physics and biology, in which reality is understood as coherence,
Cosmic Becoming Cycle → poetic and metaphysical expansion
Embodied Process Realism → formal philosophical framework
Processual Divine Coherence → theological bridge
continued from - An Ontology of Becoming - Being I (37)
“I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” Jonah 1.4-17 (ESV)
There comes a point within rupture where continuity can no longer preserve itself.
The storm reaches such intensity that neither explanation, effort, nor inherited structures remain sufficient to stabilize reality against the forces now overtaking the ship. Human competence begins exhausting itself. Fear deepens into helplessness. The sailors row harder, throw more cargo overboard, pray more desperately, and struggle against the sea with every remaining resource available to them.
Yet the storm continues.
This is another difficult disclosure within relational becoming:
there are moments when rupture cannot be solved through greater effort alone.
Some interruptions enter reality so deeply that continuity itself must give way before transformation can proceed further. What had previously sustained being can no longer survive in its inherited form. The self eventually encounters thresholds where preservation becomes impossible.
Jonah now recognizes this.
Importantly, the narrative does not present Jonah suddenly transformed into willing obedience or heroic repentance. The movement remains far more existentially complicated than that. Jonah instead arrives at a painful recognition that the continuity structures through which he has attempted to preserve himself can no longer continue without bringing destruction upon others around him as well as to his own soul.
This realization matters deeply.
For rupture is never merely private.
The self’s resistance against becoming eventually radiates outward into surrounding relational worlds. Families, communities, institutions, political systems, churches, and cultures all bear the consequences of continuity structures attempting to preserve themselves beyond their capacity for truthful participation within reality.
And so Jonah speaks:
“Pick me up and throw me into the sea…”
The statement is extraordinary.
Not because Jonah has suddenly embraced transformation fully, but because he has finally ceased denying the rupture already underway. He now recognizes that continuity itself cannot survive unchanged. The inherited self preserving its closure against relational openness must descend into interruption before self -becoming can proceed.
And yet even here the sailors resist.
This detail is profoundly important.
The supposed outsiders demonstrate greater reluctance toward destruction than Jonah himself. They row harder still. They seek another way. They hesitate before surrendering Jonah to the sea. Compassion emerges unexpectedly from those previously occupying the category of foreignness within Jonah’s inherited moral universe.
It is a surprising exhibit of compassion by sailors to an unknown stranger in their caretake. It is the very paradox God was asking of Jonah to feel towards his commission to strangers in a foreign city. To the sailors, Jonah is a stranger from a foreign city and yet they accept their burden to help and to save.
The narrative thus continues destabilizing Jonah's inherited world of tribal certainty.
Relational consciousness begins expanding precisely where inherited continuity had previously restricted it.
Eventually, however, the sea leaves no alternative:
"So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging." Jonah 1.15 (ESB)
By Jonah's acknowledged admission of fleeing God's command, the sailors lift him from the fragile continuity of their vessel and surrendered his soul into the depths below...
And suddenly:
the storm ceases.
Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows. Jonah 1.16 (ESV)
The silence after rupture is one of the most haunting moments within existential transformation. After prolonged instability, interruption, fear, collapse, and resistance, reality sometimes enters an almost unbearable stillness. The violence stops. The motion halts. Continuity as previously known has ended.
But becoming has not yet fully begun.
Jonah now exists suspended between worlds.
No longer safely within inherited continuity.
Not yet transformed.
Not yet reconciled.
Not yet returned.
Only descending by willful refusal to allow transformation.
This descent is crucial within the ontology of becoming.
For genuine transformation rarely occurs while the self remains fully anchored within inherited stability. Something must first release its grip upon the continuity structures previously organizing identity.
One must pass through:
- dislocation,
- uncertainty,
- suspension,
- and the terrifying openness of unresolved becoming.
The sea therefore becomes more than punishment or danger.
It becomes liminality itself.
The old continuity has broken apart.
The new continuity has not yet emerged.
And Jonah now falls between them.
not when certainty remains intact,but when being itself descends beyond the structures once relied uponfor orientation, identity, and coherence.
Importantly, Jonah’s surrender is not yet reconciliation.
It is only the acceptance that continuity can no longer remain what it once was.
And sometimes that recognition alone feels like death.
VII - Into the Belly of the Deep
17 And the Lord appointed[d] a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. Jonah 1.17 (ESV)
The descent does not end when Jonah enters the sea.
Only now does interruption fully overtake him.
