The Jonah Syndrome

The book of Jonah starts, “Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amittai, saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.’ But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid his fare and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord”( Jonah 1:1-30). Jonah received from God Himself a great call to be prophet, a call to be God’s depute among the world of sinners. It was the basic call to heroism demanding genuine courage of self transcendence and Godlike vocation to a people away from his land and tribe, a call of transcendental nature to become something superhuman. But his immediate reaction is of flight, he runs away from His calling.
This is not an experience of someone’s special divine call, it is story of every being born as a human. Man is not an animal riveted to instincts and programmed as such. Animals cannot dream of a future, they cannot confuse between what one sees and what one foresees. There cannot be any reaction in animal for something that transcend itself. Animals are not moved by what they cannot react to.
But look at man, he is the impossible creature! Here nature seems to have thrown caution to the winds along with the programmed instincts. He not only lives in this moment, but expands his inner self beyond yesterday to centuries ago, and he hopes to an eternity from now. It is an appalling burden that man bears, the experiential burden. Or why are so few people truly courageous?
There are deeper reasons for our lack of courage. If we stood on our own feet alone, the ground would cave in under us. Liked to talk about concepts like “actualizing one’s potential” and one’s full humanness, still we fear our highest possibility. And yet, we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe and fear before these very same possibilities. Abraham Maslow wrote: “In my own notes I had at first labelled this the “fear of one’s own greatness,” or the “evasion of one’s destiny” or the “running away from one’s own best talents”…It is certainly true that many of us evade our constitutionally suggested vocations (call, destiny, task in life, mission). So often we run away from the responsibilities dictated (or rather suggested) by nature, by fate, even sometimes by accident, just as Jonah tried – in vain – to run away from his fate.”
The great cause of much psychological illness is the fear of knowledge of oneself—of one’s emotions, impulses, memories capacities, potentialities, of ones destiny. We have discovered that fear of knowledge of oneself is very often runs parallel with fear of the outside world. We avoid becoming conscious of unpleasant or dangerous truth. The human animal is characterized by two great fears: the fear of life and the fear of death. Heidegger brought these fears to the centre of existential philosophy. He argued that the basic anxiety of man is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as he lives in a world of flesh-and-blood with masks that mock his self-sufficiency. One lacks the godlike power to know what it means, the godlike strength to have been responsible for its emergence. “To suffer one’s death and to be reborn is not easy.” And it is not easy precisely because so much of one has dies. And the result of this syndrome is what we would expect a weak organism to do: to cut back the full intensity of life to get descriptively at man’s natural feeling of inferiority in the face of the massive transcendence of creation; his real creature feeling before the crushing and negating miracle of Being.
As Maslow has well said, “It is precisely the godlike in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of, motivated to and defensive against. This is one aspect of the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods.”
The pity is I am evading my own capacities, my own possibilities. We are just not strong enough to endure more! So often people in ecstatic moments say, “It’s too much,” or “I can’t stand it,” or “I could die.” Delirious happiness cannot be borne for long. Our organisms are just too weak for any large doses of greatness. It is indeed a grace to see and dare greatness and live up to it.