Why Does Job Suffer?

The Book of Job.

When you think of Job, your first thought is probably about a man subjected to a test to see if his faith stands up. Job has been a blameless and upright man. The Satan suggests that Job is good only because Job's life has been so easy. Let’s give him some hardship and see how his faith and goodness stand up. Job, however, passes the test, remains virtuous despite hardship, and so, in the last chapter, Job’s virtue is rewarded and he gets health, wealth, and a family back.

If that’s your summary of the book of Job, then you’re looking only at the first two chapters, and the last chapter. The book of Job has 42 chapters, and most people only remember the first two and the last one. What about the 39 chapters in between?

The outside frame – the little bit at the beginning and the little bit at the end, give us an image of a mechanically moral universe. Virtue is rewarded (eventually) and wickedness punished. Goodness in, reward out; evil in, punishment out.

If you look inside the Book of Job – in between the first two chapters and the last chapter – if you look at those middle 39 chapters – you find that the notion of a mechanically moral universe is explored and ultimately debunked.

Let’s look at what happens in the middle 93 percent of the story. Job has three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, who come visit him. The three sit with him in silence, at first.

“They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.” (Job 2:13)

At length, Eliphaz ventures to speak.

“Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off?” (Job 4:7)

Then Bildad, then Zophar – all in the same vein.

"You must have done something wrong, Job," they say. "God, the universe, wouldn’t punish you if you didn’t deserve it."

“We are moved by the three silent friends, but the moment they begin to speak they disappoint.” (Elie Wiesel)

When they speak, they give these speeches insisting that the universe is mechanically moral. They say, "Well, Job, you must have done something bad. You’re being punished for something." Faced with standing for and with “their beaten and defeated friend” -- or adhering to their own concepts of a mechanically moral universe -- “They made the wrong choice.” (Elie Wiesel 225)

“Why do I suffer?” cries Job. After Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar have offered their trite moral simplifications, Job is still left crying, "Why do I suffer?"

Finally, God Godself appears in a whirlwind to answer the charge that Job’s suffering is unfair and without basis. It’s not clear, however, that what God proceeds to say can be accurately called an “answer.” God unleashes four chapters of rhetorical questions that invoke the wonders and grandeur of creation. Here’s a sampling from chapters 38 and 39.

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?... Or who shut in the sea,... made the clouds its garment... Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place... Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth?... Has the rain a father, or who has begotten the drops of dew?... Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion?... Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?...Do you give the horse its might?... Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars, and spreads its wings toward the south? Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up and makes its nest on high?”

Does this answer Job’s question? Does this explain why Job suffers? No. It does not. What it does is confront Job with the transcendent wonder of his world. In that confrontation with transcendence, Job’s complaint is stilled. Job says,

"I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. . . . therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42:3, 6)

Humbled and speechless, Job abandons his plea, for he grasps that the mystery of the cosmos is so much deeper than principles of justice. Job’s expectation that the universe is a moral agent that should be accountable for its unfairness is countered at last by seeing it, instead, in its transcendent wonder.

Perhaps Job was comforted by seeing his afflictions as small in the grand scale of things. Perhaps he was affirmed and succored by feeling his calls on behalf of justice placed within a context of the fullness of a life within such beauty and majesty.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Job and Transcendence"
Part 1: "Mechanically Moral Universe?"
Part 3: "Savor the World and Save the World"

Mechanically Moral Univese?

I signed up with Disaster Chaplaincy Services this month, so when I finish their training, I’ll be on call to be part of the spiritual care response in the New York area whenever there’s a disaster. Four days ago, on Wednesday, I was down in the city for an eight-hour orientation for disaster chaplaincy. The example scenarios and issues reminded me of how strong the human inclination is to believe in what we might call a mechanically moral universe. The mechanically moral universe theory sees the universe as a giant reward and punishment machine. You feed in virtue, you get reward back. You feed in vice, you get punishment back.

Humans have a deeply ingrained tendency to implicitly assume that’s the way the Universe works. Goodness is rewarded and evil is punished. So it disturbs us when bad things happen to good people. In disasters, people find their world turned upside down very suddenly, and this makes no sense. They are likely to say, "How could this happen? How did I deserve this?"

When people are in a crisis is not the time to engage them on the merits of their theory of the universe’s moral enforcement system. In a crisis, all that can be done is be present to their confusion and anguish. It’s when we’re not in a crisis that we can prepare ourselves with conceptual and emotional resources we’ll need when that time comes.

