“My integrity is at stake.”
Isn’t it always? ‘At stake’, I mean. Perhaps integrity is most visible (and least noticed) in the mundane and usually forgotten details of living in which we react out of instincts rather than out of reflection. Then something happens that suddenly or eventually puts our integrity ‘at stake’. The force of such defining experiences -- like a hurricane’s winds and waves -- can sweep/tear away what is extraneous to who we are.
Defining experiences can be painful, surprising, frightening, devastating, exhilarating. Some slip past too quickly for our focus to be sharp. Others can hardly be avoided. Most of us look for ways not to pause, not to see, not to listen, not to decide. Instead, one paradigm after another lures us or holds us by the promise to explain or at least to help us forget. But our guard is down -- however briefly -- when the victim is a spouse, a child, a parent, a colleague, a friend. As our mind’s eye adjusts, we begin to notice ‘the others’.
It happened to me just that way. I had been in the shacks in which some of my high school teammates lived. I had classmates whose bodies had to be pulled from wrecked cars. I had seen the disabled mocked. I had played and worked with orphans. I had visited the aging in nursing homes. I had officiated at the graveside of a stillborn baby. . . . But none of these experiences swept me away from the protective barriers standing between them and me. My place was not yet among them.
What question centers Job’s story? I think it is ‘integrity’. The stage is set around questions about Job’s integrity. The narrator sketches Job’s values, his manner of being, his standing. Then the curtain is drawn to reveal a stunning scene of celestial celebration as messenger after messenger praises ‘God’ and his handiwork. Then out from the crowd meanders the Accuser. He too has glanced around the heavens and the earth. He has a wager, not an affirmation. At issue -- Job’s integrity. He grants Job’s behavior. He raises doubt about Job’s intentions, Job’s ‘core’. The Accuser predicts Job can be made to curse ‘God’.
Leaving undecided the question of whose ‘hand’ – ‘God’ or the Accuser -- to blame for devastating Job and so many around him, the narrator quickly and dramatically replaces the initial image of Job with a horrible image -- financial ruin, sons and daughters dead, painful sores. ‘God’ calls attention to Job’s integrity (2:5). Job’s wife understands -- ‘Are you still holding on to your integrity’ (2:9). Job tries in vain to get through to his closest friends -- ‘Relent, do not be unjust; reconsider, for my integrity is at stake’ (6:27); ‘ . . . till I die, I will not deny my integrity’ (27:5).
Integrity has to do with character, soundness, reliability; with what makes something or someone whole, complete. ‘Integer’ and ‘integrate’ share etymological roots with ‘integrity’. Could Job keep a grip on his integrity without having a way to see ‘God’ as an ally? The story says no. Severely stricken, Job searches intensely through alternative meanings for the term ‘God’. Would Job still possess his integrity if he yielded to the pressure around him to deny his moral consistency? The story again says no.
As Job’s struggle unfolds, others are drawn into the crucible. What of his wife’s integrity? His family’s integrity? His friends’ integrity? His religious and social communities’ integrity? What of the integrity of ‘God’? What of your integrity? And mine?
