Lent Address 5: Jonah - 'The Lord gives and the Lord takes away: Easter Living'

Lent 2019

THE ADDRESS BEFORE COMPLINE

Week Five:    Jonah 4.6-end ‘The Lord gives and the Lord takes away: Easter Living’

OPENING PRAYER

Blessed are you, sovereign God of all,

to you be glory and praise for ever.

You are our light and our salvation.

From the deep waters of death

you have raised your Son to life in triumph.

Grant that all who have been born anew by water and the Spirit,

may daily be renewed in your image,

walk by the light of faith,

and serve you in newness of life;

through your anointed Son, Jesus Christ,

to whom with you and the Holy Spirit

we lift our voices of praise.

Blessed be God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

All       Blessed be God for ever.

Almighty and everlasting God,

you hate nothing that you have made

and forgive the sins of all those who are penitent:

create and make in us new and contrite hearts

that we, worthily lamenting our sins

and acknowledging our wretchedness,

may receive from you, the God of all mercy,

perfect remission and forgiveness;

through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,

who is alive and reigns with you,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever.

All       Amen.

THE BOOK OF JONAH

            6 The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. 7But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. 8When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, ‘It is better for me to die than to live.’

            9 But God said to Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?’ And he said, ‘Yes, angry enough to die.’ 10Then the Lord said, ‘You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. 11And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?’

We have been on quite a journey with Jonah these last weeks of Lent: from his initial call and flight; his being caught up in the storms of life and his distance from God; his call to God from the depths as he remembered God’s presence in the Temple which prompted the redemptive scooping up by the great fish which then spewed him onto the beach; his total resentment at God’s merciful dealings with the city of Nineveh; and now we come to the end of his story.

I have entitled this address, ‘The Lord gives and the Lord takes away: Easter Living’ because it takes on the question that we raised last week about what it means to live the new life of one born into something new. In Jonah’s case that was being spat out onto the beach where he had another chance and, for us, baptism where we appear to be given another chance.

However, what we learn from Jonah is that what God offers us is not just another chance, as if life was all about a slightly harder try, one last push and, with our moral force of character or mental resilience, we’ll make it; with the implication that if we don’t we weren’t actually up to it in the first place.

This plays to the contemporary fallacy that if you want something enough you’ll get it. It takes life at the very highest level of elite sport or the creative arts and applies it to everyone’s life. If what you want doesn’t happen is it your fault? Didn’t you want it enough? This, spiritually, is a version of Pelagianism; the notion that if you want salvation enough, and work hard enough for it, you will be saved. Like Jonah and his booth. It strips the possibility of grace out of our lives.

Jonah is trying to use his human effort to sort things out. He builds himself a shelter, a booth, such as the Israelites would make, and Jews today still do, for the feast of Succoth one of the great pilgrimage festivals of Israel. And indeed Jonah – not the conventional pilgrim - is on the move again. He is not someone who can count blessings, because he doesn’t appear to know what a blessing, and from where that gift comes.

As the funeral sentence that joins St Paul’s first letter to Timothy and the Book of Job puts it ‘We brought nothing into the world, and we take nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord’ (1 Timothy 6.7; Job 1.21b). Jonah doesn’t buy that: he wants to be in control of a life that cannot be controlled.

Last week’s passage concluded with Jonah leaving the city of Nineveh. The same word used for his departure from Nineveh is the Hebrew verb used for the Exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt. But, as Philip Cary notes,

as in the book of Exodus, getting out from the place of exile does not solve all the problems, and indeed raises some questions of faith and unbelief more sharply than before. Israel in exodus is not yet Israel in the promised land, and that gives them much reason for complaint, fear, and distrust.[1]

We have seen this before in Jonah. He left the great fish but even once he was out and free he was still living a resentment fuelled life. And so it is here. Jonah is grousing about his shelter or lack of, still self-justifying, still resenting God’s mercy.

