dcnovice
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ORIGINAL: Musicmystery
and Job.
One of my medical updates a few years back focused on Job. I hope it's not too obnoxious to share it here.
The Patience of Job
September 30, 2013
Few of you will be surprised to read that I do not have the patience of Job. Neither, it turns out, did he.
In my life, the Book of Job has been something of a classic in the Mark Twain sense: a work I’ve read about but never troubled to actually read. That changed last night. I was feeling particularly Job-like. Weariness had consumed the bulk of yet another weekend, and my bowels’ increasingly maddening antics included moving without warning in the middle of a giving a historic house tour. After frantically excusing myself, I left the guests standing in the master bedroom—a no-no, I’m sure—and tore up to the fourth floor bathroom. Only the knowledge that I had to go finish the tour kept me from melting down. Mercifully, the guests were very kind and don’t seem to have pocketed anything.
With that weighing on me, my thoughts turned to my litany of woes: the depression, the diabetes, the mobility issues that have harassed me all year, and of course the cancer. And second and third thoughts about my choice of surgical procedures. Out of that toxic brew emerged my first “prayer” in days or even weeks: “Why, O God, do you hate me?” A flood of tears followed. No surprise: They were days in coming. I found myself wanting to read William Safire’s provocatively titled reflection on Job: The First Dissident. But before that, I figured, I should really, finally wade into the primary source itself.
So I did. At about halfway through, I confess it’s a bit of a trudge. That’s partly because it’s essentially a play, and simply reading flattens its power. Also, the characters do go on a bit. Actually, a lot. There are three cycles of speeches that all pretty much say the same thing. Job insists that God has wronged him—an innocent man. Then the original Job’s comforters scold him, saying he must be guilty of some sin to be punished so brutally.
I took to Job immediately and adored his supreme impatience. He has the gall to bewail his birth—a shocking thought both then and now—lamenting that he wasn’t stillborn. And he has no plans to suffer in silence. “But I will not hold my peace,” he says, “I will speak out in the distress of my mind and complain in the bitterness of my soul” (Job 7:11). Wow, I thought, this is a guy who gets it! There are times—we’ve all had them—when life truly sucks, and no rosy lens can disguise that.
I already knew the ending, so I didn’t feel bad about peeking ahead. To be honest, it’s a disappointment. God shows up and blasts Job, demanding to know if Job was there when God created the universe and chastising him for the effrontery of questioning the divine design. And then, I’m sorry to say, Job caves. “I have spoken of great things I have not understood…. Therefore I melt away; I repent in dust and ashes” (42:3,6). Ugh. God basically bullies Job into silence and never answers his perfectly valid points. What began as a tale of amazing honesty and power shrivels into the ancient Hebrew version of The Taming of the Shrew.
I haven’t yet read Safire’s reflections, but I did recall—and dig out—an interesting perspective from Bishop John Shelby Spong. In Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism, he cites the Book of Job as an example of “protest literature”—“stories that provided a counterpoint to a prevailing attitude.” That attitude was one we still encounter today: “If [people] were poor and afflicted, they deserved it. Likewise, if they were rich and healthy, they deserved it.” Including Job in the scriptural canon, Spong argues, was a way of spurring the community to pause and consider things from a different angle, to stop assuming God shared their mindset.
This is turning into a sermon, which I hadn’t intended. So I’m gonna leave poor Job in his dust and ashes and advance the medical story.
_____________________________
No matter how cynical you become,
it's never enough to keep up.
JANE WAGNER, THE SEARCH FOR SIGNS OF
INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE
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