And it’s not easy.

Corollary to the idea that the universe as a whole monitors and issues rewards and punishment is the idea that inanimate objects are susceptible to our rewards and punishments. Our brains are just built to see moral agency everywhere! The other day, I was opening a package of something – raisins, I think it was, and was having a little difficulty. I jerked at it and got it open. And then I introspected: What just happened here? There was just a little more force than a purely practical assessment warranted. There was also just a touch of punitive intent. Where did that come from? There was a little part of me that was like, “I’ll show you, raisin package!” I just had to laugh at myself.

Our brains are built primed to treat anything as a moral agent. The universe punishes us to get us to act right, and we punish things, thinking (at some level) to get them to act right. That’s not logical. With self-awareness, you can notice it in yourself, laugh, and move on. Without self-awareness, you can stay mired in that blaming or self-blaming mood for . . . some time. And the mood can become a habit.

That’s why I want to talk about transcendence today. Transcendence is our theme for May, coming up. Experiences of transcendence – experiences of the awe and beauty and wonder of things – are the antidote for that irrational impulse to punish, or to imagine you are being punished for something. When you think that things aren’t going well – when you bemoan life’s unfairness, when you’re saying “Why me?” – when you’re perplexed by why bad things happen to good people – you’ve forgotten about the awe, the wonder of creation. Transcendence is also the antidote for feelings of entitlement, and the sense, when things are going well, that you are merely getting the rewards you deserve for being the virtuous person you are.

The wonder of creation transcends our blaming, judging mind and also our self-congratulations. This is where religion and science meet. The scientist Carl Sagan, near the end of his life, wrote in The Pale Blue Dot:

“In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?' Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”

Yes, Carl, and Unitarian Universalism is such a religion: stressing the magnificence of the universe to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe.

I think Carl Sagan is right that attention to the magnificence of creation – the magnificence of the universe – prepares us to tap reverence and awe. And modern science does reveal magnificence.

But religion has always included attending to the magnificence of creation, preparing us for transcendent experience.

In the next post, we'll look at the Book of Job as an example of attending to the magnificence of creation.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Job and Transcendence"
Part 2: "Why Does Job Suffer?"
Part 3: "Savor the World and Save the World"

This Week's Prayer

Dear Source of Hope,

We pause to collectively acknowledge the world’s sadness, which is our own -- and to face straightforwardly what is real. As we would be a people of love and compassion, let us open ourselves to take in the pain, and respond with kindness and care.

Our hearts go out today to Nepal where a massive 7.8 earthquake has collapsed homes, temples, triggered avalanches, and killed some 1,500 people.

Our hearts go out to Yemen, where fighting between Houthi rebels and a Saudi-led coalition wreaks death and havoc and a humanitarian crisis.

Our hearts go out to Armenian people everywhere, as they observed this week the 100th anniversary of April 24,1915, when leaders and intellectuals of the Armenian communities in Ottoman Turkey were rounded up and massacred, marking the beginning of the Armenian genocide that would last eight years and kill more than 1.5 million Armenians.

Our hearts go out to Chile, where eruptions of the Calbuci volcano threaten farms and water supply with ash fallout.

Our hearts go out to the people of our country’s western states as wildfire season begins and drought conditions multiply many times the risk to lives, homes, and local economies.

Our hearts go out to Ethiopia, which is mourning with joint Christian and Muslim prayers, for the 30 or so Ethiopian Christians believed to have been killed on an ISIL videotape released last Sunday.

Our hearts go out to Baltimore, where a history of aggressive, sometimes brutal, police behavior oppresses particularly the African American community -- and particularly to the friends and family of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, dead with severe spinal cord injury while in police custody.

Our hearts go out to the intentional and unintentional victims of US drone strikes.

Our hearts go out with new hope to Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees held at a research lab in Stony Brook. This week they became the first nonhumans in history to be covered by a writ of habeas corpus, allowing their detention to be challenged.

Remembering, then, all the love that we have ever known, may we show it back to this, our bruised and hurting world.

Give Up Saving the World

“Maybe we could give up saving the world and start to live savingly on it.”

