Writings, Readings & “Thinkings” - I
The most original shape that my sabbatical has maintained is my plan to take a course at Fuller this fall. I enrolled in OT504 - a class on the Old Testament Writings - taught by John Goldingay. The posts series - “Writings, Readings & “Thinkings” - will capture a piece of my weekly reflections from the course. **If you’re interested in more of the raw intellectual or historical data, let me know, since I won’t focus on that here.**
My first reflection comes from the following poem - about Sept. 11th - which I believe has wide-relevancy regarding the experience of those who suffer. The whole poem looks at Sept. 11th from different lenses of the OT Writings, but this section comes from my new biblical mentor Job:
Or is it the story of Job?
An honest man trying his best
when all of his hard-won security
is brought down in a sudden calamity
the hour a building fell on all his family.
His servants break the news to him by email.
Job watches, disbelieving, on TV
his life unraveling in front of him.
Weeping in the ruins of his city,
distraught, bewildered, desolate, enraged.
We rush to comfort Job, and so
we should be careful of our feelings,
not to confuse our sympathy with
the substance of his lasting grief,
as one of those who will be living from now on
on the legacy of an unthinkable change.
Of course it summons up
the ghosts of our own grievings, whether real
or from our worst imagining; but this
is suffering by proxy: it will have
no answers when God asks his dreadful questions
out of the whirlwind of Job¹s despair.
That middle statement - “we should be careful… not to confuse our sympathy with the substance of his lasting grief…” stood out to me. Clearly, that could be twisted into a unpallatably bitter pill, on par with the familiar statement “You don’t know my pain.” But if it isn’t seen as a weapon, but as a lense into suffering or the individual experience of pain, I think it is very apt.
In Veronica & my unfolding experience with “an unthinkable change,” I’m beginning to ask different questions about how others interact with my experience, how I share it, and then on a ministry level outward, how I am being shaped by this to interact differently with others in my pastoral work on staff. Still a lot of food for thought for me, but this is my appetizer.
Along those lines, he included this comment - that he heard from someone else - about the Proverbs, Job & Ecclesiastes, that also stood out to me:
Proverbs says: “These are the rules of life. Follow them and you’ll find that they work.”
Job & Ecclesiastes responds: “We did. And they don’t.”
I think that part of the tension of faith is learning how to submit to the wisdom of the Proverbs while living in the reality of Job & Ecclesiastes without going “either/or” with the tensions.