A Story of Transformation
Friday, July 11, 2025
In the CAC’s Living School: Essentials of Engaged Contemplation, Father Richard shares how the story of Jonah became so important to him and his framework of transformation:
Soon after I moved to New Mexico in the late 1980s, I began my studies for what would become the men’s rites of passage. I read everything I could on why every ancient culture deemed it necessary in to initiate the male. It seemed that no culture assumed that men would grow up naturally, because nothing in the male wants to descend. He wants to ascend; he wants to be number one. It’s the competitive nature of masculinity, which has totally informed our culture, no matter who we are. Something has to break through that level of consciousness.
For me, there is no story—other than the Jesus story itself—which has made that quite as clear as Jonah’s story. Here we have a man who is running from God, running from his own vocation, and God sends a fish to swallow him and take him where he would rather not go. That’s perfect! That’s initiation! We have to be swallowed by something bigger than ourselves. The phrase used by many, including Thomas Merton, was that we have to go into the “belly of the beast”—a place where we are not in control, where we can’t fix it, explain it, understand it, or even like it. Our lack of control, our lack of preference isn’t important. We just have to learn from it.
I’ve always made a great deal of the passage where Jesus says, “This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign, but no sign will be given except the sign of Jonah” (Luke 11:29). He is saying that his message is simple and clear: You’ve got to die before you die. In rites of initiation we teach people that they have to go down before they can possibly go up. In modern psychological language, we call it the death of the ego or the separate self……perhaps even surrender. What has to die is our sense of separateness, because what goes with separateness is superiority. Once we define ourselves according to our nationality, culture, religion, or identity, then we feel we have to defend each one of those. What a waste of energy! We sink to scolding and blaming; not just are we “number one,” but everybody else is a second-class citizen.
That’s how dualistic our thoughts become. When the private ego didn’t die, Christianity even made salvation into a victory trip, thinking we knew who “won.” To undergo the sign of Jonah feels like losing, and by worldly standards, it looks like it, too. The sign of Jonah is a symbol of surrender, of letting go, of giving up. Most of us wouldn’t describe those as the stages of the journey of enlightenment, but they’re much closer to the real truth and the real journey.
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John Chaffee 5 on Friday
1.
“Hope is optimism with a broken heart.”
– Nick Cave, American Songwriter
Hope is often seen as the inverse of despair.
This makes sense, too. Despair is often seen as demobilizing, as something that takes away our initiative. Hope is understood as giving more energy to a task.
However, optimism can seem immature or ungrounded in reality. Sometimes optimism feels as though it operates in a reality that does not exist. Optimism can seem as though it fails to see the difficulties in life.
That may be why I like this quote. Or, perhaps it is because I know what it is like to have a broken heart at the state of the world.
Hope looks at the world with eyes wide open, recognizing that the world can be a mix of beauty and disappointment.
2.
“It takes such holy audacity to choose a new path when the old ways turn into dead ends for you.”
– Thomas Keating, Trappist Monk
The idea of starting over from scratch, even after decades of walking down a particular path, can feel terrifying.
However, for Thomas Keating to say that it takes “holy audacity”? Yeah. I can jive with that.
To start completely over and to course correct is no easy task, but it is a holy one. In my lifetime, I can look back and see several points at which I was given the choice to either double down on what I thought I knew or allow my worldview to be rewritten entirely.
This has happened to me not only in my actual life but also in my spiritual life.
So yes, “holy audacity” feels like the right thing to call it.
3.
“Everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that is illuminated becomes a light itself.”
We tend to keep things in the dark, don’t we?
We often fear that keeping something in the dark will cause it to grow when we expose it to the light. But this is always how monsters grow, in the shadows.
What is beautiful about this passage of Scripture is the second half.
“Everything that is illuminated becomes a light itself.”
By shining a light on the dark things, they do not grow… Rather, they are transformed into lights themselves. Perhaps this is what the Christian mystics mean when they say that Christ’s wounds have become his glory? The very things that we wish to avoid might be the thing that lights our path to something better, if we allow the light of God to expose, illuminate, and transform them.
4.
“The metamorphosis of Jesus Christ from a humble servant of the abject poor to a symbol that stands for gun rights, prosperity theology, anti-science, limited government that neglects the destitute, and fierce nationalism is truly the strangest transformation in human history.”
– Rainn Wilson, Actor (Best Known as Dwight Schrute from The Office)
Well, what do you think about that?
A famous actor, who does not identify as a Christian, can speak a hard truth that many other Christians in the West cannot.
We all can make God in our image, but it feels as though things have hit a fever pitch in the West. I say this because some people who believe that Jesus stands for what Rainn says above, cannot even seem to engage Bible passages that challenge them.
It is almost as if we want a Jesus who validates our presuppositions and pre-conceived values rather than a Jesus who topples our idols and redefines the loves of our hearts…
Am I off on my own in this train of thought? What do you think?
5.
“Those who believe that they have ‘arrived’ have merely found another way to wrap themselves up in filthy, stinking pride.”
– The Cloud of Unknowing by Anonymous (Trans. by Carmen Acevedo Butcher)
Ooof. This was a good one.
For nearly two decades, I worked in Church ministry. I honestly loved it, and still miss certain aspects of it. However, one thing I don’t miss is the pressure to feel like I’ve “arrived.” I never fully felt free to say that I, myself, was still learning and growing.
So what would that be called? Is that a form of impostor syndrome? Except that on top of that, it was also dependent on my paycheck to seem like I had all the final answers! Imagine going down that road another 2 decades? That did not feel spiritually healthy to me.
The best thing, it seems, we can do is to constantly confess and profess that we are beginners on this spiritual path. This does not mean not to have a tradition, mine always has been and always will be the Christian tradition. But I will say that it has been enormously liberating to settle into the fact that I barely know anything at all.
Did you know that the French word “amateur” comes from the Latin “amator” which means “lover”?
Never be an expert, always be an amateur; they are still in love with what they are chasing after.
