Life in the Vine: December 26. 2009

Holidays make me nervous.

Holidays are the time when disasters feel especially poignant and disturbing. This morning's Chronicle was full of these stories: the single Mom found murdered by her children on Christmas Day, the terrorist plot on a Christmas Day flight. The heart attacks. The suicides. The family fights. I want to rush through the holiday, get it over and done with, so that somehow the associated risks of tragedy will diminish -- as if the holiday itself brought them on.

It's like that all year for me. Thanksgiving, Easter, Fourth of July. My birthday is the worst.

I (and my therapists) have decided this comes from years of growing up in an alcoholic family, which actually turned out to be a family with a bipolar mother who used alcohol (and anything else she could get her hands on) to medicate herhelf. The result was the same: I never knew what to expect, so I expected the worst. The birthdays have more to do with abandonment. Somewhere in my dim memory is an image of me being left alone on my birthday at a neighbor's house while the family was tending to some Mom-based emergency. I think I was five.

I've made a life-long habit of not celebrating much of anything for fear that it triggered some kind of disaster. I would rest in good times with one eye open, convinced that the better the circumstances, the more ready for disaster I should be.

The leaf on the vine doesn't expect anything but more nutrition headed down the pipeline. It doesn't expect to be ticked at the last minute with herbicide.

So, here's Jonah, sitting around, ticked at God for saving people and telling God that he'd rather die than face the futility of it all. He's sitting and waiting for disaster -- God wiping out all those people. He expects it. But instead, this vine grows up around him and gives him shade -- the Bible says pleasure -- in the middle of expected disaster.

I love the version of the story from the Message translation:

5 But Jonah just left. He went out of the city to the east and sat down in a sulk. He put together a makeshift shelter of leafy branches and sat there in the shade to see what would happen to the city. 6 God arranged for a broad-leafed tree to spring up. It grew over Jonah to cool him off and get him out of his angry sulk. Jonah was pleased and enjoyed the shade. Life was looking up. 7 But then God sent a worm. By dawn of the next day, the worm had bored into the shade tree and it withered away. 8 The sun came up and God sent a hot, blistering wind from the east. The sun beat down on Jonah's head and he started to faint. He prayed to die: "I'm better off dead!" Jonah 4:5-8 (MSG)

I can't help but wonder if Jonah thought, "See -- nothing good ever happens to me. The minute I get a little shade tree growing, some worm comes and wrecks it. How typical!" I would have.

But finally, God explains the entire deal:

9 Then God said to Jonah, "What right do you have to get angry about this shade tree?" Jonah said, "Plenty of right. It's made me angry enough to die!" 10 God said, "What's this? How is it that you can change your feelings from pleasure to anger overnight about a mere shade tree that you did nothing to get? You neither planted nor watered it. It grew up one night and died the next night. 11 So, why can't I likewise change what I feel about Nineveh from anger to pleasure, this big city of more than a hundred and twenty thousand childlike people who don't yet know right from wrong, to say nothing of all the innocent animals?"
Jonah 4:9-11 (MSG)

Part of me wants to say: So, God is fickle? He changes his mind? That makes me just a pawn in God's game -- the recipient of random acts of kindness or punishment, all of which live outside of my control? But that would be thinking like Jonah (something I'm good at). Jonah, like me, is a control freak. I like to make things happen on my own, and don't trust anything that happens under some other source of power.

But that thinking represents the major flawed premise, the missing fact: God isn't focused on disaster and more than the vine is focused on the death of the branches and leaves. The whole point is to make it thrive. Ninevah wasn't thriving. It was dying. God reconected the Ninevah branch so that the leaves could flourish. Jonah saw a wrathful God, and expected the wrath to mess up his life as well.

I don't know Jonah's life-story -- it isn't given in the book. But if it was like mine (and I suspect it was), then Jonah was one pessimistic man, perhaps for as good of reasons as I have. But the reasons are unimportant. The premise is flawed. So God sends Jonah to watch Ninevah get reconnected to the vine and flourish -- just to show him that reconnecting branches and leaves so that they'll flourish is what He's all about.

It's the expectation of disaster that is the problem. For Jonah. For me. I look at the shade tree, and assume the worm is coming tonight. And in doing so, I don't see the gift of the shade tree at all. Or realize that some worm had a marvelous meal that night, and that a new tree can -- and will -- take its place for me tomorrow.