In the belly of the Word/5 - Understand what God does for us and learn to pray again
Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 17/03/2024
Ahèr: - You were swallowed by a whale.
Ionà: - The shaking of the waves ceased, everything was calm inside. Under my feet, but on the ceiling, a slow, full heartbeat, accompanying my breathing and making me drowsy. I surrendered to that rocking motion and traced back my ages: a boy on a swing, a baby in a cradle, further back to the sac of placenta where my mother's heartbeat echoed and my blood followed its rhythm. Music is learned before birth by repeating the solfeggio of maternal heartbeat in the vein of the eardrum.
Erri de Luca, Dialogue between Jonah and an Inquisitor
Spiritual gratitude is a capital asset of individuals and communities. At first it is transmitted to us by osmosis from parents and grandparents, and it becomes that existential posture that leads to attributing the most important components of our gifts and talents to the generosity of life, to providence, to God. It is a delicate and strong invitation to keep a hole open in the roof of the house of the soul towards the sky, so that we can point to it with our hand when someone praises us for our good deeds - ‘not me, but God ...’. It is the opposite attitude to that proposed today by meritocracy, which instead pushes us to read our successes (and the failures of others) as the exclusive result of our merits (and their demerits) - mass ingratitude is the first note of meritocratic societies.
“Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish saying, “I called to the LORD out of my distress and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried and you heard my voice. You cast me into the deep...Then I said, “I am driven away from your sight ".... yet you brought up my life from the Pit, O LORD my God.... But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the LORD!” (Jonah 2:2-10). Having experienced the warm womb of God who welcomed and saved him, Jonah prayed there. The text gives us a prayer in the form of a psalm, a very important and beloved literary genre in the Bible (and beyond). It is composed on the basis of quotations from many Psalms (16, 69,88,89,120) and we find the same beauty and spiritual strength in it. The author imagines Jonah praying after he has already been saved, while he remembers and praises God for the salvation obtained.
Inside, the great fish Jonah learned to pray again - if he was a prophet, he already knew how to pray. So in this psalm we can find a grammar of the art of beginning to pray again after a great trial that had taken away our faith or had taken away our prayer, or both - on earth there are faiths without prayers and prayers without faith, both experiences almost always fully human, no less spiritual and true than many prayers of believers.
Jonah began to pray because he recognized God as the cause of his salvation from the waters. He recognized him as a liberator from the sea waves and from the moral hell where he had fallen, starting in a stubborn and contrary direction to the good one. He recognized God as a liberator, so he called him by his first biblical name, because the God of the Bible is many things, but first and foremost he is a liberator from every form of slavery, a giver of freedom. Therefore, in that womb, Jonah had an experience of being given freedom. In the repertoire of human freedoms there are some that are the result of self-liberation, the result of a tiring and arduous personal journey that ends the escape from the abyss. But there are others, indeed the majority, where freedom is liberation, when at a certain point, almost always when we had lost our last hopes, a hand arrives, visible or invisible, which on the other side of the waters lowers for us "the drawbridge" (J. Taubes), to announce that that slavery is over. In that good and feminine womb Jonah experienced this second type of freedom-liberation and thus began to pray again - perhaps we pray little because we can no longer see a hand behind the raising of the drawbridges of our prisons. There is God at the beginning of prayer and praise, we know that. But if we fail to recognize the presence and action of God in that act of salvation, no recognition-gratitude is triggered. To rediscover (or find) faith and therefore start praying again, the objective fact of salvation is not enough: there is a need for a subjective experience that associates that fact with a spiritual presence. Faith is a relational good: seeing a presence, recognizing it and finally calling it by name: "Rabbunì". This is also why God needs us and our freedom, because without our recognition the logos cannot become our flesh. I like to imagine the presence of God in the world as someone who waits meekly and silently, hopes and prays that sooner or later we manage to identify his hand behind our doors, and even if we cannot, he remains there, in another stabat: "Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me. ” (Rev. 3:20).