For beneath the collapsing continuity of ship, storm, and surface, Jonah passes beyond ordinary orientation altogether. The narrative no longer unfolds within recognizable structures of stability, geography, nation, vocation, or inherited certainty.
The Great Sea gives way to ontological depth. Motion gives way to existential suspension. Continuity dissolves into phenomenological enclosure.
And there, within the watery depth of darkness, beneath continuity itself, Jonah is swallowed by a leviathan to ends his days.
Importantly, the great fish should not be reduced merely to miracle, punishment, or supernatural spectacle. Such readings often miss the existential and ontological depth of the narrative. The fish functions more profoundly as a liminal enclosure - a suspended space between former identity and future becoming.
Jonah now inhabits personal interruption completely.
- No escape remains possible.
- No continuity structure remains intact.
- No inherited stability survives beneath the waters of descent.
The self that fled transformation can no longer outrun rupture.
And yet, paradoxically, Jonah does not perish.
He is held. Suspended in time and space.
Resolved to die for his refusal to commit, to act, to be merciful.
This may be among the most important revelations within the narrative.
For relational becoming does not always destroy through interruption. Sometimes rupture encloses being precisely so transformation may continue beyond the collapse of prior continuity. The fish therefore becomes both confinement and preservation, burial and shelter, suspension and survival.
Jonah exists within an impossible threshold:
- removed from the world above,
- severed from inherited continuity,
- yet still alive within the depths of interruption itself.
This is the terrifying ambiguity of liminality.
For in such spaces identity no longer coheres through familiar arrangements. Time alters. Orientation dissolves. The self cannot fully return to what it was, yet cannot clearly perceive what it is becoming. Hence, being itself hangs suspended between realities without stable grounding beneath either.
Many know such spaces intimately.
There are seasons in which continuity collapses so deeply that existence itself begins feeling enclosed within uncertainty, grief, displacement, exhaustion, depression, illness, deconstruction, loss, or prolonged instability. The world once inhabited no longer feels fully accessible, yet no clear future continuity has emerged capable of replacing it. One feels suspended beneath ordinary reality itself.
Nor are these existential spaces merely psychological.
They are intensely ontological, requiring reconstruction.
Being itself undergoes enclosure within interruption.
And often the surrounding world does not understand such descent. Others continue living upon the surface while the self remains buried beneath waters that the external other cannot begin to perceive. Language struggles to explain the dislocation. Old certainties that continue can no longer function for the one who is undergoing rupture. Familiar identities to community, to perception, to past experience, begin to weaken. Even time itself feels altered within prolonged rupture. For dislocation is never shortened. It lives on, and on, and on. It becomes a new way of being.
Jonah now inhabits precisely this condition.
The belly of the fish becomes:
- darkness,
- suspension,
- enclosure,
- gestation,
- dissolution,
- and terrible inwardness.
For perhaps the deepest transformations occur not through outward triumph, but through inward interruption, disruption, dislocation, unyet internalized embodiment.
And importantly, Jonah still does not emerge as enlightened hero.
The narrative resists such simplification.
Even within enclosure Jonah remains conflicted, fearful, resistant, uncertain, and incomplete. Transformation within relational becoming rarely unfolds cleanly or instantly. The self often carries fragments of former continuity deep into the process of interruption itself. Becoming unfolds unevenly, ambiguously, and without guaranteed emotional resolution.
Yet something nevertheless begins changing within the depths.
For once continuity fully collapses, the self can no longer sustain itself solely through inherited structures. Beneath all prior identities, a more vulnerable encounter with being gradually emerges. The self confronts its contingency, fragility, dependence, and relational incompleteness.
The illusion of autonomous stability begins dissolving.
And perhaps this is why descent feels so terrifying.
For interruption eventually exposes how little of continuity was ever fully under our control.
The fish therefore becomes more than punishment.
It becomes personal revelation / enlightenment / realization, through enclosure.
Jonah had previously attempted to preserve identity through resistance against relational openness. But within the depths of interruption, preservation itself becomes impossible. The self can only endure suspension while reality slowly reconfigures the conditions through which becoming may continue.
And so Jonah remains there:
- enclosed,
- suspended,
- alive,
- yet no longer anchored within the continuity that once defined him.
The sea above continues without him.
The old world has already passed away.
between destruction and transformation,waiting within the terrifying stillness of becoming itself.
“I called out to the Lord, out of my distress, and he answered me..."
