Are you a whale? Suppose that you were the whale who swallowed up Jonah, the prophet who was fleeing God and his assigned task. What would have happened to Jonah inside your belly? What would have happened to you, swallowing Jonah whole?
The father of a close friend in high school was a Professor of Forestry at the University of Montana in Missoula. Les Pengelly had a considerable impact on my life. While in high school, he urged me to read good books. I distinctly remember him recommending Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Plato’s Republic. Other than the Gospels and letters of the Apostle Paul, no book has so formed me as Plato’s Republic, a study of well-ordered political life, and more fundamentally, a well-ordered, rational human life. From Plato I learned to think, or more correctly, to reason; and I learned that reasoning is our human way of sharing in the mind of God. Reason keeps us from being innerly empty.
Professor Pengelly had a problem. He had no faith in God. On several occasions, he told me what happened to him as a boy growing up in a small town in northern Michigan. Having an inquiring mind, he could not understand the story of Jonah being swallowed by a whale, and then living. So he asked his minister about it. The answer he was given was: “It is in the Bible, therefore it is true, and you must believe it.” As he saw it, the boy had to choose: what seemed reasonable to him, or the Bible. He chose the way of scientific study and questioning, and rejected the Bible. And while giving up the Bible, Les gave up any kind of belief in God. So when I knew Dr. Pengelly, a man whom I revered, I was puzzled by his agnosticism, which is another word for functional atheism. What I did not understand, when I was young, is that this learned professor was not as rational as he thought he was. Had he truly chosen reason, he would realized that Jonah is a story rich in meaning, not meant to be taken literally. He would have seen his minister as a fundamentalist who had renounced right reasoning. Professor Pengelly could have used his reason properly, not rejected God, but renounced a literal reading of a sacred book. Had he done this, Pengelly would have followed Plato, who in the Republic criticized Homer, the great poet of Greece, for misrepresenting the gods or God. Reason surpasses poetry and myths, and sees them for what they are.
Plato also notes that if a human being is not open to God by the age of about ten, that person will never be well ordered within. He will never learn to reason properly, which is man’s way of sharing in God moving him from within his soul. We can say: Without loving trust in God within, one will always be empty inside, like the belly of a hungry whale. Here is the difference: a hungry whale can eat and be satisfied; but without the divine within, a human being is prey to stuffing itself with things that will not satisfy or make one happy or blessed: drugs; ideologies; large doses of entertainment; restless money-making; frenetic activity; drives for power, lust, stuff. God works through reasoning open to truth, to reality. The whole cosmos is alive with God’s ordering presence and guidance, even the whale, even man in his search for God.
The father of a close friend in high school was a Professor of Forestry at the University of Montana in Missoula. Les Pengelly had a considerable impact on my life. While in high school, he urged me to read good books. I distinctly remember him recommending Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Plato’s Republic. Other than the Gospels and letters of the Apostle Paul, no book has so formed me as Plato’s Republic, a study of well-ordered political life, and more fundamentally, a well-ordered, rational human life. From Plato I learned to think, or more correctly, to reason; and I learned that reasoning is our human way of sharing in the mind of God. Reason keeps us from being innerly empty.
Professor Pengelly had a problem. He had no faith in God. On several occasions, he told me what happened to him as a boy growing up in a small town in northern Michigan. Having an inquiring mind, he could not understand the story of Jonah being swallowed by a whale, and then living. So he asked his minister about it. The answer he was given was: “It is in the Bible, therefore it is true, and you must believe it.” As he saw it, the boy had to choose: what seemed reasonable to him, or the Bible. He chose the way of scientific study and questioning, and rejected the Bible. And while giving up the Bible, Les gave up any kind of belief in God. So when I knew Dr. Pengelly, a man whom I revered, I was puzzled by his agnosticism, which is another word for functional atheism. What I did not understand, when I was young, is that this learned professor was not as rational as he thought he was. Had he truly chosen reason, he would realized that Jonah is a story rich in meaning, not meant to be taken literally. He would have seen his minister as a fundamentalist who had renounced right reasoning. Professor Pengelly could have used his reason properly, not rejected God, but renounced a literal reading of a sacred book. Had he done this, Pengelly would have followed Plato, who in the Republic criticized Homer, the great poet of Greece, for misrepresenting the gods or God. Reason surpasses poetry and myths, and sees them for what they are.
Plato also notes that if a human being is not open to God by the age of about ten, that person will never be well ordered within. He will never learn to reason properly, which is man’s way of sharing in God moving him from within his soul. We can say: Without loving trust in God within, one will always be empty inside, like the belly of a hungry whale. Here is the difference: a hungry whale can eat and be satisfied; but without the divine within, a human being is prey to stuffing itself with things that will not satisfy or make one happy or blessed: drugs; ideologies; large doses of entertainment; restless money-making; frenetic activity; drives for power, lust, stuff. God works through reasoning open to truth, to reality. The whole cosmos is alive with God’s ordering presence and guidance, even the whale, even man in his search for God.
