I think about hope it is helpful for me to reference Julian of Norwich. For her Hope always rests not on the circumstances of our life, but on who God is and who God has promised to be. One of my most treasured lines from Julian is the following:


“If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.”

A good friend of mine and one of the greatest teachers I ever studied with, Amy Laura Hall, recently wrote a wise and wonderful book on Julian of Norwich. I had the privilege of reviewing it here.

The book is a powerful reflection on what Julian's theology means to our present moment and Julian's work becomes all the more prescient in the time of an epidemic. Julian was writing in the shadow of the great plague. Her own window into the sufferings of Jesus were shaped in part by her own travail of sickness.

Julian insists that Christians see God as not only "all powerful" and "all knowing," but also as all-loving (Hall calls this God's omniamnity) In Julian's words:

"Love was without beginning, is, and shall be without ending."

That God is ALL LOVE provides a shape to Christian Hope. Julian's hope is a significant departure from a vision of Christian hope that merely relies on an account of God's power and providence. Hall claims that a vision of Christian hope that places all its eggs in the eschatological basket (things will work out in the end) downplays the drama and the beauty of each individual life. What Hall's account of Julian seeks to recover is the deep personalism of God. Julian envision a God who is powerful enough to hold the entire world like a woman holding a hazelnut, but who is also present with us in each breath and through each of our very human sighs.

As Julian writes in a well known passage:

"He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God."


Hope is not founded only on an eschatological promise that God will make a way for all creation to be with God at some future moment. Hope also rests in the assurance that God is even RIGHT now loving us each into being--each breath we breathe in God and through God.

Hope is not simply looking on the bright side of things and yet I cannot deny that to be hopeful is to be constantly looking for signs of God presence within us and all around. As Jesus would say: look to the lilies of the field; look to the sparrow and remember somehow that God has counted all the hairs on your head.

Finally, something that I am really struggling with is this: is hope something that we do? Or, rather, is hope something that God accomplishes within us? I think that it must be the latter. For Julian hope rest in the absolute fact of the universe that despite all evidence to the contrary that God holds us all firmly and that God has never and will never let us go.

I will find hope in this even if I am not optimistic.

Samuel and Samwise Gamgee

Sam is anxious. This is understandable; we are all anxious. He has had more questions lately when we
say things like the "border is closed." I don't want to worry him, but you can't stifle anxiety or completely soothe it. His older siblings have tried telling him that kids aren't as likely to get really sick (which has led to unhelpful conversations about which one of us might get the most sick.)

Last night I decided on another tactic for dealing with his anxiety. We started watching The Lord of the Rings together. This is not necessarily an obvious choice as it is quite scary, but sometimes you make a judgment call. I am not a exactly a super fan of the Lord of the Rings. I read the books in college. Doug and I read the books to each other while driving across the US when we were first married. I watched the movies in theaters when they came out, but I am not a Stephen Colbert level fan.

But we did name Samuel after Samwise Gamgee.

I think he is a really astonishing character and quite an example of courage.

Samwise has no desire to partake in adventures. He doesn't want to leave the Shire or the comforts of his life there.
What drives him to accompany Frodo on this perilous journey with the ring is friendship and fidelity.

I have treasured these stories so much because they reminded me of why I wanted to become a Mennonite. The world's redemption does not depend
on the brave exploits of armies or wizards. It depends on two little hobbits shaped by a strange set of commitment: a love of simplicity, and home, and each other, shaped by a disdain of power that is exercised over other people. Because of these qualities it is only Hobbits who are able to bear the ring on its perilous journey to Mt Doom to be destroyed. All the other creatures of Middle Earth would be tempted to use the ring.

Hobbits are unlikely heroes and Samwise is an unlikely hobbit to be a hero.

But he has great lines.

And it is because of one of his speeches that I decided that perhaps the best way to help confront Sam's anxiousness is by watching an epic adventure together. Here is Sam encouraging Frodo to keep going:

“I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”

We want our kids to be safe, but the world is not safe and so sometimes we all need to be reminded to brave.

This is why we will also being doing church together. The Bible is a book filled with people trying their best to be brave and hopeful: itinerating with Jesus, trying to walk on water, heading towards tombs guarded by soldiers, resisting imperial edicts, singing in prisons, offering strangers the last bread and oil, protecting bitter mother in laws, facing fiery furnaces.

It isn't a safe book filled with little moral tidbits.

In Scripture as Karl Barth writes:

We are offered the magnificent, productive, hopeful life of a grain of seed, a new beginning, out of which all things shall be made new. One cannot learn or imitate this life of the divine seed in the new world. One can only let it live, grow, and ripen within him. One can only believe — can only hold the ground whither he has been led.


While we read our newspapers and our twitter feeds and see all the reasons there are for fear, may we also be telling ourselves stories familiar and old that remind us that we can be brave.

