Hope Flickers

Has hope ever been so elusive, so invisible or out of reach, that when it finally showed up, you resented it a little bit?

Most of my academic work focuses on theologies of suffering and theologies of the Word. How does suffering change a person? What does suffering do to language? How does suffering shape theology? How does suffering impact proclamation? What is the relationship between gospel and suffering bodies? How do we preach in the presence of suffering? These are the kinds of questions that compose the bedrock of my academic work.

Growing out of these questions, I have explored continental philosophy, trauma theory, affect theory, feminist hermeneutics, and theologies of preaching. But the one conversation partner who largely launched my academic trajectory, and who continues to confound my work, is the biblical character, Job.

To put my fascination with Job (and his very important place in the wisdom traditions of the Hebrew Bible) into perspective, here is a brief summary of our relationship: I took a class on wisdom literature in high school, which focused largely on the book of Job. Then, the final and most significant course of my undergraduate degree in Ministry and Theology was a course on Job and Ecclesiastes, taught by Dr. John Mark Hicks. During my M.Div. I took a course on the book of Job with Dr. Mark Hamilton, and even still, the book was not done with me. So, I kept reading and kept interrogating. I wrote a paper on embodied grief in the poetry of Job, and presented it at the annual Society of Biblical Literature/American Academy of Religion meeting. Then, I proposed that I continue this research in doctoral studies, particularly in relation to preaching. This landed me at Boston University, where I return to this text again and again, finding its wisdom no less enigmatic upon each reading.

There are three aspects of the book of Job that trouble me the most. The first is also the most obvious. We still want to know why the innocent suffer. We still want to know how a God who is characterized by chaos-vanquishing lore—a God who tames the primordial waters of chaos and regards Leviathan as nothing more than a play-thing—could allow chaos to relentlessly consume creation.

Secondly, I have been troubled by what C.L. Seow refers to as Job’s “history of consequences.”[1] Throughout history, Job has been vaulted in the Christian imagination as a valiant hero, a man undeterred by the suffering of his flesh (Seow specifically traces this interpretation through Gregory the Great’s Moralia, and throughout the medieval period). The primary descriptor accompanying Job is “patient”—we encourage sufferers to have patience like Job. And yet, every time I encounter this representation of Job, I can’t help but wonder if we are reading the same book.[2] Job is not patient. Job does not transcend his own suffering. Job’s holiness does not save him from despair. This history of interpretation has yielded centuries of real consequences, and to be frank, really bad theology.

The third thing I continue to find troubling about the book of Job is its ending. Let’s be real. The ending of Job is disappointing. Here’s a man who has lost everything. His flesh is rotting. His friends badger him with “sympathy card theologies” of suffering, while he scrapes his scabs with pottery shards. His friends encourage him to transcend his suffering, and he bites back demanding that they look at his body. His friends point up to the sky and rehearse accounts of a God who is in control. Job points back to his own body, and demands a witness. This goes on for…a really long time. The book of Job is a tedious read. It is truly painstaking. Job is not patient, stoic, or valiant. He is broken, he is desperate, and at times, very angry. He is losing sight of hope. Then, God shows up in a whirlwind, waxes eloquent about how God is actually really, truly in control of creation, and then gives Job a whole bunch of new stuff. New family, fancy new digs. God gives Job abundantly more than anyone could ask for in a lifetime.

And I think it’s absurd.

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Back in 2016, I visited Duke University in order to talk with renowned Old Testament scholar and theologian, Dr. Ellen Davis, about combining Practical Theology and Old Testament studies for my doctoral work. I sat across from Dr. Davis in her office as she poured me some tea. After a few moments of quiet, she asked me point blank: “What is your take on Job?” I ventured, humbly and with great trepidation, a little theory I had developed. “Perhaps,” I suggested, “the very presence of God resolves Job’s suffering. Maybe this is all Job needed—a transformative encounter with God. He hoped to see God, and then God showed up and restored his life.”

She stopped stirring her tea, and looked in my eyes. “You really believe that? You find the ending of Job to be…satisfying?”

She drove the question deeper, without raising the volume of her voice. "You think that God's response resolved Job's suffering? You think that getting a new life absolved the loss of his first life? That is quite difficult to imagine.”

I looked down into my tea cup, knowing that she was right. “I suppose it is rather unbelievable. And perhaps this is where we are reminded that Job is literature. He is probably fiction. Is Job just really bad fiction?”

She smirked, and said something along the lines of, “It sounds like Job is not done with you yet.”

The ending of Job is a gross and unwelcome reminder that life goes on after loss. But the picture the book paints is unrealistic. It is offensive to those who have suffered traumatic loss, because they know that in reality, the kind of loss, the kind of trauma, that Job experienced never really goes away. The trauma takes on an “afterlife,” to borrow a concept from Dr. Shelly Rambo.[3]

Perhaps a more realistic ending of Job would portray a man who manages to survive the unimaginable, but is sometimes still rattled awake at night in a cold sweat. What about Job’s anxiety over the safety of his kids? Did he and his wife have to seek wise counsel, as they worked together to build a new life? What happened to his friendships? How did Job talk to God after the whirlwind? How did Job’s life continue day after day, after everything he lost?

