Some exposures to pain and misery slip past us too quickly for the focus to be sharp. Other exposures linger too long to be avoided. Many -- who can do so -- look for ways not to pause, not to see, not to listen, not to decide. But the guard is down -- however briefly -- when the victim of tragic innocent suffering is a spouse, a child, a parent, a colleague, a friend. If our mind’s eye has time to adjust, we begin to notice all the other sufferers near the one we know.
It happened to me just that way. I had been in the shacks in which some of my high school teammates lived. I had a classmate whose mangled body had to be pulled from a wrecked car. I had seen my disabled cousin mocked. I had played and worked with orphans. I had visited nursing homes. I had officiated at the graveside of a stillborn baby, . . . . But none of these experiences swept me out from behind the protective wall that kept me from being shaken. My place was not yet with them, not until multiple sclerosis carried my wife out among them. Then I learned that to see/respect her was to see/respect all the other sufferers she symbolized – e.g., the two-year-old toddler brutally murdered by neighborhood boys, the dying cancer patient whose skin tears away from her shriveled frame as nurses turn her, the disfigured war veteran who will never leave his veterans’ hospital ward, the fatigued parents of a severely disabled child who never have a night out, the terribly abused kids at the K-Bar-B Youth Ranch too traumatized to be placed in foster homes, . . . .
Job’s way of thinking about ‘God’ and life – the conventional wisdom upon which his integrity had been based -- failed him . . . set him up . . . left him to protest being treated like a worthless outcast. Had he not seen enough to keep him from thinking his noble behavior would somehow insulate him and his family from devastating tragedy? Had he not learned from the campfire reports of caravan merchants that calamity indeed occurs to the honorable as often as to the scoundrel? With his own miseries added to the accumulated weight of those reports, the way of thinking about ‘God’ and life most familiar to Job finally crumbled and with it the motivation for using his strength – however diminished on the ‘scrap heap’ -- to befriend the unfortunate.
The approach to spirituality, ethics, theology described in this website’s entries is rooted in my ongoing search for another way to think about ‘God’ and life, a way to be with seriously wounded individuals without harming them or attacking them in self-defense, a way dependent on no motive more than – to use the accuser’s phrase – the sheer goodness of heart. I always have my heavily marked text of the ‘scrapheap’ Job’s story with me whenever I attend a ‘religious’ gathering.
It happened to me just that way. I had been in the shacks in which some of my high school teammates lived. I had a classmate whose mangled body had to be pulled from a wrecked car. I had seen my disabled cousin mocked. I had played and worked with orphans. I had visited nursing homes. I had officiated at the graveside of a stillborn baby, . . . . But none of these experiences swept me out from behind the protective wall that kept me from being shaken. My place was not yet with them, not until multiple sclerosis carried my wife out among them. Then I learned that to see/respect her was to see/respect all the other sufferers she symbolized – e.g., the two-year-old toddler brutally murdered by neighborhood boys, the dying cancer patient whose skin tears away from her shriveled frame as nurses turn her, the disfigured war veteran who will never leave his veterans’ hospital ward, the fatigued parents of a severely disabled child who never have a night out, the terribly abused kids at the K-Bar-B Youth Ranch too traumatized to be placed in foster homes, . . . .
Job’s way of thinking about ‘God’ and life – the conventional wisdom upon which his integrity had been based -- failed him . . . set him up . . . left him to protest being treated like a worthless outcast. Had he not seen enough to keep him from thinking his noble behavior would somehow insulate him and his family from devastating tragedy? Had he not learned from the campfire reports of caravan merchants that calamity indeed occurs to the honorable as often as to the scoundrel? With his own miseries added to the accumulated weight of those reports, the way of thinking about ‘God’ and life most familiar to Job finally crumbled and with it the motivation for using his strength – however diminished on the ‘scrap heap’ -- to befriend the unfortunate.
The approach to spirituality, ethics, theology described in this website’s entries is rooted in my ongoing search for another way to think about ‘God’ and life, a way to be with seriously wounded individuals without harming them or attacking them in self-defense, a way dependent on no motive more than – to use the accuser’s phrase – the sheer goodness of heart. I always have my heavily marked text of the ‘scrapheap’ Job’s story with me whenever I attend a ‘religious’ gathering.