-Wendell Berry

Sustainability requires slowing down the pace of life, freeing up the time to do more self-provisioning. Here are some things that would take more of that precious time we have so little of: our own cooking, a little gardening, maybe some canning, taking the time to hang clothes on the line instead of using the dryer.

We’d really have to re-allocate our time away from marketplace-work to be able to do this kind of self-provisioning. People report that do-it-yourself activity is highly satisfying: they learn new skills, and it’s an outlet for creativity. And it reduces our ecological footprint. Sometimes these newfound skills and passions lead to start-up businesses that are small, local, and green. Or they lead to trading and sharing through local networks that strengthen community ties and social capital – which enhances well-being and security.

Working less, having less money, means buying fewer new products, and what you do buy you’ll want to be durable, longer-lasting, and repairable.

Can this be done? Do we even really want to try, I wonder? Can you imagine for yourself maybe a few baby steps toward a simpler and freer and less consumptive life? We could live with less work and stress and consumption and stuff – and thus have more time for family, friends, community, and rewarding labor of crafts or garden or do-it-yourself activity. This would be good for us, and good for our planet.

The threat of climate change is real, and it is pretty scary. Plenitude and simplicity are about living in a sense of grace and abundance, not in fear. So let me conclude with some reflections on environmentalism and fear. Environmental advocacy typically depends a lot on playing the fear card. There is another way.

Environmentalism Without Fear

For starters, let us openly acknowledge that doomsday scenarios have a terrible track record. In 1967, a bestseller by William and Paul Paddock was titled Famine 1975. It was full of detailed scientific data and reasoning. Population was booming; agriculture was static. There were going to be massive famines in about eight more years, said the Paddocks.

The next year, 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, similarly predicted huge die-offs from outstripping our food supplies. 65 million Americans will die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, Ehrlich predicted, and by 1999 the US population will have declined to 22.6 million.

In 1970, Harvard biologist George Wald predicted that

“civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing [humanity].”

Also in 1970, Life magazine reported that:

“By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” (1970 Jan 30, p. 22)

The truth is we don’t know what’s coming, or when. Long-term predictions are always mostly wrong.

“The End of Something—history, the novel, Christianity, the human race, the world—has long been an irresistible subject. Many of the things predicted to end have so far continued, evidently to the embarrassment of none of the predictors.” (Wendell Berry, Yes magazine, posted 2015 Mar 23)

When it comes to being an environmentalist without purveying fear, Wendell Berry is a helpful guide. He points out:

“All we can do to prepare rightly for tomorrow is do the right thing today.... If using less energy would be a good idea for the future, that is because it is a good idea.”

Berry points out that

“the difference between ‘prediction’ and ‘provision’ is crucial.”

Prediction we are lousy at. But provision we can do. For instance, we plant at the appropriate time, not “because we have predicted a bountiful harvest.” Rather, we do so because the past teaches us that it might be. The past teaches that our odds are improved by a diversity of food crops – precisely because we can’t predict which ones will do well.

Provision involves principles that prediction does not. For instance: never waste or permanently destroy anything of value. To destroy for the sake of greater good tomorrow is to place faith in predictions, which always ultimately miss something important.

“Maybe we could give up saving the world and start to live savingly on it.”

Do the right thing today. Engage nonanxiously in the careful, caring tasks of provisioning. Remember the wisdom Jesus, in the Matthew gospel, taught:

“Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” (Matt 6:34, NRSV)

At the end of his 1977 prose-poem, "Healing," Wendell Berry gives a glimpse of the life of simplicity and plenitude. It is not one of great leisure. It is one in which the work is unhurried and unworried, grounded and grounding.

“The teachings of unsuspected teachers belong to the task, and are its hope.
The love and the work of friends and lovers belong to the task, and are its health.
Rest and rejoicing belong to the task, and are its grace.
Let tomorrow come tomorrow. Not by your will is the house carried through the night.
Order is only the possibility of rest.” (What Are People For? p. 13 -- excerpted, Singing the Living Tradition, #697) 

Could you take a few baby steps toward a life of simple plenitude? What would those steps be for you?

What would those steps be?

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "The Call of Simplicity"
Part 1: "Are You Temporally Impoverished?"
Part 2: "Simplicity for You, For the Earth"

Simplicity For You, For the Earth

For You

Most of us have complicated lives. E-mails, phone calls, working long hours. Carrying the kids to music lessons, soccer practice, play dates or scouts – church. It’s a fast culture and just trying to match the velocity of others makes life hectic.

