A Path Like Job’s

Job is my hero. He is mouthy, scrappy and doesn’t take any crap from his friends. I find those admirable traits. Mostly I love the biblical book of Job because it mirrors some of what happens in our own lives.

Job is a book for when life comes totally unraveled. In the blink of an eye Job loses everything: home, possessions, livelihood, family and health. He is the poster child for human pain. Beyond the obvious losses was the deeper, eviscerating wreckage that comes from severed relationships, broken dreams, shattered hope, and any sense of a bearable future.

Job’s path is not unfamiliar to us.  The capricious path of illness and disease can change our lives in a heartbeat. A random act of violence or carelessness can shred our hold on security in a flash.  So many things intrude into the fragile worlds we construct for ourselves and those we love.  And much of it is beyond our control.  Then there is, of course, all that we manage to do to each other.   

Job’s story unfolds as a play in several acts.  The first act introduces us to Job and serves as an off-stage character development narrative.  Job is a good guy. The second act takes place independently of Job, and is essentially a conversation between God and an under-schlep angel known as the Satan.  Contrary to our popular images of the little guy with the pitchfork and long tail dressed in red, which is a construct of Dante not Scripture, the Satan was an important part of God’s cadre of under-schleps.  It was the Satan’s job to spot unrighteousness and bring it to God’s attention.  The second act ends with God and the Satan agreeing to send a host of misfortunes Job’s way to see how he acts when all his blessings evaporate into thin air.

The image of a God who has to play games with Job and his family as a means of proving that Job will remain faithful doesn’t sit easily with our image of God.  It was, however, the God image of the post-exilic period, when the book of Job was most likely written.  Going along with that was a cosmology that tied suffering to retribution.  In other words, awful stuff was believed to be the consequence of sin.  It was a tit-for-tat world. 

And this sets the stage for act three, which unfolds in numerous scenes, each involving the friends who visit Job in his affliction.  The Reader’s Digest version of their visit is, with friends like that, who needs enemies.  The highlight of their time with Job is the three days they spent in silence.  When they open their mouths it’s pretty much downhill. 

To say they are misguided but well-intentioned is generous. These friends meet Job in his misery and try to talk him through it, talk him out of it or talk him to death. They assault Job in his misery with their particular variation on the theme…if stuff is happening in your life, it’s your own fault.  And for good measure they each add to their own peculiar version of buck up, shut up, and get on with it. 

We have all been on the receiving end of such well-intentioned but unhelpful advice. 

And Job, for all his distress and trauma, holds on to his own faith and says a resounding, “no” to all of it.  Job had to find his own way and he wasn’t about to acquiesce to something that didn’t ring true in his own soul.  One of the great messages of Job is that it’s okay to rail and make complaint against God, say exactly how we feel, and trust that God will hear and understand.  In moments of deepest distress, honesty brings more comfort than easy answers. 

Job’s friends were so busy trying to explain away his suffering and answer the question “why me” that they failed to recognize that wasn’t Job’s question.

Job is not asking, “Why me?”  Job is asking, “Where is God?”  It’s a very different question.  As the third act unfolds and Job’s distress deepens, it is partly out of frustration with his clueless friends. It is more because he cannot find God in his pain.

Job laments God’s apparent absence.  It seems to Job that God has caught the last train outa town…and the silence is almost as unbearable as his friends who can’t stop talking. 

In moments of great struggle, often the question is not whether or not God exists, but whether or not God cares. Job wasn’t totally sure what to believe about God, but he believed God existed and that God’s existence mattered. He believed enough to trust God cared about his unraveled life.

And sometimes that is the best we can do…trust that God cares about our unraveled lives, believe that God journeys with us in what Joan Halifax calls the “hell realms.” 

Sometimes the best we can do is rail at God and trust that’s enough.  Sometimes the best we can do is say no to the answers that are too easy, too shallow or too stupid to honor the places of our pain even though we don’t have any other answers ourselves.

And there, in the moments of emptiness between what we have always believed and what we don’t yet know, God comes.  If you are in the waiting moments, know that this dark night does not last forever.  If you are on the other side of the dark night, reach to someone whose journey is in that realm.  Do not answer, just wait.  Do not speak, honor the silence.  Reach with the heart and not just with the head. 

If you have never known this place…you will.  The dark night of the soul visits us all.  It is a stop along the journey, not a final destination.

Richard Bach writes, “When you come to the edge of all the light you have known, and are about to step out into the darkness, faith is knowing one of two things will happen.  There will be something to stand on, or you will be taught to fly.”