This morning I share with you three stories, each reflecting one aspect of a journey I am on right now, a spiritual journey to bring God home to my life.
In the cinematic rendering of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy's song, "Somewhere over the Rainbow," is a lament. In her life so much is missing; it is riddled with disappointment, limitations and grievances. Trapped at home, Dorothy dreams of escape. "Birds fly over the rainbow," she sings, "why, then, oh why can't I?" Soon her wish is granted. A great tornado conspires to lift her over the rainbow. Suddenly far from home, her life metamorphosed from black and white to Technicolor, Dorothy experiences a profound sense of loss, missing all that she once had begrudged or taken for granted.
"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also," Jesus teaches. As long as Dorothy imagines her treasure to be beyond the rainbow, her heart is unfulfilled. Only when she returns from her Kodachrome adventures does everything appear in a new, more gracious light. That is to say, Dorothy's dream does come true, but not in a way that she could possibly have imagined. Back from beyond the rainbow, she perceives in the linings of her everyday existence a beauty that before had eluded her. Discovering through experience that beyond the rainbow there is no treasure, she arrives at an awareness that her heart's treasure was at home all along. Only then does she abandon wishful thinking in exchange for what might be called "thoughtful wishing." Upon returning home, thankful for all she once took for granted and begrudged, Dorothy remembers to wish for what she already has. Of all of our wishes, this wish alone will surely will come true.
Etched in my soul, and by far the most haunting memory of my childhood, is a fantasy of death. It first took hold of me sometime after my family moved to Washington, D. C. when I was eight years old. I can't remember how often I succumbed to its allures, but I recall both what triggered it (always a brutal argument with my mother) and the time of day when these battles took place (right before bed). In each instance, a lie precipitated our melee. When my mother caught me lying, I (not content to leave bad enough alone) would confabulate a string of new lies designed to help me weasel free from the first one. What finally piqued her anger into fury, whether my transparent mendacity or my panic-driven tears, I'm not certain. Given the premium placed on happiness in our household, probably the latter. In either case, possessed by my favored demon (naked fear), I spun out of control, my mother's anger intensifying until it reached a fevered pitch. Invariably, the battle ended with me in total humiliation and banished to my room.
More vivid in memory than the struggle itself is its aftermath. After sobbing uncontrollably for a few minutes, I would launch my mind into a sea of self-pity. Into this blood red sea sailed my fantasy of death.
Running away from home, I crawl out of my bedroom window into the snowy night. Wearing only my pajamas, I wander through the bitter cold into the woods between our house and my elementary school. I fall into a snowdrift. Never have I felt so all alone. And then I die. The snow stops and morning dawns. A schoolmate finds me lifeless in the snow, bursts into tears and rushes off to tell my parents. "Come quickly. Forrest is dead." My parents hadn't missed me. They didn't even notice I had run away. Hastening to my side and falling to their knees to embrace my body, they beg me to awaken. My father becomes distant. My mother moans in disbelief. Through tears of self-recrimination and overcome by grief, she pities me with all her heart.
At this moment in my imagined melodrama, the floodgate opens once again, my self-pity magnified by the specter of me dead, my mother's lamentations almost too poignant to bear. But not quite, for with this I rewind my fantasy of death and play it back again, retouching each reprise with embellishments to augment its pathos: ripped pajamas; my beloved sock monkey frozen to my breast; my little naked arms; my mother's perfect hair blowing wild in the wind; the dark sun; the snow on my forehead.
And then, interrupting my fantasy, the bedroom door opens. A crack of light pierces the darkness, and in slips my mother. Sitting down on the bed, she leans over and hugs me. She says she's sorry, confessing how very much she loves me. We cry together. She cradles me in her arms, my sobbing subsides, and inexpressible calm settles over me. I shut my eyes. My mother rocks me gently until I drift off to sleep. When I awaken in the morning, my fantasy of death is but a distant dream.
When I was a child, my parents were more Godlike than was the little God I prayed to at suppertime and before bed. Though I was surely not conscious of this on a daily basis, the above nightmare reminds me of how absolute my need for their love must have been. My childhood could not have been less traumatic, yet a single fight and its aftermath (the imagined withdrawal of my mother's approval) could plunge me into a sense of complete abandonment. At times such as these, just how complete my feeling of hopelessness was is mirrored in the desperate measures my mind concocted to reclaim her affection: running away from home and dying alone.
Death is the ultimate escape fantasy. As anyone who has flirted with suicide knows, killing oneself not only represents the most perfect act of revenge; it also guarantees an end to pain. As a painkiller, the idea of suicide can be incredibly seductive. And as a curtain call as well. The center of attention, we are able to treat ourselves to a gift of which life and others have heretofore denied us the full pleasure. To fantasize about our own death, and other people's shocked remorse over it, permits us to cry at our own funeral. In addition, it bequeaths the bittersweet pleasure of imagining others crying for us, shedding tears that we had longed for unrequitedly during our lifetime. Triggered by depression, this kind of thinking may even be instinctive. But, when viewed in a more balanced light, as my nightmare reveals, the logic behind it's passion play is at once completely "counter-intuitive" and irrational. Think about it. To recapture my mother's love, I fantasized my death. More than a matter of "looking for love in all the wrong places," this represents hiding from the very thing one seeks.