Consider how much we work. In a report last August, Gallup found:

“Adults employed full time in the U.S. report working an average of 47 hours per week, almost a full workday longer than what a standard five-day, 9-to-5 schedule entails.” (Gallup, 2014 Aug)

And if you’re answering work emails even when you’re at home, you’re really working more than that.

Do you sometimes feel like a short-order cook at the lunch rush? It’s fine to rev up every once in a while, but constant rushing is stressful. “Risk & Insurance” reported earlier this year:

“In a trend that shows no sign of reversing, American workers are reporting higher levels of stress.” (Risk & Insurance, 2015 Jan.)

Stress weakens the immune system. It wears down your mood. When we’re living in a rush, we worry more, find more things to get irritated about. We don’t think so clearly, and we make worse decisions.

Is there a way to simplify, slow down? The hectic pace of modern life is driving us nuts. We are the most stressed people in history. And since stress can trigger depression, it’s no coincidence that we’re the most depressed people in history.

So many of us have somehow gotten sucked into a bad trade: we traded in our time for a little more income, when in fact, having more time and less income is more conducive to happiness and well-being. As Juliet Schor writes:

“Evidence that longer hours of work are associated with lower happiness is accumulating, as is the more general point that how people spend their time is strongly related to well-being. In a series of studies, the psychologists Tim Kasser and Kennon Sheldon found that being time-affluent is positively associated with well-being, even controlling for income. In some of their studies, time trumped material goods in importance. Kasser and Kirk Brown found that working hours are negatively correlated with life satisfaction.”

Economist Richard Layard found that across the globe, the average happiness score of a country stops rising when its per capita income reaches $26,000 in today’s dollars.

I had to laugh when I read about a study finding that three activities most likely to elicit a bad mood are: the morning commute to work, being at work, and the evening commute from work.

In the quest for more, what we got was more stress, more clutter, more stuff in our lives. We’ve created a booming storage industry just to stow it all. In the quest for more, so many Americans got less: less time and less enjoyment of life.

Plenitude is about a life attuned to the abundance of grace from simply being alive. Duane Elgin, the author of Voluntary Simplicity, first published back in 1980, wrote:

“To live voluntarily means encountering life more consciously. To live more simply is to encounter life more directly.”

And that’s what Thoreau was on about. He went to woods in order to simplify, simplify – and thereby in order to encounter life more consciously and more directly.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

As Thoreau also wrote in Walden:

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

Can we march to a more measured drummer? Is there a way to do that? We’d be happier, less stressed. And some of the work we stop doing can be given to some one else who needs a job.

For the Earth

The call to simplicity is for our own sakes. The call to simplicity is also for the sake of our planet. Longer hours increase your environmental impact

“both because of more production and because time-stressed households have higher-impact lifestyles.” (Schor)

Time-stressed households don’t cook as often. On average, they rely more on pre-prepared packaged food, and eat at restaurants.

• Ready-made packaged foods involve a lot more CO2 production than foods you prepare yourself.
• And restaurants? One study found that an hour of restaurant eating uses 11 kilowatt-hours of energy, while an hour of eating at home (including all travel for food purchasing, gas or electricity for cooking, and so forth) uses only 7.4.That means, eating out uses just shy of 50 percent more energy than eating at home.

We need to slow down. And the planet needs us to slow down.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "The Call to Simplicity"
Part 1: "Are You Temporally Impoverished?"
Part 3: "Give Up Saving the World"

Are You Temporally Impoverished?

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau, one of our transcendentalist and Unitarian forebears, wrote about the call to simplicity:

“Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion."

* * *

How are you doing?

Remember when the usual answer to that question was, “fine”? What may now be the more common answer is: “busy.” It’s a very popular thing to say. For one thing, it’s often true. For another thing, it has the benefit of making us seem virtuous, or at least decent. Decent people, according to general expectation, keep themselves occupied. Moreover, saying “busy” has the further advantage that it might deter whoever you’re talking to from asking you to do something more.

We guard our time, because we have so little of it.

Juliet Schor’s 2010 book Plenitude – along with Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden -- have been inspirations to me. Throughout Walden, Thoreau is constantly seeking to simplify his lifestyle: he patches his clothes rather than buy new ones, he minimizes his consumer activity, and relies on leisure time and on himself for everything. He asks us:

“Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed at such desperate enterprises?”