Jonah helps us learn that the new life, the new promise, the new hope of God isn’t a rehash of our old lives where we’re given a second crack at the whip, but rather something entirely new. As St Paul says ‘so if anyone is in Christ there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see everything has become new’ (2 Corinthians 5.17).

The genius of the book of Jonah is the ending, which is really no ending at all. The book ends with a question, a rhetorical question perhaps, but it is a question which is telling us that we have to go on and seek the answer. We have to move beyond Jonah’s life –which is ours in so many ways –beyond resentment and grumbling.

Before we return to that point, let’s just consider what is in the question.

And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?’ (Jonah 4.11)

The Lord is asking why he should not show mercy on the city of Nineveh: a city of more 120,000 people, human beings, sons and daughters of Adam, and save them not because of their membership of the people of Israel, but of their membership of the human race. And we see even more, that God’s mercy is for the whole of creation, because all creatures are part of that mercy he gives to Nineveh. Cary points out that Nineveh abounds in livestock, just as the Lord abounds in mercy.[2]

Human beings and livestock – dressed in sackcloth - together await the judgement on the city. Livestock is subject to plague and pestilence, as are human beings, but they are also beneficiaries of the blessing of the Sabbath established in the Law of Israel, where he gives rest to sons, daughters, maidservants and menservants, as well as ox and ass and all the livestock belonging to the house (Deuteronomy 5.14; cf Exodus 20.10). Cary suggests that:

The last words of the book of Jonah point toward this Sabbath rest for all, a time set apart and holy when human beings may look upon the livestock and every other creature that God has made and Adam named (Genesis 2.20) and laugh on behalf of the whole creation, which is finally freed from vanity (Romans 8.20) delivered from evil and rejoicing in the praise of the LORD.

Jesus’ three days in the tomb, the Sign of Jonah, break a Sabbath rest. Indeed Holy Saturday, that apparently empty day between Good Friday and Easter Day, is a Sabbath through which the whole of creation is made new, renewed in Christ.

The Church Fathers speak of the Day of Resurrection as the Eighth Day of creation: the ‘rest’ that God had on the seventh day, the first Sabbath, was in order that the ongoing work of creation and recreation might be resumed. The ‘light there be light’ of the first day is echoed with ‘the light of Christ’ of the eighth day, the Day of Resurrection and the inauguration of the New Creation.

Compline – completorium – is an act of completion so that we lie ourselves down to the ‘little death’ of sleep, when the day the Lord gave is taken away through the night. In our nightly sleep we die to the past ready to wake to the new, and declare with the psalmist, ‘This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it’.

The ‘ending’ of Jonah is a beginning. Christ’s own death was both an ending and a beginning. The ‘ending’ of Jonah is, for us, a pointer to a grace-filled life in Christ.

This is the pattern of dying to self, that we might live to God: Easter living. Life is never resolved, but is a constant negotiation of every life, uncontrollably throws at us. We have journeyed this lent with Jonah in growing in that understanding: thank you Jonah!

The call to an Easter life, a baptised life, life as a Christian is an invitation to enter the unresolved-ness of the world with the conviction that God’s grace, mercy, compassion and love sustains and holds that world in being because ultimately as St Paul puts it, ‘it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me’ (Galatians 2.7,8).

Recommended further reading:

Paul Murray, A Journey with Jonah: The Spirituality of Bewilderment. Dublin: Columba Press, 2002.

(A limited number of copies are available to borrow, or buy second hand, from the Minster.)

---

[1] Phillip Cary. Jonah. (2008: SCM Brazos). 139.

[2] Cary, p 161.

Lent Address 3: Jonah - 'In the murky depths'

Lent 2019

THE ADDRESS BEFORE COMPLINE

Week Three: Jonah 2 ‘In the murky depths’

THE BOOK OF JONAH

Chapter Two

Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, 2saying,

‘I called to the Lord out of my distress,

   and he answered me;

out of the belly of Sheol I cried,

   and you heard my voice.

