Wednesday, March 13
Readings: JON 3:1-10; LK 11:29-32
Today we hear a section from the story of Jonah, and then hear Jesus cite that story.
The basics of the story: Jonah gets a calling from God to go to the city of Ninevah. Jonah goes in the other direction! Eventually he gets thrown off the ship, gets swallowed up and sits in the belly of a great fish for 3 days and is spit out at Ninevah. Jonah gets same calling a second time and follows it. He preaches the message and the people immediately take him seriously and change their ways! Even the king (in today’s reading) changes his ways and decrees that everyone must do the same.
Jesus uses the story to say to the people around him, “You know that story of how people changed their lives based on Jonah’s teaching? Well you have someone in front of you who is more than Jonah and you’re ignoring everything I’m saying!”
Who or what do we look to in order to help us change our ways? What evidence do we need that change is necessary?
I think about today’s story in light of things like the global climate crisis or racism. For years, we have had “prophets” coming to us in a various forms saying that we needed to change or we will be destroyed. Have we heeded those warning? What will it take for us to fundamentally and collectively address these realities?
It certainly helps when you have the king on board (!) but there is a lot that is ours to do in this equation.
One of my mentors in anti-racism work, Dr. Ken Hardy, says that change has three phases: Seeing, Being and Doing. So often, we move to the “doing” part because it feels good and necessary. Yet he stresses that we need deep work around seeing the connections and how the problem(s) manifest around us and the self-awareness (being) of how that problem lives inside of us.
Ken Hardy calls the “Seeing, Being and Doing” soul work, and this is precisely what it is.
There is much that requires our conversion in this world in order to be in right relationship with each other and the planet, and there’s a deep interconnectivity among the myriad issues we face.
This Lent, I’d invite you to pick something that you’d like to track for 40 days. Try to notice it in your life, in the world and in others. Explore how it operates. Explore how it got into you and what reinforces it and makes it stronger and what weakens it. And then lean into it and take action.
For example, many Catholics around the country this year are “giving up plastics” during Lent. They are trying to notice where plastic shows up in their lives (it’s everywhere!) and trying to shift their relationship to it. But this means we’d need to have done the deeper inner work to give up some of our much valued convenience in order to forgo plastic, Styrofoam and various forms of packaging. It might mean changing where we shop, what we buy or altering what we use. It could mean an entire lifestyle makeover!
The aim is not to get overwhelmed. It is to stay on the journey. Pick something and stay with it in your own process of “conversion” for 40 days and see what happens. If we hear nothing else today, it’s that people can change their ways. We just need the will.
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