Yet for the last century and a half, the problem Thoreau identified has grown steadily worse.

Juliet Schor’s book adds 21st-century empirical studies to Thoreau’s 19th-century insights. The data tell us – if data we needed -- that US culture generally has not taken Thoreau to heart. She writes:

“Millions of Americans have lost control over the basic rhythm of their daily lives.
They work too much, eat too quickly, socialize too little, drive and sit in traffic for too many hours, don’t get enough sleep, and feel harried too much of the time.
The details of time scarcity are different across socioeconomic groups, but as a culture we have a shared experience of temporal impoverishment.”

Temporal impoverishment: we are time poor. We don't have enough of it.

What can you do about this? I’m not talking about going to live in a hut by a pond by yourself – although, if you can manage it, for a year or so, as Thoreau did, with occasional visits and trips to town, it does sound like a wonderful exercise. I’m just asking: Is it possible to slow down, simplify, de-clutter, go ahead and drop some of those balls we’re juggling and not pick them up? Is that possible? I don’t know. We’re New Yorkers. We're like, “Stop doing stuff? What’s he talking about? Stupidest thing I ever heard.”

You know your life. Is having less stuff and doing less stuff even a remote option? I don’t know. What I’d like to do is invite us to think about that.

Thoreau thought that the way to simplify, slow down, live a more authentic and present life, was to get away from modern conveniences – which, for him would have been things like steam engines, sewing machines, combine harvesters, and telegraph machines. Instead, we have persistently followed a different path: more and more devices and "conveniences." It seemed so logical. Creation of labor saving devices will save us from labor. By definition, right? And if we are saved from labor, then we have more leisure. Also, by definition, right?

Yet here we are with our microwave ovens, ice-making refrigerators, washers, dryers, and dishwashers, home computers, cell phones, interstate highways and jet airplane travel, central heating and air conditioning. And somehow we are busier than ever.

In some ways you could say our devices liberated us. In some ways you could say they enslaved us.

Robotics and automation do more and more of our manufacturing for us – and, indeed, more and more of our farming. Restaurants and prepared packaged food items do more and more of our cooking for us. And somehow we are busier than ever.

Freed from what we used to do, the labor force shifted away from industry and agriculture and into the service sector. We work frenetically in order to pay for all these conveniences and each other’s services.

Our lives are complicated. Would it be possible to simplify?

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "The Call to Simplicity"
Part 2: "Simplicity For You; For the Earth"
Part 3: "Give Up Saving the World"

This Week's Prayer

Thank you, Earth.
Thank you for air.
The sunshine:
Morning rising beauty of hope,
Evening setting grace of gratitude.
My brain processes the light that comes from the sky as blue –
I’m not clear on why
Or how a bunch of neurons does that.
And chlorophyll is green because, I don’t know.
I just know the blue sky and the green grass and trees
Are home.
I don’t know why blood is red, either,
The vivid aliveness motion inside me, and us.
Or why flower blossoms are so variously, brightly colored.
Thank you, Earth,
For ants, worms, beetles, spiders, jellyfish, squid.
Thank you for fish: shiny, darting;
And reptiles: gopher tortoises, bright little lizards, dark green gators.
Thank you for birds, and the unignorability of the fact of flying.
Because they are, and I am they, I, too, fly.
Thank you for other mammals: foxes and alpacas
and manatees and rabbits:
The things with hair and milk-making bodies.
All the funny, weird animals – the different ways that life can be.
I imagine living on a space station,
The view, so deep the black, and vast starfields,
Filling me with infinity every day.
Yet.
It takes ground to be grounded.
I was made to be among your colors and life and limited horizons, Earth,
Even when it is dangerous.
Even when it is too hot, too cold, too rainy, too dry,
I was made for you, Earth.
All the millions of species, each was made for you
Out of dirt and water and sunlight.
Did you make snakes able to be thankful?
Have blue jays gratitude? Lobsters?
Maybe they are always grateful – and what they aren’t able to be is not thankful.
This is a wonder to me, who am sometimes ungrateful and who other times,
Like today, am
sky-blue thank you and leaf-green thank you and blood-red thank you
And lavender and fuchsia and goldenrod thank you.
Grateful feels good,
Dear Earth,
And you offer so much for which.
Sometimes I forget.
Then I remember again.