3 You cast me into the deep,

   into the heart of the seas,

   and the flood surrounded me;

all your waves and your billows

   passed over me.

4 Then I said, “I am driven away

   from your sight;

how shall I look again

   upon your holy temple?”

5 The waters closed in over me;

   the deep surrounded me;

weeds were wrapped around my head

6   at the roots of the mountains.

I went down to the land

   whose bars closed upon me for ever;

yet you brought up my life from the Pit,

   O Lord my God.

7 As my life was ebbing away,

   I remembered the Lord;

and my prayer came to you,

   into your holy temple.

8 Those who worship vain idols

   forsake their true loyalty.

9 But I with the voice of thanksgiving

   will sacrifice to you;

what I have vowed I will pay.

   Deliverance belongs to the Lord!’

10Then the Lord spoke to the fish, and it spewed Jonah out upon the dry land.

Last week I suggested that the great fish that swallowed Jonah up as he plunged into the waters was something of a distraction to us. The imagery of Jonah and ‘the whale’ is good fun but is it much more than a jolly way for children to engage with a fantastical story? Well, yes, it is. There is so much more to the story of Jonah, and what we might learn of ourselves and of God through reading and meditating upon it.

The passage last week saw Jonah thrown overboard in an act of desperate propitiation, in the hope that it would calm the storm that had engulfed the mariners on the ship bound for Tarshish, on which Jonah had fled God’s call.

Now Jonah is in the belly of the great fish. And this is where we must consider the role of the fish and the sign that it is.

First the great fish is redemptive. After all, we read, “But the Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah (3.17).” The fish is a sign of the redemptive love of God scooping up Jonah to give him security and protection. It is a sign that despite our disobedience, our failure to listen and be attentive to the ways of the Lord, God does not ever wish to see us drown or sink so far from his presence that there is no way back.

Secondly the great fish becomes the arena in which the sign the Jesus refers to as ‘the Sign of Jonah’ takes place. For as we the reading concluded last week, “Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.”

And that takes us to this evening. And it takes us to the heart of why Jonah is such a significant book for Lent. The time in the belly of the fish is the literary and spiritual heart of the narrative of the book. You can map out Lent, Holy Week and Easter onto this book.

Lent, a time of deep wrestling with God’s purposes in one’s life, interrogating what it is God really calls us to, endeavouring to be faithful to the call that God places upon us.

Holy Week, more specifically the Holy Three Days known as the Triduum Sacrum, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday, when we plunge into the depths with Christ and find that he is the redemptive source of love for us.

Easter, both the day itself and the Great Fifty Days that take us to Pentecost, is the time we have been drawn out of the waters and, like a fish flipping on the shore, have to learn to breathe in a new way, in a new environment of Life in the Spirit.

That last point is looking ahead to the remaining two addresses, but for tonight, we will focus on those Three Holy Days. What I will do now is reflect on those three days, weaving in - albeit out of order - words from this evening’s passage of Jonah.

Those Three Days are also sometimes known as the Paschal Triduum.

Paschal is a word that derives from ‘Passover’. It taps deep into the roots of God’s deliverance of his First-Called People, Israel. Maundy Thursday has strong Passover links and allusions as the blood of the Passover Lambs are marked on the doors of the Israelites as signs of protection, as Christ becomes the Passover Lamb, whose blood will be shed, delivered into the hands of the wicked.

9 But I with the voice of thanksgiving

   will sacrifice to you;

what I have vowed I will pay.

   Deliverance belongs to the Lord!’

Jesus’ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane that night mirrors Jonah’s prayer from the belly of the great fish. If you know the topography of Jerusalem this becomes even more obvious because Gethsemane is across the Kidron Valley from Jerusalem. Looking up and across the valley all one would see is the Temple. Jonah cries from the belly of the fish, and Jesus from Gethsemane:

4b how shall I look again

   upon your holy temple?”

