Comments on the Book of Job, Part 1

The Book of Job is perfect for preparing us for Lent. The issues that it raises are perennial and still unsolved. Job bears thinking about. What does it say to you? Here's a poem I wrote about it some years ago:

JOB

The messengers have told me of the natural
Disasters and incredible fatalities

Which fell upon my properties and oh my dear propinquities

My grown-up sons and daughters and their
Children in their infancies

All taken from me now when I had shored up liabilities
And thought myself the happiest man alive.

I cannot stand more messages nor dreary fearful presages
Though nothing’s left to lift from me except disease’s ravages
And this thin thread of life.

My wife, that shrieking woman,
What a person she has been for me

As if her curses meant for me
Could find their way to God.

My friends, they sit away from me
They cannot stand the stench of me

I see what horror looks like in their eyes.

As long as they sit silently
My spirit bides their sympathy

Especially when surprisingly
Their tears splash all too copiously
Down upon their beards.

But now the waiting gets to them
The terror is too much for them

They’re thrown upon
The doctrine of their youth.

And so they take their turns to speak
And ask me now to face myself

And find within this rottenness
The sin which is the source of it

So they might have the pleasure
Of knowing all along.

Do they think I’ve been oblivious
To every single silliness
And all the indiscretions of my youth?

I have counted and berated
And retold and still negated

Petty jealousies and rivalries
And all the sins of flesh;

Or weighing in my memory
Each babe my wife presented me
To see if I’ve preferred one child too much

But my children, they are gone from me
And who has wrecked this wrong on me?

And what the scales which weigh to me
Such punishment as this?

But when my friends are silent
And I sift through all this misery
As if it holds the very sands of life,

I discover deep inside of me
Through torture and calamity

A deep abiding presence which
I do not understand.

And all the words which come at me
And all the speeches made, you see,

And all the stuff that’s written to explain
This morbid life

Evaporate so rapidly
In the furnace of infinity

For that’s what’s here inside of me
And has been, in my agony;

I see it now, the rest is not
For me to understand.

The message then is not
That God delights in senseless suffering,

But through it all and in it all,
He’s here.