A Reflection for Tuesday of the Twenty-Sixth Week in Strange Time
Why did I not perish at birth,
come forth from the womb and expire? (Jb 3:11)
Once I tell folks that Job is my favorite book within the Hebrew Bible, I get certainly one of two responses. Either people’s faces light up they usually affirm this with an enthusiastic “yes!” or they take two steps backward, as if I would infect them with my malaise. But the reality is that I like the Book of Job because Job is so willing to check with God in ways most of us can’t all the time manage.
In her book You Can Discuss with God Like That: The Surprising Power of Lament To Save Your Faith, Methodist pastor Abby Norman writes that “our anger, our sadness, our frustration won’t scare God from us.” Each Job and the Psalmist for today go to date as to wish that they’d never been born, which might feel like a shocking extreme. But they share this lament with tens of millions of individuals world wide who deal day by day with the anxiety and depression which have grown into a world crisis because the arrival of Covid-19.
But just as now we have barely paused to grieve the lack of the pandemic, so can we rarely grant ourselves the chance to take our rage, frustration and despair into our prayer lives. Rev. Norman reminds us now we have permission to do that when she writes that “God isn’t judging us for the way we feel.” Job actually understood this. When he asks why life is given to the bitter in spirit, he’s speaking for all of us who’ve experienced suffering.
God isn’t asking us to maneuver on or let go; like a trusted friend or a great therapist, God simply receives our sorrow and desolation, and provides it a spot to go.
When the Psalmist says “my soul is surfeited with troubles,” that, too, is an experience every human being shares. Suffering is an element of human life, and God understands that. But a lot of us were brought up understanding that prayer is a time to praise God, to not rage at God. Yet Scripture, literature and art all give us loads of examples of individuals doing just that.
Because God can handle our anger and our sadness, by bringing those emotions into our prayer, we are able to learn to avoid using them to break other people or ourselves. When Jesus admonishes the disciples who wish to destroy an unwelcoming village and as an alternative simply leads them on to a different village, he’s mirroring the ways God receives unpleasant emotions in prayer. Yes, you’re offended. Yes, you’re sad. God is present to us in those states of emotional turmoil, too. But God isn’t asking us to maneuver on or let go; like a trusted friend or a great therapist, God simply receives our sorrow and desolation, and provides it a spot to go.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit” just isn’t only a phrase; it’s an motion, moving from God to us. Today’s readings are a reminder that even in our deepest state of despair, love also exists.
