Faith beyond resentment – chapter four – page 86ff

Allison in scorchingly good form here, every sentence a potential quote.

His insight is of Jonah as a man caught with too much pride and too much shame.  There is a pride in his orthodoxy, in his chosen-ness, but also a shame that God might break through, to a shame that is the “underside of ordered righteousness.”

“Shame forces you prematurely to run away from yourself; pride forces you prematurely to expose yourself.  Most gay lives, I’m afraid, are full of an embarrassing abundance of both” – Andrew Sullivan.

For Allison, the sailors represent the compassionate representatives of primitive, unthought, reactive religion.  They “react as good pagans know how to when threatened with violence beyond their ken.  They cast lots, for they have known from time immemorial that if they sacrifice the troublemaker, then peace will come.”  Later on “these delightful stage extras saill off into the sunset, presumably to a barbarian island north of France and to the east of Ireland where to this day their religion is alive and well, and mistakenly thought to have something to do with the living God.”

He talks about Jonah’s willing sacrifice of himself (but not suicide) as something cowardly: “”Who need know that I was worse than a pagan, for I was co-opting them into my terrible drama, while allowing them to be blamed for it, when all I really wanted to do was kill myself.”

However, God holds onto Jonah at the very lowest point of his disintegration, before spluttering him up onto the beach, a new man.  Allison says of himself “I found myself caught and held through the depths in which the utterly terrifying and yet completely unambiguous “yes” of God started to suggest into being the consciousness of a son, to bring forth the terrifying novelty of an unbound conscience.”

“The new story has no clear script, although it does have a short preface: the preface of being killed and finding oneself in a life that can no longer be destroyed.” – page 96.

“Remember, we have not been asked to preach resentfully to the sailors on the boat, but to Nineveh.  And God adores Nineveh so much that he would not have us talk to it until we’re able to imagine it as utterly lovable, so that we find ourselves thrilled with all the transformations in that great city, which God, who sends us as a few labourers into a huge harvest which is doing pretty well without us, is bringing about before we even open our mouths.” – page 97.

On living under the domination of shame: “We are not children in a garden, we are living blasphemies, and since with every footfall we tread illicitly on a sacred lawn, it would be better not to tread at all, let alone walk confidently and make something of our stay.  Many of us experience this as having killed us

“But here’s the part which interests me: those who are killed are free from their killer.”