Jonah 2.2 (ESV)
It is often assumed that prayer emerges most naturally from certainty.
Yet some of the deepest prayers arise not from stability, but from collapse.
Not from clarity,but from disorientation.Not from theological confidence,but from interruption.
And perhaps nowhere is this more visible than within Jonah’s enclosure beneath the deep. For only after continuity has fully failed does Jonah finally begin speaking differently.
Importantly, the prayer emerging from within the fish is not the voice of restored certainty. It is the voice of being suspended within rupture itself. Jonah speaks not from resolution, but from dislocation.
The depths have stripped away the stability structures through which his identity had previously remained anchored. The prophetic self that once fled interruption now speaks from within interruption’s interior.
This distinction matters profoundly.
For genuine transformation often begins only after inherited continuities lose their capacity to shield the self from existential exposure. So long as certainty remains intact, prayer may function merely as reinforcement of continuity itself. But within rupture, prayer changes character. It becomes less performance and more disclosure. Less certainty and more vulnerability. Less mastery and more relational dependence.
Jonah’s words emerge from beneath orientation itself:
“Out of the belly of Sheol I cried…”
The imagery is striking.
Jonah no longer speaks from ordinary life, but from symbolic death-space - from beneath continuity, beneath stability, beneath inherited coherence.
The language of descent now reaches toward dissolution itself. Sheol represents not merely physical danger, but existential ungrounding, the nearness of disappearance, the terrifying proximity of non-being.
And yet Jonah still speaks.
This is crucial.
For rupture may destabilize continuity, but it does not necessarily annihilate relation. Even within enclosure, being continues reaching outward. The self remains capable of address even when certainty has collapsed. In fact, relational openness sometimes becomes most visible precisely where inherited metaphysical confidence has failed.
This marks an important transition within Jonah’s becoming.
Earlier Jonah resisted interruption externally through flight and avoidance. Now, enclosed within rupture, he begins confronting the reality he had attempted to escape. The descent inward becomes unavoidable. The self can no longer outrun itself beneath the depths of interruption.
And yet the prayer itself remains complex.
It is not pure surrender.
Nor complete transformation.
Jonah still speaks partly through inherited theological language and familiar continuity structures. Fragments of older certainties remain active even within interruption. This too feels deeply human. Rarely does the self emerge from rupture entirely severed from prior worlds. Transformation often unfolds through tension between inherited continuity and emerging relational openness rather than through absolute replacement.
The old language remains,but it no longer carries the same unquestioned stability.
And perhaps this describes many forms of existential reconstruction after rupture.
One continues speaking:
- inherited prayers,
- inherited symbols,
- inherited theological vocabularies,
- inherited hopes,
while simultaneously sensing that continuity itself has already been altered by interruption. The words remain recognizable, yet the self speaking them has already changed.
This is why rupture can feel both destructive and strangely revelatory.
For interruption exposes dimensions of being often concealed beneath stable continuity. Dependency becomes visible. Fragility becomes undeniable. Relationality emerges more clearly once illusions of self-sufficiency begin dissolving. The self discovers that existence was never entirely autonomous, secured, or fully self-contained.
Jonah’s prayer therefore becomes less a return to certainty than an emergence into deeper exposure.
that being itself remains vulnerable, contingent, relational, and unfinished.
And importantly, the depths do not immediately release him.
This too matters.
Transformation within relational becoming rarely occurs instantaneously. The fish does not become magical resolution. Enclosure continues. Suspension remains active. Jonah still inhabits liminality between old continuity and future reconfiguration. The self undergoing transformation often longs for immediate restoration while reality itself unfolds more slowly through prolonged interruption.
And for those undergoing radical transformation. Allow its fundamentality to live, to breathe, to become complete. Do not end it prematurely even though it may hurt, be too painful, become too disruptive to the old continuities living around you. Let vision, practice, testing, continue. Let it become completed.
And importantly, do not leap to the first or second or third thing that comes into view. Distrust those leaps... for repurposing takes time. It will not be immediately resolved. It requires testing. Probing. To be undergirded by love and compassion. Wilderness experiences last long enough to become affected, then in time will go away. - re slater
There are seasons where becoming feels unbearably unfinished.
- Where prayer remains uncertain.
- Where identity remains unstable.
- Where continuity has collapsed but reconciliation has not yet arrived.
And yet something essential has nevertheless begun.
Jonah now speaks from within rupture rather than fleeing from it.
This marks the beginning of transformation.
