In the Holy Space Between Stimulus and Response

A Reflection for  III Epiphany                       All Saints’ Episcopal , Southern Shores, N.C. 

January 25, 2015                                           Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Jonah 3:1-5, 10                Psalm 62: 6-14        1 Corinthians 7: 29-31            Mark 1:14-20

In the Holy Space Between Stimulus and Response

A couple weeks ago I reminded you about Victor Frankl, a philosopher, psychotherapist and Nazi concentration camp survivor, whose most important book was Man’s Search for Meaning.  I quoted him when he wrote: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” One of the things I see in today’s lessons is that space between stimulus and response. I call it holy space because this is where we go into the depth of our being to find true meaning.

The first lesson is from the Book of Jonah, a comic story by a Hebrew writer in the 4^th Century BC which is set in the 8^th Century BC. In the 4^th Century the debate is going on in Jerusalem about whether non-Jews are part of God’s love. On one hand you have people like Ezra who want Jewish men to put away their foreign wives and children, and on the other side you have the Book of Ruth and Jonah who urge the Jewish people to share the love of their God with outsiders. 

Jonah, as you remember, gets a call from God to go to Nineveh, that Great city. The call is the stimulus and Jonah runs away from that call as his response. He already knows that he would hate to go to Nineveh because as he says, “The inhabitants do not know their right from their left.” He is not talking about people who are directionally-challenged.  I was one of those people about whom people used to say, “No, your other left”, when I messed up.  In the middle East, where there is not that much water to waste on washing hands and limited amounts of paper, the right hand was used for eating and the left was used for cleaning up after bodily functions; so a person who does not know their right from their left is not someone with whom a ritually pure person as Jonah would want to associate. Nineveh was also the city whose main deity was the Goddess Ishtar, the Assyrian Goddess of love, war, fertility, and sexuality. This is not a place for a good Jewish boy.

The Jonah story from the Ikon Studio

Instead of looking deep into his soul, Jonah runs away. In his adventures to get away from the call of the ground of his being, he will get tossed into the ocean, a Middle Eastern symbol of chaos, and he is swallowed by a large fish. Interestingly enough, some scholars suggest that the name for the city Nineveh is seen in ancient cuneiform text as a fish surrounded by an enclosure, which adds this nice touch of Jonah running away from “the enclosure of a fish” and ending up enclosed by a fish. In the same way that Jonah wanted to escape the chaos of the city, he is swallowed by the chaos of the sea. In the same way that Jonah wanted to run from being made unclean, he ends up in the unclean digestive system of a fish. A couple of nice touches that demonstrate that there is no way to get away from God.

In the belly of the fish, he has to stop running and he enters into prayer. In a blog on Jonah written by Old Testament scholar, Kathryn Schifferdecker, she quotes from Aldous Huxley’s poem Jonah, but this is the full poem written on Christmas 1917:

A cream of phosphorescent light
Floats on the wash that to and fro
Slides round his feet-enough to show
Many a pendulous stalactite
Of naked mucus, whorls and wreaths
And huge festoons of mottled tripes,
With smaller palpitating pipes
Through which some yeasty liquor seethes.

Seated upon the convex mound
Of one vast kidney, Jonah prays
And sings his canticles and hymns,
Making the hollow vault resound
God's goodness and mysterious ways,
Till the great fish spouts music as he swims. 

Jonah can no longer escape, and in the belly of the fish, he enters into Holy Space where he is aware of the full present. The past is gone and the future has no meaning and God is present in the eternal now.

 It is that space that Paul is writing about when he writes to the Corinthians in the Epistle lesson for today. He reminds them that all of life is Holy Time, and we are called to live into the eternal now where everything is passing away as we focus on what is really important. All the things that we spend so much energy on are seen as transient, and we go deeper into a sense of meaning for our lives. Now before I get flak from at least one person about treating my wife as if I have none, I should remind you that in the Corinthian culture, “wives” were not seen as soulmates or even full human beings, but they were property, a possession one used for one’s own benefit. I think that Paul is saying, “Hey, it is not all about you; it is about finding a deeper meaning in this world than what in your balance sheet of possessions or what people think about you. Go deeper into the core of your being to see how you are connected to all things, visible and invisible.”

In today’s Gospel lesson from Mark, Jesus is continuing the ministry of John the Baptizer and urging people to repent - a word that does not mean that you need to be sorry or guilty, but means to turn around, to “change one’s mind” and see the world in a different way, to go deeper and see the Kingdom of God that is not somewhere after we die but here and now. This Kingdom of the Heavens is the Kingdom that we ignore as we pay allegiance to all the petty tyrants of this life that claim our obedience and loyalty - the tyranny of our appetites and our egos. The fishermen make the choice in that Holy Space between the stimulus of the call from Jesus and their response of leaving their jobs as fishermen and becoming disciples. Mark wants to tell us that they made the choice “immediately”. Yet as we go through the rest of the Gospel, as the disciples walk with Jesus, the Holy Space for the choice continues as they see more and more depth in their call - the call to follow Jesus into death itself and beyond.

I remember years ago when I was an undergraduate trying out to figure out my call to the priesthood. My response to the stimulus was to run away and say that I really didn’t believe in God. God kept showing up and the call kept coming back, and I managed to hold off making the choice for thirteen years. Finally I went to seminary, and I vowed I would never be a Parish Priest. I would be a college chaplain and teach Social Work and Counseling. The laughter you hear is God’s response to human plans. I found that I loved parish work. Six months after being a college chaplain, I was ordained a Priest.  That was 30 years ago last week. A year and a half later, I ended up as a Parish Rector in Lynchburg, Virginia which was where Jerry Falwell ruled his empire of what he called the Moral Majority, and I had sworn I would never go there. I don’t think there is ever an end to listening to calls and making responses after we go through Holy Space.

I think God is calling each of us to do ministry. What is you calling? What are you running away from? What does your holy space feel like? What is your response so far?