This childhood fantasy of mine also reflects the basic elements of our most familiar archetypal tale of sin and redemption. First, I abandon love in search for love; flee home to find the comforts of home; destroy myself in order to be saved. Then, through no act of my own, I receive love, find home and experience salvation. I receive my heart's desire not by virtue of my willfulness or self-pity (which in fact prove dysfunctional). Salvation instead comes to me uncoerced and undeserved, like grace. All I contribute to my own redemption is to long for it and to be willing to receive it when it comes.
Throughout this little drama, my mother plays the role of a traditional Judeo-Christian God. She punishes me for my sin and then forgives me, each an act of love. I play the role of a two-bit Jonah. I sin, run away from God, cast myself into the sea, and at the moment when everything seems lost, am saved. The story of Jonah is far more nuanced, of course. For one thing, until the very end at least, Jonah knows what is happening to him. Beyond this, he takes flight from God for a nobler reason than that which prompted me to fanaticize running away from home. Nonetheless, this well-known tale from the Hebrew Scriptures fits the same archetype. Jonah jumps from God's arms only to have God catch him.
Jonah doesn't want to be a prophet. As so often is the case, where there are many openings few apply. And it's hard to blame him. A true prophet must suffer. So when God calls Jonah, and says to him, "Arise and go to the great city of Nineveh, go now and denounce it, for its wickedness stares me in the face," Jonah runs away from God. He books passage on the next ship out, not to Nineveh but in precisely the opposite direction. Almost at once Jonah's ship runs into high seas and then a mighty storm. White-capped waves crash over the bow. Should the storm continue, the ship will surely go down. Clearly the gods are angry, and soon all eyes turn to Jonah. "Who are you?" the Phonecian sailors cry. "Where do you come from? What have you done wrong?"
"I am a Hebrew," Jonah replies. "And I worship the God of heaven, who made both sea and land. It is my fault that the sea has risen against you. God called upon me and I tried to flee from God. You must throw me overboard," he tells them, "and the sea will go down." Over Jonah goes, and at once the sea grows calm. The ship is saved, and a great fish swallows Jonah. For three days, deep within the belly of the fish, Jonah prays to God, offering up his thanks and promising to pay his vows should God give him a second chance. Wondrously, Jonah's prayers are answered. The fish vomits him up on the beach. Thankful and chastened, this time Jonah fulfills God's will, not his own. He travels straight to Nineveh and denounces its crimes, proclaiming that in forty days Nineveh will be destroyed. But then something wonderful happens. The people listen, their king decrees a period of penitence, and God spares Nineveh.
Having followed God's orders, Jonah of course is furious. He had done his duty, proclaiming the righteous word of God's vengeful justice, and nothing happened. Jonah feels a fool, his honor tarnished. He placed his reputation on the line, but God didn't deliver. Not to mention the fact that justice was not done. So what does Jonah do? He goes out and sits down on the east of the city and sulks. Displaying a divine sense of humor, God ordains that a climbing gourd should grow up over Jonah's head to shade him from the sun. Jonah is grateful for the gourd, but at dawn the next day a worm attacks the gourd and it withers. As if designed to burn away his self-deceit, the sun beats down on Jonah's head. But Jonah will not abandon his newfound virtue. Growing faint, he offers up a final desperate prayer to God, this time for death.
In the course of this brief story, Jonah falls twice-first on account of selfishness, and then of self-righteousness. Yet, having saved the people of Nineveh despite their sins, God will not permit Jonah to destroy himself by self-pity. Instead God asks this leading question: "Are you so angry over the gourd?"
"Yes," Jonah answers, "mortally angry."
God suggests that Jonah consider things more carefully. "You are sorry to lose the gourd, though you did not have the trouble of growing it, a plant that came up in a night and withered in a night. How is it then that I should not be sorry for the great city of Nineveh, with its hundred and twenty thousand who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and cattle without number?"
So ends the Book of Jonah. Everyone is saved: the sailors from Jonah; Jonah from the sea; the people of Nineveh, themselves not Jews, by the God of the Jews; and Jonah once again, this time from himself. No wonder Jonah was so perplexed. God's mercy extends not only to a chosen few, but to all the earth's creatures. As for his personal reward, Jonah is saved first in answer to his prayers, second despite his pride, but each time only after having tried to liberate himself from the rock of his salvation.
There are many paths to take when we run away from God. And many reasons to run. A sense of unfulfillment in our lives as they are. Fear or anger. Self-pity. Self-righteousness. Disappointment with ourselves or others. Almost always pride. Yet almost any moment, however far we have wandered away from our true home, we can bring God home to us. Over the coming weeks, I shall offer a few suggestions that have worked for me. Perhaps you will find them to be of some small guidance for your own spiritual journey. As for now, as suggested by the stories I have shared this morning, the one thing I can promise you is this. However circuitous and arduous our journey may be, the key to spiritual fulfillment is always in our pocket. By no accident, this same key unlocks our hearts.
Amen. I love you. May God bless us all. Copyright AllSouls 2001.