Not because certainty has returned,but because his being has ceased resisting interruption entirely.
The depths still surround him.
Darkness still encloses him.
But now relation begins emerging within the rupture itself.
And perhaps this is one of the deepest disclosures within the ontology of becoming:
that even beneath collapse,beneath interruption,beneath enclosure,and beneath the terrifying instability of existence itself,
being continues reaching toward relation.
IX - The Emergence Toward Shore
 |
| Jonah Preaches to Ninevites by Gustave Doré, 1866. |
X - Re-entry into the Unfinished World
The movement toward shore does not conclude Jonah’s rupture.
It only returns him to reality differently.
This distinction is essential.
For many narratives of transformation falsely imply that interruption culminates in clarity, certainty, healing, or spiritual completion. The hero descends, learns, returns, and resolves. Suffering becomes neatly integrated into meaning. Continuity is restored through a higher order of coherence capable of reconciling all prior fragmentation into harmonious understanding.
But too often this is not the case. More factually, it is the start of one's liminal journey of recoherence towards a reality previously hidden, unknown, unlived. It is the start of a new journey, an important journey, out of one's conflicted wilderness and into the calling of God.
But Jonah resists such closure.
And perhaps this is why the narrative feels so deeply truthful within the ontology of becoming.
For genuine rupture rarely restores the self to stable permanence. More often interruption leaves behind:
- altered perception,
- lingering fragility,
- widened relational awareness,
- and the irreversible knowledge that continuity itself can never again be inhabited naïvely.
Jonah emerges from the depths not as triumphant saint, but as interrupted being.
The sea has not perfected him.
The fish has not resolved him.
The rupture has not erased resistance from within him.
And yet he continues.
This continuation matters profoundly.
For the deepest disclosure within relational becoming may not be transformation alone, but the willingness to re-enter reality despite remaining unfinished. The self eventually discovers that reconciliation does not require total resolution before participation may begin again.
One returns:
- uncertain,
- altered,
- partially healed,
- partially resistant,
- carrying both rupture and continuity simultaneously within the ongoing movement of existence.
This is not failure.
It is being. It is exploration. It is the inhabitance of renewal and what that might look like.
And perhaps nowhere is this more visible than in the fragile continuities reconstructed after existential collapse.
The self emerging from interruption rarely recovers the same metaphysical certainties once inhabited before rupture began. Earlier identities no longer fit with the same unquestioned stability. Former frameworks remain present, yet differently arranged within consciousness after descent.
The world remains.
But differently.
And perhaps this is where the title The Imaginable Lightness of Being finally reveals its deeper significance.
For before rupture, continuity often feels heavy with permanence. Identity appears fixed. Meaning appears settled. Reality seems sufficiently stable to support the illusion that being itself rests upon enduring certainty. One inhabits inherited worlds assuming their structures possess a solidity capable of permanently anchoring selfhood against contingency, instability, and becoming.
But interruption changes this.
After rupture, being feels lighter - not because existence becomes less significant, but because continuity itself is recognized as more fragile, relational, contingent, and open than previously imagined. The self begins realizing that much of what once appeared permanent was always provisional beneath the movement of becoming itself.
And yet this lightness need not collapse into nihilism.
For relational becoming does not eliminate meaning.
It transforms how meaning is inhabited.
The self no longer clings to continuity as rigid possession. Instead continuity becomes participatory, adaptive, and open-ended. Identity survives not through immovable certainty, but through the ongoing capacity to continue relationally within instability itself.
Perhaps this is one of rupture’s strangest gifts.
It dismantles illusions of permanence while simultaneously disclosing deeper forms of participation hidden beneath them.
And this may ultimately explain why Jonah remains so psychologically and spiritually compelling across centuries of human experience.
For Jonah is not merely the story of a prophet swallowed by a great fish.
It is the story of being interrupted by becoming.
It is the story of continuity collapsing beneath the pressure of relational expansion.
It is the story of the self resisting transformation because transformation threatens inherited coherence at the deepest levels of identity itself.
not into certainty regained,but into reality reopened.
Jonah survives rupture.
But he survives differently.
And perhaps this is the deeper truth encountered by many who pass through interruption honestly enough.
The old self does not fully return.
Yet being continues.
The world continues.
Relation continues.
And even within unfinishedness, life slowly calls the self toward relational participation within the terrifying, beautiful, unstable openness of becoming itself.
And the Lord said, “You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. 11 And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?” Jonah 4.10-11 (ESV)
Perhaps every ontology eventually reaches this threshold.