On sleepless nights and courage

I have woken up the last few nights at 3:16 am.

Seeing the same time three nights in a row made me think of the Fred Roger's documentary I saw recently. He weighed 143 lbs. most of his adult life and every time he saw the scale he would recall the phrase "I love you" -- I (1) Love (4) You (3). He saw this as a reminder of God's love.


When I once again saw 3:16 flashing at me it reminded me of the ubiquitous verse from John:


For God so Love the World that God gave God's only begotten son.


I find in interesting that Fred Rogers looked and found signs for God's accompaniment in mundane signs. What would it mean for me to be more attentive to God's words of comfort and presence breaking in all around me? Would it do me some good as I lay awake: fearful of the darkness of the world and of my own life to turn to these words from John? The words echo strong and familiar always in my memory in the King James Version: only begotten, whosoever, believeth, shall not perish...

I confess that I don't spend a lot of time thinking about "everlasting life." I do spend a lot of time thinking about God's love and what it means to be held by God's love. I believe very fervently in love's redeeming power and that love is able to make a way where there is no way. And it is not that I don't believe in "life eternal." I just don't think about it that much. But maybe I should more. Christianity isn't just a big bag of metaphors. If it is going to matter for my dark nights or anyone's dark night it needs to offer more than just vague promises of community and toothless moralism. Everything that is really, truly worth loving is worth dying for. . . and since that cost is so searing and final there really does need to be more on offer than what this life can give.


And so today I will be praying for the doctors, nurses, hospital cleaning staff, people at the checkouts of grocery stores and pharmacies who are putting their health and lives on the line for other people.

We owe so much to those people who are willing to transcend self-interest and at times like these we are reminded that there can be no morality or goodness or truth without courage.

And I will try to be a bit more brave for my children and for other people who need me to be brave.

And I will look for for cracks in the universe where God might be trying to whisper words of direction and comfort to me.

And yet....

One thing that I keep thinking about that story of Fred Rogers is that there had to have been a day when the scales stopped reading 143. When his cancer advanced...

as he neared death...

When there were no comforting signs in the world around.

And so..

If you can't see God anywhere in any of this... that is okay too.

For right now, I am trying to rest in God's promise in John 3:16

God will be with us beyond the end.

A Crossroads

"Jodie, how many times have I told you.  I don't want to go to church."  These were the words of my Mother the last time she left the family home.  We were taking her to the hospital, but in her confusion she reached for the one place I was always trying to force her towards. It was Boxing Day.  Alongside her dementia she had a severe kidney infection.  My Dad, had called, late on Christmas Day to say that he couldn't care for my Mom anymore.  In the next week, we would discover that Dad needed a quadruple bypass.

That January the health of my parents ebbed and flowed.  I thought at times that I would lose them both.  By the end of January my Mom was gone and my Dad was recovering, ever so tentatively, from his surgery.  

It was at my Mother's bedside, in those critical weeks, that I would first hear the adult version of my call to the ministry.  

When I was a young girl I heard God's call, but I also heard the voice of the minister at my summer camp telling me that God would not call a women.

This calling at my Mother's bedside was different. More a statement of identity than of aspiration.  I was a mediator, a priest.  This was not a job to pursue, this was  a way of being--an orientation that I couldn't escape.

The first 20 years of my life.... I worked so hard to balance commitments that felt at times impossible to reconcile.  My parents--who I loved so deeply--who wanted nothing to do with the church AND my own deep, crazy and passionate love of Jesus.  

Both my parents are gone now.  

Another cold and dark January brings me to another crossroads--a juncture where I feel an excruciating heartbrokenness regarding the church.

The church was always a place of solace and safety for me.  

And yet, at times, I also felt like the church, which would glibly say that my parents were eternally damned, demanded that I abandon and forsake my deepest loves.

What the church offered instead was its claim to righteousness and justice.

And at the time, I was willing to surrender everything for a taste of this other world of God's reign within this world.

............ 

My Dad was never lauded as some holy man.   He made many mistakes in his life.  Yet, for ten years he gently, conscientiously, carefully cared for my Mother.  Comforting her fearful nights, filling her days with pleasant diversions, defending her when people belittled her  --noting that "she was the smartest woman he had ever known and she would be treated with respect." 

------------

The church has demanded much from me-- using the words of Jesus.  Asking me to abandon kith and kin.

AND

I love the church, but not more than vulnerable love.

I love the church,  but not more than the truth

I love the church, but not more than the severe and tireless love of self sacrifice and courage.

And so I sit at this crossroads: 

Knowing that the truth lies somewhere betwixt and between 

more, perhaps,  in the Gospel preached by my parent's broken faithful love than in the glib promises of a church that refuses to lay down its own life and its own reputation.

And I am bereft.