The Daily Office readings have recently been working through the book of Job.  You may recall he is a deeply faithful man who sees his whole world collapse- his vast numbers of livestock have died, his means for living are gone, he body is covered in rashes and his family members have all died.  His 'friends' offer less than helpful counsel: "You must be a real sinner, boy, to be in this much mess."  That is the essence of their 'help'.

After he dismisses their counsel ("Tell me what heinous sin I have done to merit all I have ever loved being killed?  I know I ain't perfect, but I am not that bad."), he begins his doubts about God, God's goodness and God's presence.

Today we venture through Chapter 29 and hear. "Oh. that I were in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me, and by his light I walked through darkness, when the friendship of God was on my tent and my children were around me...(when) I delivered the poor who cried and the orphan who had no helper..."

Job yearns out loud for an earlier time when all was right, things were in their place and justice prevailed.  Now justice is a mockery and his is the butt of jokes in the square.

I think every mature journey of faith passes through this point, and not just once.  How many of the faithful have left their testimony of when God seemed vacant, absent, unknowing and certainly uncaring of their lot (including Jesus). 

"Can one return to their mother's womb and be born again?"  What if Nicodemus was not speaking literally, but truly got what Jesus was proclaiming ('you must be born again') and thus replied using the image metaphorically: "If you expect me to pass into the place you are calling, you might as well ask me to enter into my mother's womb at this point in my life (hard enough) and pass once again from the security I know to a new space not filled with the warmth and consistent nourishment of that place, of what I know.  I might as well cram my way through a tunnel that is painful, pressing, to a place where I have not yet existed, and plops me into immense vulnerability."  For that is what Job, Nicodemus and we are constantly asked to do- be born again, and again, and again, and again; to pass from a place of knowing to a place of unknowing.

Each time will pull us through a Job like experience for we will be learning things about God that will make prior knowledge seem frighteningly remote, seemingly irrelevant and of no currency, no help.  It is not that the past was untrue as much as the new is beyond our current knowing, and thus immediately sensed as vacant, ex nihilo, of nothing we recognize.  And as Job will find, it is the only place into which we can pass to find real life, to know God truly.

I have always appreciated Job's, and Israel's courage for leaving us these words.  For they are risky in telling us that true journey always passes through the vacant, the seeming absent.  And they are telling us the truth.

Above the doors of Westminster Cathedral in London is a line of statues of martyrs including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Oscar Romero.  This is truth in advertising.  If you pass through these doors, you will be asked to die.  If you pass through these doors, you will find martyr living is the call.  For again and again, you will be called to lay down all that you believe, all that you trust, all that you think is your future.  In doing so you will find life.

Job finds his way with God.  It is not what we might think.  It is true life.

Peace,

Todd