Not where thought ends,
nor where meaning disappears,
but where continuity itself becomes too fragile to sustain the illusion of permanence beneath being.
The earlier movements of the Reality & Cosmology Series sought to understand reality through:
- relation,
- coherence,
- embodiment,
- continuity,
- emergence,
- consciousness,
- identity,
- and becoming.
Yet eventually ontology encounters something more difficult than structure.
It encounters lived rupture.
And it is here, within Jonah’s descent, that ontology itself begins passing toward existential participation.
For the deepest interruptions are never merely conceptual.
They become:
- personal,
- relational,
- historical,
- political,
- civilizational,
- and spiritual.
At such thresholds continuity no longer feels abstractly unstable.
It trembles beneath the becoming self directly.
And perhaps this explains why rupture so often feels terrifying.
Not because transformation necessarily destroys being,but because interruption exposes how contingent inherited
continuity had always been beneath the movement of reality itself.
The self senses the terrifying possibility that:
- identity may change,
- meaning may widen,
- certainty may collapse,
- and reality may prove more relational, open, and unfinished than previously imagined.
This is Jonah’s fear.
... and perhaps it is ours as well.
For many attempt preserving continuity against becoming:
- through rigid certainty,
- institutional closure,
- ideological tribalism,
- theological absolutism,
- political nostalgia,
- or inherited metaphysical systems incapable of adapting relationally to reality’s unfolding openness.
Yet interruption eventually comes for every continuity structure.
Not because continuity is meaningless,
but because reality itself continues becoming.
That it is the very nature of reality to become.
And so the Jonah narrative leaves readers not with completion, but with openness.
Importantly, Jonah never fully resolves.
Even after emergence, resistance lingers. Anger remains. Fragility persists. The self survives rupture without becoming entirely reconciled to the transformation now underway. The narrative closes not with perfected harmony, but with unresolved relational questioning beneath divine mercy itself.
This is profoundly important.
For the ontology of becoming does not culminate in static resolution.
It culminates in continued participation - whether as protest, confrontation, etc.
The self emerging from rupture learns that being was never sustained through rigid permanence alone, but through the ongoing capacity to remain relationally open within instability itself.
that continuity survives not by refusing interruption,but by adapting through transformation.
And perhaps this is why the narrative feels so profoundly modern.
For contemporary existence increasingly unfolds within conditions of:
- destabilization,
- historical fracture,
- ecological uncertainty,
- political rupture,
- spiritual displacement,
- technological acceleration,
- and collapsing continuity structures across civilizations themselves.
Many now inhabit worlds where inherited frameworks no longer stabilize being with the same certainty once assumed possible.
The old continuities tremble.
And yet becoming continues.
This is where Jonah remains strangely alive within the modern imagination.
Not as simple morality tale.
Not as supernatural curiosity.
But as existential ontology narrated through descent itself.
Jonah becomes the self encountering interruption within relational becoming.
The self resisting transformation.
The self enclosed within rupture.
The self surviving continuity’s collapse.
the self returning unfinished into an unfinished world.
Thus the movement of Jonah ultimately becomes the movement of ontology itself.
not where structure disappears,but where structure becomes lived rupture.
within interruption,within descent,within enclosure,within transformation,and within fragile reconciliation -
that becoming begins again.
Being After Rupture
The world was fixed -
or so I thought,
Sameness was my truth,
for an anchoring stability.
Then a foreboding, an uncertainty,
but it was falling,
I. Process Philosophy and Relational Ontology
Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected edition. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978.
———. Religion in the Making. New York: Fordham University Press, 1996.
John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1976.
David Ray Griffin. Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Catherine Keller. Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. London: Routledge, 2003.
II. Phenomenology and Existential Becoming
Edmund Husserl. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by F. Kersten. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983.
Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962.
Søren Kierkegaard. The Concept of Anxiety. Translated by Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Paul Tillich. The Courage to Be. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952.
III. Biblical Studies and the Jonah Tradition
Walter Brueggemann. The Prophetic Imagination. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001.
Phyllis Trible. Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994.
Jack M. Sasson. Jonah: A New Translation with Introduction, Commentary, and Interpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. National Council of Churches, 2021.
IV. Consciousness, Meaning, and Modernity
Milan Kundera. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.
Iain McGilchrist. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. London: Perspectiva Press, 2021.
Rudolf Otto. The Idea of the Holy. Translated by John W. Harvey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958.
