slice of infinity (jill carattini)
http://www.rzim.org/USA/Resources/Read/ASliceofInfinity/TodaysSlice.aspx
"Jonah was a prophet by profession. He knew the liturgy and worship of the people of Israel by heart. So it is not unreasonable that as his life was ebbing away in the depths of the sea, Jonah cried out with the words of a psalm he had certainly heard countless times before. And yet, the words no doubt had a depth of meaning for him unlike anything they had ever had. As he was losing consciousness—literally in Hebrew, "in the feebleness of his person,"—Jonah not only remembered the LORD, but in some ways was seeing Him for the first time. Like one woken to a world both real and imaginary, Jonah quickly clung to what was real.
Jonah's behavior up until this point suggests the mentality that God was not entirely omnipresent, but present only in Israel, in the temple, and in the places of his own interest. As Jonah ran to Tarshish to avoid the call of God to go to Nineveh, he ran believing there was a place he could go where God could not find him. But as he sunk further into the depths of the sea, the prophet realized he was mercifully mistaken. His language seems a play on words—As I was losing consciousness, I remembered the LORD—or else, it was a sudden recognition of the Really Real in the imaginary world he had occupied. Losing consciousness, Jonah was actually gaining it.
Perhaps not wanting to consider the discomfort it would take to uproot our own embedded fallacies, we often minimize the distress that broke Jonah's silence with God. But the popular notion that Jonah went straight from the side of the ship and into the mouth of the fish is not supported by either the narrative as a whole or Jonah's cry for help. H. L. Ellison suggests, "[Jonah] was half drowned before he was swallowed. If he was still conscious, sheer dread would have caused him to faint—notice that there is no mention of the fish in his prayer. He can hardly have known what caused the change from wet darkness to an even greater dry darkness. When he did regain consciousness, it would have taken some time to realize that the all-enveloping darkness was not that of Sheol but of a mysterious safety."(1)
In the mysterious safety of the fish, Jonah shows us the strange world that unwound his imaginary one, and in it, the God who hears. Though the deep surrounded him and reeds were bound to his head, Jonah was heard—and his awareness of this was an essential turning point in his story. In prayer and darkness, Jonah admitted that the role of salvation is not in his hands. If only momentarily, the drowning prophet clung to a truth more hopeful than escapism and more able than idols: "Salvation belongs to the LORD" (2:9).
It is hard to believe that Jonah would have considered being swallowed alive a rescue, and yet it is precisely Jonah's considerations from which he needed to be rescued. At times, the deliverance we need is that of deliverance from ourselves. The reluctant prophet introduces us to the reality of self-deception and what is all too often our ironic refusal to face the face of God. Though our thoughts be wound in self and seaweed, and the depths of our imagined autonomy threaten to drown us, rescue is a valid hope. God is far more real than we often imagine.
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my ideas of the realness of God being challenged over and over again in this exhaustion
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