The ending of Job is fantasy. It is a fantasy for a world of readers who know better. And while I continue to probe for the purpose of such fantasy (and I haven't given up on it), I do know that the ending of the book of Job is right about one thing: that even after darkness consumes us, even after we suffer horrific loss, life somehow goes on. The sun still rises. Time marches on.

My mom once told me about a book she read about a woman who suffered a traumatic loss. When asked how she survived, the woman simply responded, “I didn’t mean to. I just kept waking up.” Somehow, impossibly, life goes on.

The present age is marked by a volume of loss that historians and psychologists and philosophers and scientists will struggle to comprehend for decades to come. As we endure a global pandemic, as we fearfully witness the rise of autocracy, and as we worry about our rights and safety under bigoted regimes, we continue to endure particular losses as well. The personal losses and the communal losses compound one another. And yet, we keep waking up to a new day. Maybe we greet each new day with courage, as a new chance to face a struggling world. Or maybe we throw open our windows with dread, and ask, “What fresh hell awaits us today??” Either way—the world continues to turn.

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As I write this blog post, the philosopher Martin Heidegger comes to mind. He once wrote about how we all live life along the edge of a great abyss (abgrund). It certainly feels that way, doesn’t it? Furthermore, he argued that the poets among us are the ones who reach into the abyss, and retrieve our “fugitive gods” with language. While his poetic casting of existential dread (and its accompanying sense of cosmic abandonment) rings true for many, I think that perhaps Heidegger was too bewitched by phenomenological and existential descriptions of human life to notice what was right in front of him. While he could write poetically about this ambiguous abyss which characterizes human existence, he failed to aptly name the real, physical, all-consuming abyss that surrounded him: the evil of Nazism. Heidegger supported the Third Reich. And in this, it seems he failed to connect the existential with the particular.

So here I am with words, a floundering poet staring down into the abyss, and I will be damned if I make the same mistake.

News broke out last week that a privatized migrant detention facility in Georgia (where I currently reside) has been performing non-consensual hysterectomies on detainees. This is a bewildering terror that makes Heidegger’s abyss look like a crayon drawing on a piece of paper. We are also approaching 200,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States, during the worst health crisis of our lifetime. I have several friends who have received cancer diagnoses during this time of isolation, and others who have suffered through miscarriages, loss of family members, loss of homes, loss of employment...the personal losses are piling up. No poets could possibly summon sufficient language to demand an answer from God about this magnitude of suffering. Doubtless many have tried, and yet, like the book of Job, we flip through endless pages of human debate, with no sign of a divine whirlwind yet.

The world is looking mighty dark right now, friends. And yet, somehow, we keep waking up.

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A month ago, a former Psychology professor of mine, Dr. Chris Gonzalez, posted on Facebook: “The pandemic has taught you something about yourself. Care to share?”

I responded, fingers typing almost instinctively,

“I have learned that sometimes hope merely flickers at the margins of suffering, barely visible at all. And I can do nothing more powerful with my life than to keep bearing witness to it, for myself and for my loved ones (even as we tend to our grief).”

Hope flickers. And sometimes, frankly I resent it for not shining brighter. Sometimes I simply resent it because our suffering is not absolved in its gleaming. Sometimes I am angry that the God, who I really do believe is good, will only afford us a spark.

Sometimes waking up is cruel. And yet, it is hope that keeps us moving. It is that flickering hope on the edge of the abyss that beckons us forward. It is hope that keeps us alive when the world grows dark. It is that flickering that empowers the oppressed, sparking and igniting their protests. It is hope that reanimates our bones, when life shakes our breath right out from us. It is hope that will move us to protect the vulnerable among us, and hope that will help us build lives together.

Oh, how I wish it was more satisfying than a mere flicker! How I wish we could have our fantasy ending. But if the book of Job has taught me one thing, for certain—one thing that holds up in the midst of our present crises—it’s that we are not called to transcend our suffering but to bear witness to it. When the world threatens to erase or obscure our wounds, when politicians seek to silence the truth-tellers among us, we can remember a remarkably clear moment from God in Job 42:7, when God tells Job’s friends, “I am angry with you [. . .] because you have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has.”

The hope that flickers is calling for our response; it is calling for us to speak truly. And if you are too tired to respond, don’t you worry. Just keep waking up. Truth-telling is no less true when only one person does it; and yet it finds momentum when more people participate. It is going to take a lot of us to tell the truth in order to make good on that flickering hope. And yet, hope characteristically will remain, and will grow brighter the more we bear witness to it.

[1]C. L. Seow, “History of Consequences: The Case of Gregory’s Moralia in Iob,” Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel1 (2012). [2]Actually, if we compared my version of the book of Job with Gregory the Great’s version, they would be quite different. But my guess is that most modern readers are basically reading the same text. [3]Rambo, Shelly. Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Afterlife of Trauma. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017.