7 As my life was ebbing away,

   I remembered the Lord;

and my prayer came to you,

   into your holy temple.

Speaking of his own body, tying in with the significant three days, Jesus says, ‘Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up’ (John 2.19)

You’ll remember that the deliverance of the people of Israel was through water; the water of the Red Sea. It is little wonder that the Early Church teachers connect the deliverance from slavery that God wrought in the Exodus from Egypt with the deliverance from sin that God effects in the waters of baptism.

Furthermore on Maundy Thursday there is the washing of the disciples feet recorded by St John (John 13.1-11). The footwashing signifies acts of loving service in Christ’s name and also the need for cleansing through the washing away of sin. Even if our whole body is clean through baptism, which it is, still we pick up dirt on our feet, which will washing away; a pointer to the need to be reconciled with God and neighbour through confessing our sins.

And Jonah’s words may be read in that way, as a testimony of reconciliation. Notably also this is the first time in the Jonah narrative that Jonah has ‘owned’ God, as in understanding God to be his Lord and not simply a remote deity.

Through the Incarnation God is not remote from our experience. In Gethsemane we are drawn closer into Jesus’ prayer to the Father, with whom he is absolutely one in the power of the Holy Spirit.

6b I went down to the land

   whose bars closed upon me for ever;

yet you brought up my life from the Pit,

   O Lord my God.

Jonah’s prayer speaks of the abandonment of Good Friday and the depths of the experience of isolation which Christ went through in his redemptive love:

            4 Then I said, “I am driven away

   from your sight;

how shall I look again

   upon your holy temple?”

5 The waters closed in over me;

   the deep surrounded me;

weeds were wrapped around my head

            6   at the roots of the mountains.

Strong echoes there of Jesus’ words of desolation from the cross ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Psalm 22.1). Those words of desolation and abandonment also bespeak an intimate relationship. Yet Jesus dies on the cross. He has plunged the very depths for us and with us, and this is where the great fish becomes the sign of resurrection. As Jonah says,

6b I went down to the land

   whose bars closed upon me for ever;

yet you brought up my life from the Pit,

   O Lord my God.

7 As my life was ebbing away,

   I remembered the Lord;

and my prayer came to you,

   into your holy temple.

That land ‘whose bars closed upon me for ever’ is, without doubt, death. That is one of the great mysteries and questions we feel bound to ask. What happened to Jesus when he died? At what moment did he rise again? There are different ways of accounting for it, but actually it is something about which the gospels remain resolutely silent. There is only one hint of an answer in the New Testament that might address our curiosity, from the first letter of Peter:

“For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight people, were saved through water”. (1 Peter 3.18-20)

That is often known as the Harrowing of Hell, the notion that Christ descended to the depths to raise up those who, chronologically, could never have called upon him. It’s articulated in the Apostles’ Creed in which we proclaim that Jesus ‘was crucified, dead and buried and buried. He descended into hell. And the third day he rose again’. That is our dogmatic proclamation of the Sign of Jonah.

So the great fish swallowed up Jonah and took him into the deeps. This redemptive action is redolent of Christ’s redemptive death and the significance of the Three Days. ‘And on the third day he rose again’ (Nicene Creed).

Little wonder then that this plunge into waters to be raised to new life and, as the book of Jonah puts it, ‘spewed onto the beach’ has been associated with the death and resurrection of Christ and our own experience of baptism and life beyond it.

It’s rather galling, but everything I have tried to say tonight is expressed rather more pithily by St Paul in his letter to the Romans:

“Therefore we have been buried with [Christ] by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life”. (Romans 6.4)

Recommended further reading:

Paul Murray, A Journey with Jonah: The Spirituality of Bewilderment. Dublin: Columba Press, 2002.

(A limited number of copies are available to borrow, or buy second hand, from the Minster.)

Lent Address 2: Jonah - ‘Caught up in the storms’

OPENING PRAYER

Blessed are you, sovereign God of all,

to you be glory and praise for ever.

