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Sunday
When I read God’s answer to the long-suffering Job, today’s Old Testament reading and a magnificent poem in its own right, I recognize the God I encountered when I lost my oldest son 24 years ago.
In response to the question “why suffering?”—the toughest of all questions–Job receives what at first appears a non-answer. Rather than speaking to Job as Job’s so-called friends have been doing, God essentially accuses Job of thinking too small. He even throws in a little sarcasm: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?…surely you know!”
What I hear God saying to Job is this: “You are part of a drama that is bigger than you can ever know. You are part of the great dance of creation and destruction, one that involves the foundation of the earth and the creation of the stars and nature’s cycle of life. So gird up your loins and expand your imagination.”
Although I didn’t read the Bible when I lost Justin, turning instead to poems like Shelley’s Adonais and Tennyson’s In Memoriam, I came to an insight similar to what God is telling Job. In losing Justin and in experiencing unbearable mental anguish, I felt connected with the universe in a new way. It’s like what Sartre’s Orestes says to his sister Electra in The Flies when she wants to retreat into a comforting rationalizations. “We were too light,” he tells her. “Now our feet sink into the soil, like chariot-wheels in turf.”
If I had thought that God was singling me out—if I had thought that God was some old man watching me through a telescope– if I had rationalized that God was somehow doing this for reasons that would be revealed later—I would have found such a God to be disappointingly small. And if God was this small, then the pain I was feeling was also a lot smaller than I thought it was, something that could be encapsulated in a maxim or some other kind of explanation. And that, I felt, would have failed to do justice to the loss.
Where I departed from Sartre’s Orestes is that, rather than feel weighed down—even in a good way—I felt expanded. I felt like I was entering unknown territory. I looked up at the summer sky and out over the St. Mary’s River where Justin had drowned and into the woods that border our house and understood now that I was a member, however unwilling, of God’s larger mysteries.
It’s hard to explain exactly what I mean but that’s why we have poems like Book of Job. Here’s God’s full response (Job 38), not just the excerpted passage that will be read in church today:
The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up your loins like a man,
I will question you, and you shall declare to me.“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
“Or who shut in the sea with doors
when it burst out from the womb,
when I made the clouds its garment
and thick darkness its swaddling band,
and prescribed bounds for it,
and set bars and doors,
and said, ‘Thus far shall you come and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stopped’?
“Have you commanded the morning since your days began
and caused the dawn to know its place,
so that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth,
and the wicked be shaken out of it?
It is changed like clay under the seal,
and it is dyedlike a garment.
Light is withheld from the wicked,
and their uplifted arm is broken.
“Have you entered into the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been revealed to you,
or have you seen the gates of deep darkness?
Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth?
Declare, if you know all this.
“Where is the way to the dwelling of light,
and where is the place of darkness,
that you may take it to its territory
and that you may discern the paths to its home?
Surely you know, for you were born then,
and the number of your days is great!
“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow,
or have you seen the storehouses of the hail,
which I have reserved for the time of trouble,
for the day of battle and war?
What is the way to the place where the light is distributed
or where the east wind is scattered upon the earth?
“Who has cut a channel for the torrents of rain
and a way for the thunderbolt,
to bring rain on a land where no one lives,
on the desert, which is empty of human life,
to satisfy the waste and desolate land,
and to make the ground put forth grass?
“Has the rain a father,
or who has fathered the drops of dew?
From whose womb did the ice come forth,
and who has given birth to the hoarfrost of heaven?
The waters become hard like stone,
and the face of the deep is frozen.
“Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades
or loose the cords of Orion?
Can you lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season,
or can you guide the Bear with its children?
Do you know the ordinances of the heavens?
Can you establish their rule on the earth?
“Can you lift up your voice to the clouds,
so that a flood of waters may cover you?
Can you send forth lightnings, so that they may go
and say to you, ‘Here we are’?
Who has put wisdom in the inward parts,
or given understanding to the mind?
Who has the wisdom to number the clouds?
Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens,
when the dust runs into a mass
and the clods cling together?
“Can you hunt the prey for the lion,
or satisfy the appetite of the young lions,
when they crouch in their dens,
or lie in wait in their covert?
Who provides for the raven its prey,
when its young ones cry to God,
and wander about for lack of food?”
What I thought about God in those awful days and weeks and months, I also thought of literature. Poets since the dawn of time—including the Job poet—have been grappling with heart-rending tragedy. And although they have always come up short when it comes to putting their grief into words, they also found a measure of meaning and a measure of consolation.
I turned to poetry in a new and intense way to explore this new connection with creation. Just as Justin, in his birth, had opened up new pathways for me, so was he doing so with his death.
Knowing, as God tells Job, that I knew nothing of what provides “wisdom in the inward parts” or that gives “understanding to the mind,” I gave myself over to all that grieving had in store for me.