While (and we are in the second movement of prayer) Jonah recognized the hand of God-YHWH in that extraordinary liberation, from recognition came gratitude. Jonah became grateful. Recognition is the father, recognition-gratitude is the daughter. Gratitude is a word before existence, it is impossible to grow and live without practicing it at least a little. But Jonah's gratitude was different: that recognition of salvation generated spiritual gratitude to God. There are many grateful people, capable of gratitude, without living or knowing gratitude to God, and this lack does not reduce the ethical value of their human gratitude. In order for the spiritual gratitude that is initially given to us, to last into adulthood, it needs to become an experience of salvation during a ‘great storm’, when at the end of a nocturnal struggle the angel blesses us and changes our name - in Jonah's fight there are many of his biblical friends, and among these Jacob-Israel. In French ‘recognition’ and ‘gratitude’ are the same word: reconnaissance.
The verse in the centre of the Psalm of Jonah is very important: You cast me into the deep. Why did Jonah attribute his plunge into the deep to God, why did he make him responsible for his misfortune? So far the text has told us exactly the opposite: it was Jonah who had disobeyed God and instead of going to Nineveh had embarked for Tarshish, where during the storm he was thrown into the sea as a ‘scapegoat’ sacrificed to save the sailors. Where did this prayer come from? Some have tried to see an ironic tone in it- I do not share the reading of the book of Jonah as an ironic text, for me it is much more. We must look elsewhere for a possible explanation.
If we read Jonah from the wisdom perspective of the Psalms and Job, we understand that within this spiritual horizon nothing that happens to us is outside the will of God. Associating YWHW also with our misfortunes and those of others, even the absurd ones, was the ‘cost’ that biblical humanism had to bear in order not to dissociate God from human history and our daily stories, turning him into a harmless and banal god. Because, according to the Bible, if God is not behind-within everything, he is not behind-within anything. Job manages to save his faith by blaming God for his blameless misfortune. If we push this radical and fascinating thesis to its fullest extent, we must say that God was also behind Jonah's no, without denying that Jonah was truly free to disobey. Jonah freely chose not to obey YHWH's command: it was not God who told him to go to Tarshish and board that ship, he decided to do it himself. But once saved, Jonah the prophet felt that there was a deeper will than his own freedom that had wanted that disobedience. Jonah therefore had a similar, albeit symmetrical, experience to that of Joseph with his brothers. After they had sold him to the Ishmaelite merchants, Joseph ended up alive and powerful, saved his brothers in Egypt, recognized them, forgave them and finally said to them: " And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you " (Gen 45: 5). His brothers had sold him; but Joseph felt that on a deeper level that ‘being cast out from home’ was within a greater process of love that was fully revealed to him only at the end.
It is not rare for this experience of Jonah (and Joseph) to be repeated in the life of those who honestly follow a voice. You receive a call, you answer, you set out, you begin a journey. One day, each with a different (and similar) reason, you feel you must change direction. You go in the opposite direction, find yourself on the wrong ship. A storm breaks out, you feel death is near, but at the bottom of the deep and hell, a hand picks us up and saves us. One of the things we understand in this descent into hell and back, is the awareness that in that free setting out there was someone or something that had driven us out - ‘I am driven away from your sight’. We really understand that we had not left, fled, run away: we had been driven away. A first level of analysis immediately leads us to identify the culprits of that expulsion in specific people and events, and this phase is painful and difficult, generating a lot of anger and poison. But if we can go all the way, we can reach another level of truth. On another day, perhaps in a good womb, we realize that, without knowing it or wanting it, those people who had expelled us while we thought we had escaped freely (and it was also true) were reciting a part of a script that someone had written for them. Faith is not needed to find this second level of the world, to believe that someone is God - it is a useful hypothesis but not absolutely necessary (if it was so, too many people would be condemned to a sad eternal anger).
We emerge from long and painful trials of existence if and when one day, a blessed bright day, we can recognize a kind hand in the events that have complicated and sometimes ruined our lives. A hand that we feel is true, beyond self-consolations, just as true and even more so than was our choice to leave. And that truth, at last, sets us free with another, greater freedom. It's all grace. The most beautiful spring begins, sometimes you even learn to pray again.
"Then the LORD spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out onto the dry land" (2:11).
