Photo by A Whistling Train
As noted in an earlier post, this week's first reading at Sunday Mass is from the Book of the Prophet Jonah. I've already encouraged you to read the whole book (a brief 4 chapters, right here - won't take you more than ten minutes) and at least one reader has reported in to say that he did just that.
The portion of Jonah we'll hear this weekend begins after the prophet's three-day stay in the belly of the great fish. This poem by May Sarton offers us Jonah's memory of his "prisoning" and his deliverance. If you click on the link for the photo above you'll see two more photos of this carving of Jonah. On his site, the photographer includes the Canticle of Jonah which I have appended below.
Jonah
I came back from the belly of the whale
Bruised from the struggle with a living wall
Drowning in a breathing dark, a huge heartbeat
That jolted helpless hands and useless feet.
Yet know it was not death, that vital warm
Nor did the monster wish me any harm
Only the prisoning was hard to bear
And three weeks’ need to burst back into air…
Slowly the drowned self must be strangled free
And lifted whole out of that inmost sea
To lie newborn under compassionate sky
As fragile as a babe, with circling eye.
Do not be anxious, for all is well
The sojourn over in that fluid Hell
My heart is nourished on no more than air
Since every breath I draw is answered prayer.
- May Sarton
The Canticle of Jonah
In my distress, I cried out to the Lord,
and he answered me;
from the belly of the grave, I cried out,
and you have heard my voice!
You have thrown me into the depths,
into the heart of the sea,
and the waves rushed in on me from all sides.
All your surge and swell have overwhelmed me.
And I, I kept saying:
I have been rejected from your presence;
how will I ever gaze on your temple again?
The waters closed in about me;
the depths swallowed me up!
Seaweed entwined itself around my head.
There, where the mountains begin to grow,
I went down into the world beneath,
to people who once existed.
But you made my soul rise up from the deep, O Lord, my God!
When I felt my strength failing,
I remembered the Lord,
and my prayer reached you, in your holy temple.
Those who serve nothingness
have abandoned their true loyalty.
As for me, I will offer sacrifice to you to the tune of praise.
The vow I made, I will keep.
All help that saves comes forth from the Lord!
-Jonah, 2:3-10
Jonah reference
-ConcordPastor
I had my entire seventh-grade religious ed class read the Book of Jonah last night, attesting to both its brevity and wit.
ReplyDeleteOne student expressed incredulity at the possibility of a man surviving in the belly of a fish, and another student offered that the story was like that of Jesus, who one wouldn't expect to survive the cross and cave, either. This unprompted exchange led to pointing out the similarity of their "resurrections" in three days.
Jonah's resurrection was the result of his repentance, expressed in his beautiful prayer from the fish's belly. Such an appropriate image, too, of being coughed up out of sinful behavior when we choose to return to the Lord.
Jonah's surprising success in converting the Ninevites is so much like Jesus' startling recruitment of apostles in the Gospel reading. It can encouraging story that shows we need do our best, that the hard work of conversion is accomplished by God in the heart.
I do think a few of the students had been prepared for reading Jonah by the Veggie Tales movie of the same name.
Awesome, Stephen! The Jonah story is very engaging. I always search for images for scripture references and I was amazed at how many light-hearted, cartoon images came up for Jonah and his tale of the whale.
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