A profound prayer
Those of you who read last week’s post on an interactive sermon will know that I have just embarked on a preaching series about ‘overheard prayers’. Last week we began with Mary’s simple five word prayer, and this week it is Jonah’s turn. Jonah’s prayer is born out of the most testing of circumstances. In my forthcoming book Jonah:poet in extremis, I describe it as born in the darkness:
Patting around behind him, trying to work out where he was – he realised he was sitting in a pool of gloopy, watery liquid…and beneath him the surface felt like rubber. Was this hell, he wondered? Was this the place where failed prophets came ?If it were, it was no more than he deserved. What was he thinking of to run from the God who stood behind, before and all about? Was there any point, he wondered, in praying down here? Could God hear him, even here? And even if he did –why ever would he answer? ‘Tell me that’– he shouted. But there was no answer, nor even an echo, just a sloshing and plopping in this horrid darkness. Old habits die hard, though – and even a failed prophet knew the psalms from the temple. In the sightless void he spoke aloud in words he’d learned from the temple, weaving, as he went the ancient with the modern…and the words of others with his own anxious cry. And right there, in the squelching darkness, a psalm was born.
As I read those words again, and think of Jonah in his private hell, my thoughts turn back to the San Jose mine in Chile over two years ago. Do you remember the story? Thirty-three miners were trapped underground for 69 days before they were finally lifted, one by agonizing one, to the surface. As they stepped from the Phoenix rescue capsule at the surface many were wearing a tan t-shirt over their overalls bearing a Bible reference: Psalm 95 v.4. “In whose hand are the depths of the earth,The peaks of the mountains are His also.” Some would also talk about their number being 34 because ”God has never left us down here”. I suspect these miners and Jonah would have much to say to each other. In isolation and darkness, with despair snapping at their heels, they had learnt to pray as never before.
You might like to remember them, and others praying out of the darkness, as you listen to Faure’s sublime ‘Libera me domine’ below.