You are our light and our salvation.

From the deep waters of death

you have raised your Son to life in triumph.

Grant that all who have been born anew by water and the Spirit,

may daily be renewed in your image,

walk by the light of faith,

and serve you in newness of life;

through your anointed Son, Jesus Christ,

to whom with you and the Holy Spirit

we lift our voices of praise.

Blessed be God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

All       Blessed be God for ever.

Almighty and everlasting God,

you hate nothing that you have made

and forgive the sins of all those who are penitent:

create and make in us new and contrite hearts

that we, worthily lamenting our sins

and acknowledging our wretchedness,

may receive from you, the God of all mercy,

perfect remission and forgiveness;

through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,

who is alive and reigns with you,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever.

All       Amen.

THE ADDRESS BEFORE COMPLINE

Week Two:   Jonah 1.4-17 ‘Caught up in the storms’

            4 But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and such a mighty storm came upon the sea that the ship threatened to break up. 5Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried to his god. They threw the cargo that was in the ship into the sea, to lighten it for them. Jonah, meanwhile, had gone down into the hold of the ship and had lain down, and was fast asleep. 6The captain came and said to him, ‘What are you doing sound asleep? Get up, call on your god! Perhaps the god will spare us a thought so that we do not perish.’

            7 The sailors said to one another, ‘Come, let us cast lots, so that we may know on whose account this calamity has come upon us.’ So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. 8Then they said to him, ‘Tell us why this calamity has come upon us. What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?’ 9‘I am a Hebrew,’ he replied. ‘I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.’ 10Then the men were even more afraid, and said to him, ‘What is this that you have done!’ For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them so.

            11 Then they said to him, ‘What shall we do to you, that the sea may quieten down for us?’ For the sea was growing more and more tempestuous. 12He said to them, ‘Pick me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quieten down for you; for I know it is because of me that this great storm has come upon you.’ 13Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to bring the ship back to land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more stormy against them. 14Then they cried out to the Lord, ‘Please, O Lord, we pray, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life. Do not make us guilty of innocent blood; for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you.’ 15So they picked Jonah up and threw him into the sea; and the sea ceased from its raging. 16Then the men feared the Lord even more, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.

            17 But the Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.

In the story of Jonah, attention, almost inevitably, turns to the eye catching character of the ‘large fish’ often thought of as a whale. In some ways the great fish becomes a bit of a distraction. It sounds so unlikely (although recent press reports tell of Rainer Schimpf, a diver observing whales off the coast of South Africa, who was caught in the jaws of a blue whale, and thankfully spent less than three minutes in its jaws and not three days in its belly).  I don’t want in any way to dismiss the significance of the great fish, for it is the at the heart of Jonah’s story for Christ and for Christians, but I will hold him over to next Thursday.

The stormy sea is representative in Hebrew thought, and indeed our own too, of unleashed forces of chaos, turbulence and despair. The creation itself is inaugurated over, in and through the primeval waters and (Genesis 1.1-3). In our mother’s womb each of us was carried in the waters of amniotic fluid, and it was when the ‘waters broke’ that the moment for our birth came.

This storm is the birth pangs, as it were, of Jonah’s adult life. Just as Nicodemus points out to Jesus one cannot enter a second time into the mother’s and be born (John 3.4), this is not a literal thing, except in the sense that Jesus describes of the need to be born from above (John 3.3). The dominant question for Jonah and for us, through the book of Jonah, is, ‘what will life look life for those born again in Christ’? But for now let us stay in the stormy waters.

This is where the story of Jonah has a clear narrative, but is figurative too. It was, we might say, that the storm, whilst unleashed by the Lord (v1), is of Jonah’s making. But this is not a personal experience. When we are in a storm in life others are drawn into it too. And those mariners sailing from Joppa to Tarshish became implicated in his flight from the call and commission of God, which we explored last week in Jonah 1.1-3.

