Monday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time
In distress I cried out to the Lord.
From the midst of the netherworld I begged. For you hurled me into the deep,
I was submerged.
The waters swirled around me, endangering me. I was enveloped by the abyss.
Down I descended, the gates of the netherworld closing behind me forever.
You rescued my life from the pit, O my God.
~ Jonah 2:3-10
“Life’s the pits!” This slang expression originated on the college scene in the 1950s and really took off when it was commonly expressed by TVs “Rhoda” in the 1970s.
Cultural reference to “pits” is widely found: trading pit, pit bull, armpit, cockpit, money-pit, mosh pit, pitfall, pit-viper, ash-pit, cesspit, coal pit.
The late Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis, said to his easily frustrated daughter, “My dear, if you would only recognize that life is difficult, things would be so much easier for you.” Sort of, “Yes, life can be the pits, it is now and ever shall be. So why not simply do the best you can and accept with gratitude the good that does come your way?”
I would tell my students over the years something that took me years to learn: “life is hard…for everybody.” The boys seemed surprised by that. There’s something freeing about it, a “letting go” of unreasonable expectation that life is supposed to be easy, uncluttered, smooth — that there is some kind of eventual landing place where everything comes together and we can take a deep breath because we have finally arrived. Such a place does not exist this side of the Pearly Gates.
Our cultural use of “the pits” is only a shadow of what is found in our readings today from Jonah. In the 1st reading and the responsorial taken from the prophet, “the pit” is akin to the pit of hell, the domain of evil spirits, anything devoid of God. A way of despair — much more than the unfairness of life.
The good news and great grace of the Incarnation is that, in Jesus, God entered our humanity, experiencing these things. Because Christ, the light of the world, is our eternal light, the darkness flees before him. In him “the pits” are but a moment's inconvenience. And by the light of our baptisms and the living out of our baptisms we have been enveloped in that same light so as to dissipate “the pits'' for others.
-Timothy J. Cronin