Canter Bridge

It is facile, conventional, and mostly true to consider the Bible a life-affirming book. Like any simple description of complex reality, it is also reductionistic.

The iconic sufferer Job, in the first vexatious soliloquy in the book that bears his name, takes a different path. Covered with boils, abandoned by kith and kin, enraged by the silence of heaven’s steely walls, he curses the night he was conceived and the morning of his birth:

Let the day perish in which I was born,
and the night that said,
‘A man-child is conceived.’
Let that day be darkness!
May God above not seek it,
or light shine on it.
Let gloom and deep darkness claim it.
Let clouds settle upon it;
let the blackness of the day terrify it.
That night—let thick darkness seize it!
let it not rejoice among the days of the year;
let it not come into the number of the months.
Yes, let that night be barren;
let no joyful cry be heard in it.
Let those curse it who curse the Sea,
those who are skilled to rouse up Leviathan.
Let the stars of its dawn be dark;
let it hope for light, but have none;
may it not see the eyelids of the morning—
because it did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb,
and hide trouble from my eyes.

This self-imprecation is the opening salvo in a spirited conversation that locks an honest sufferer and his too conventional companions in a life-and-death struggle for the shape of reality and the contours of hope. Job wins, in the end, by the sheer violence of his honesty. His would-be comforters skulk off with nothing but their platitudes to comfort them through their own dark night.

The rhetoric of suffering is often suffused with rhetorical questions, hurled both from and at the pain that makes former truths feel like betrayal. Job, in an oddly comforting way, is no exception:

Why did I not die at birth,
come forth from the womb and expire?
Why were there knees to receive me,
or breasts for me to suck?
Now I would be lying down and quiet;
I would be asleep; then I would be at rest
with kings and counselors of the earth
who rebuild ruins for themselves,
or with princes who have gold,
who fill their houses with silver.
Or why was I not buried like a stillborn child,
like an infant that never sees the light?

In the furnace of affliction, life’s small mercies seem the atrocious steps by which I survived for this. Sustenance becomes damnation. Nurture proves to be treachery. Extinction steps in as one’s hope, one’s telos, the sufferer’s passionately desired eschaton.

It may be possible to be a friend, advisor, companion, counselor without having suffered. It is not wise to attempt the same outcome without having lowered oneself down into the roiling refuse of Job’s pain to soak there for a while in pursuit of discernment’s silence.