The mariners could not understand this storm. They sensed there was a divine drive to it, and in some ways they were right, but they defaulted to an instinct in humanity to create the scapegoat to placate and ease their own turmoil.

The mariners hit the nail on the head about how each of us feels in a storm: we fear that we will perish, be blotted out (v6). It is out of that fear that they act, and cast Jonah overboard, dressing up their desperation as a religious act, attributing all this to God. Jonah colludes with that and invites the act of throwing him overboard.

The search for the scapegoat does not achieve a resolution but only a temporary truce. Scapegoats can be guilty of course: Jonah was. Likewise, the death of toppling, arrest and execution Saddam Hussein did not bring a peaceful Iraq; the assassination of Osama bin Laden has not resolved Islamist terror; deposing Theresa May as Prime Minster will not lead to a smooth, uncontroversial Brexit.

But creating a scapegoat makes us feel better. That’s why we do it. And we can justify it. As the mariners reckoned this was the only way to calm the storm, and they even ask in advance to be excused for their murderous act, ‘Please, O Lord we pray, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life. Do not make us guilty of innocent blood; for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you’ (v14).

The great mystery of redemption is that the Innocent Victim is turned scapegoat, and the guilt he bears is not his own, but is ours. And whatever the justice we feel better for it: as Caiaphas said in the trial of Jesus, ‘it is better for one man to die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed’ (John 11.50).

One lesson then from the book of Jonah is that scripture exposes our innate desire to blame and point the finger, whether at God or other people. Like Jonah we are to take responsibility for our own decisions and their consequences. Jonah’s rejection of his call and commission and his flight away from God have thrown him into turmoil and a storm of his own making.

This is not to point the finger further at Jonah to absolve myself, or any of us. Indeed part of the move to confession and repentance is to acknowledge precisely our disposition to flee from the mercies of God. The irony, or beauty of this passage of Jonah is that it is the Lord who provides the great fish to swallow up Jonah (v17) which itself is a mercy.

So Jonah is a person caught up in storms. He has been fighting against himself and against his God: it is that sort of fracture in a life that leads to depression, turmoil and withdrawal. Jonah is in denial and that denial leads to self-blame.

Before his ejection Jonah famously sleeps on the boat, down in the hold. Jonah’s first strategy is to withdraw: Jonah’s sleep is Jonah shut down, closed in on himself. This is where the parallels with Jesus, the Innocent Victim, continue. Jesus sleeps on a boat in the midst of a storm and his disciples call out to him that they are on the brink of perishing. The disciples, experienced mariners themselves, inadvertently, perhaps, call upon their God: ‘Master, save us for we are perishing’ (Matthew 8.25; Mark 4.38; Luke 8.24). But Jesus is asleep.

But is this the sleep of withdrawal in the storms? I want to suggest that is the reverse of Jonah’s hibernation in the face of the world and life. Jesus’ sleep embodies peace in the midst of the storm. This peace is the space into which we are invited as the storms swirl around us: this is the peace of Jesus Christ, the Innocent Victim, to whom we cry when we are perishing in the storms that buffet and assail us in our lives. As the antiphon to the Nunc Dimittis at Compline puts it: ‘Preserve us, O Lord while waking, and guard us while sleeping, that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace’.

So two points to ponder as we approach Compline:

1.     What are the storms in my life at the moment?

2.     Where do I seek solace in times of depression, turmoil or withdrawal?

I weave a silence onto my lips:

Calm me, O Lord, as You stilled the storm.

Still me, O Lord, keep me from harm.

Let all the tumult within me cease.

Enfold me, Lord, in Your peace.

Amen.                                                                        A Celtic Prayer

Recommended further reading:

Paul Murray, A Journey with Jonah: The Spirituality of Bewilderment. Dublin: Columba Press, 2002.

(A limited number of copies are available to borrow, or buy second hand, from the Minster.)

© Andrew Bishop, 2019