Myself and the Whale

The first biblical story that made a lasting impact on me was Jonah and the Whale. This story is very commonly told to children attending church, like myself, probably because of the visual of the big fish eating Jonah. Or maybe it was because The Little Mermaid was also very popular at that time. The underworld below the ocean has always fascinated me, however I believed this story about as much as I believed in the Mermaid story.

“How did Jonah survive in the whale for three days?” A younger me asked.

“It’s a miracle of God’s doing.”

“But, how does it work? Could we use whales for transport?”

“No, that’s ridiculous.”

I probably had terrible Sunday school teachers, or they were fed up with me because I had already earned the labels of Spaz and Smart-Ass. I had the same questions about several of the miracles presented in the stories told in the bible and usually received an answer along the lines of: “Thou shall not test the Lord’s will.”

This answer was simply unacceptable to me and as a result I ended up an atheist before I had even knew the word ‘atheist’. Why follow a god that can turn water into wine, multiply fish and bread, and save sailors thrown off boats via whales if he reveals none of his secrets? Why am I forbidden from even attempting to know and understand the workings of this trickster god?

It all seemed incredibly cruel to me. A solution to world hunger used as a party trick to gain the ancient equivalent of Facebook likes and follows. Am I expected to just be impressed and fall in line?

I’ve been called mechanically minded when I was young. Still to this day my curiosity leads me to wanting to understand the engineering of the world. My focus has always been on how to master the workings of the physical world and indeed I saw nearly everything through these lenses.

I figured being a priest would be a great profession if I desired to manipulate other people, for both sinister and non-sinister reasons alike. But I wasn’t interested in that. I wanted to turn water into wine, multiply food, and master whale-based transportation.

After I figured out I couldn’t do any of that I turned to computers. Very suiting for someone like me who usually takes things too literally. Computers are entirety created by man without ambiguity and therefore very practically masterable. I found my church coming out of a CRT monitor at 60 Hz.

Years pass and I found myself disregarding the entirety of the Bible as simply a catalyst for civilization. That is something that was once necessary to move forward but no longer required or relevant. Fairy tales one would grow up with but discard as you enter adulthood, not unlike that Mermaid story.

Recently when browsing YouTube I found a snippet of a lecture by professor Jordan Peterson with his own interpretation of the Jonah and the whale story. He yielded right away the idea of literally surviving in a belly of a whale for three days as absurd. The story, by his account, isn’t really about the whale.

The story goes Jonah was commanded by God to go on a mission. Jonah refuses and flees onto a ship leading far, far away from his objective. While he sleeps under the deck of this ship, a storm begins to brew.

Ancient people did not understand the weather. Hell, still tons of people today reject the most modern understanding of it. Ancient people believed weather happened for a reason. A very real and supernatural reason. And so the story continues.

The sailors are nearly brought to a panic as the storm’s intensity continues to grow. God must be angry at someone on this ship. All the sailors knew they were sinners in one fashion or another so they drew straws to see who would be the first to jump ship.

Jonah draws the short straw and then owns up to it and admits: “It’s me and my fault. God gave me a mission and I refused to even attempt.” It seems Jonah was unable to forget what he thought he needed to do and couldn’t bare letting others suffer for his own faults. Thus he casts himself off the boat and into the vast ocean.

The storm calms down. Jonah gets a glimpse of the calm as he is taken down into the underworld. Into the metaphorical chaos under the sea.

There are no musical numbers with singing crabs and dancing starfish in the belly of a whale. It’s dark, you get tossed about, stuck your own lonely prison cell, and maybe eaten by a even bigger fish. I can’t imagine any of the sailors were ecstatic about seeing Jonah swallowed up either, but they were powerless to stop it.

After much contemplation Jonah comes to terms to what he must do. God decides to give Jonah another chance and releases him from the whale and he crawls to shore. Now with intent, despite initially not wanting to, he goes forward with his mission.

If you run from your mission you’ll find yourself in chaos and suffering needlessly. Even if that mission seems painful it’ll be worse if you run. And if you run too far you might just end up dead or close to it.

So, what is your mission? That’s whatever you have in your head that you think you should do, that you know you should do. I ask you, dear reader, how much time do you waste per day on average? By your own account, how much time do you think you waste? Asking myself this question and answering honestly I didn’t particularly enjoy my own answer.

I’m not referring to simply time spent in leisure. Everybody needs and probably deserves some time off. After thinking about my overindulgence in time wasting, I clearly knew of something better to do. You only ‘waste’ time if you know better and that there’s something you’re running from. Boredom would be a good indicator of that.

The Bible clearly isn’t a rational story on how the world works. It uses ancient assumptions to tell stories to it’s target audience at the time, ancient people. As we’ve become more knowledgable about the world it seemed to me that the Bible would be obsoleted, but now I think there’s something more to it than that. There’s some good stuff in there, a different kind of truth. Not a truth that I would use to program a computer with, but a truth that’s how to lead a decent life or at least one that reduces unnecessary pain. Maybe it’s a kind of truth that never becomes obsolete.

Thanks for reading.