Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Fourteen Summary

The Sign of Jonah

April 2–Friday, April 7, 2023

Sunday 
Jonah is indeed a symbol of transformation. Jesus had found the Jonah story inspiring, no doubt, because it described almost perfectly what was happening to him.  —Richard Rohr  

Monday 
Jonah flees because he knows God is merciful. There is no worse situation than a merciful God when you want to see your enemies get what’s coming to them. Jonah wants to do things his way and ends up in the belly of a sea monster. 
—Barbara Holmes 

Tuesday 
Sometimes, it is only in the midst of the “tempest,” in the heart of a storm of circumstances which we can’t control, that we come finally to realise something of the wonderful mystery of God. —Paul Murray 

Wednesday 
Jesus is brought to the lowest place, that place where the all-loving God seems infinitely distant. He enters a universe of utter solitude, meaninglessness, and fragmentation. Like the prophet Jonah, he is overwhelmed by chaos.
—Brother John of Taizé 

Thursday 
Without the sign of Jonah—the pattern of new life only through death (“in the belly of the whale”)—Christianity remains a largely impotent ideology, another way to “win” instead of the pain of faith. —Richard Rohr  

Friday 
When you and I embrace Jesus’ essential paradox—that to lose is to gain and to die is to live—we come to God, who gathers up the broken pieces of the world and makes them more complete and beautiful than they were before they broke. —Rachel M. Srubas 

Week Fourteen Practice

Waiting

For Holy Saturday, we share a poem from Methodist minister Jan Richardson, who invites us to wait faithfully at the tomb, in the “belly of the whale,” trusting in the Resurrection: 

Therefore I Will Hope 
For Holy Saturday
 
“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, 
“therefore I will hope in him.”  
—Lamentations 3:24 

I have no cause  
to linger beside  
this place of death,  

no reason  
to keep vigil  
where life has left,  

and yet I cannot go,  
cannot bring myself  
to cleave myself  
from here,   

can only pray  
that this waiting  
might yet be a blessing  
and this grieving  
yet a blessing  
and this stone  
yet a blessing  
and this silence  
yet a blessing 
still.  

“Therefore I Will Hope” © Jan Richardson from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons. Used by permission. www.janrichardson.com

Image credit: A path from one week to the next—Jenna Keiper, North Cascades Sunrise. Jenna Keiper, Photo of a beloved artpiece belonging to Richard Rohr (Artist Unknown.) McEl Chevrier, Untitled. Used with permission. Click here to enlarge image. 

One of Richard Rohr’s favorite art pieces about the prophet Jonah and the whale. 

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