JOB - Grief, Loss, and the Absurd
Dealing with the existential given of grief and loss is a struggle and challenge that has been around as long as people have. The result of which is that we can find stories of existential heroes seeking to face their situation in surprising places.
One very old precursor to what we now call existentialism is the Book of Job in the Old Testament. I have not been a regular reader of the Bible, but after learning about the connection between this ancient book and existentialism, I was led to take another look at this particular story. I was surprised by what I found.
Job is a character described in the terms of the time as having everything going for him. He is well off by the standards of his culture and has all the things someone might want in that context. On top of that, he is “upright and blameless”. The story really drives home the point that Job hasn’t done anything wrong. It almost feels like his character is, rather than a real person, an example of a perfect person used in order to drive home a point.
Then everything goes wrong for him. All of his livestock are killed, meaning all his wealth is gone, and all ten children of his are killed. Then he gets some kind of disease that creates sores all over his body.
And so Job suffers. He suffers the loss of children, the loss of health, the loss of possessions, and so the loss of the life he thought he would live. At this point he is in such a bad way that he is wishing he had never been born, and he can’t figure out why life would be given to people just to suffer so much before they die.
I was so struck by how familiar this sounded as a therapist. I have met dozens of Jobs, people who have experienced repeated losses and are trying to make sense of it.
Several friends come to be with Job and try to comfort him. The friends all try to respond in ways they think are helpful, but all come from some form of the belief that Job must have done something to deserve this. That there must be some kind of cause and effect at play. Job’s friends can’t handle seeing him in pain.
They each try to create their own narrative for why their friend has lost so much and now suffers, a narrative that helps them believe they can live a certain way, follow certain rules, and so never have to sit at suffering’s table and eat their portion. They are reacting to the anxiety their friend’s pain gives them by trying to impose the concepts and logic given to them by their culture.
Job doesn’t take their B.S. He didn’t do anything wrong which caused this loss. He is “upright and blameless” and he knows it. And so he just gets louder and more emphatic in expressing his pain, wanting them to just hear him rather than blame him. Eventually he tells them they are “miserable comforters”, and basically asks them why they keep talking. He digs into expressing his pain, his loss, his suffering. He demands to be heard, until finally God Itself responds.
But the response he gets is not an explanation of why he is suffering. That question is almost ignored, and instead he gets a kind of universal tour of creation. The Universe does not tell him why he is suffering, because maybe that’s the wrong question and implies blame in itself.
Instead, the Universe responds by just being as beautiful, expansive, detailed, and unexplained as it is. I’m reminded here of Albert Camus (1913-1960) and his idea of the Absurd, the gap between our desire for understanding and the universe’s seeming refusal to provide such an explanation.
Job to me is a character who stands by his pain, refusing to be blamed for his suffering, and refusing to be shut up. He expresses it through line after line of poetry, and doesn’t take on his friends’ needs for explanations and imposed logic. And in this inexplicable experience of suffering, he is able to see the Universe in a new way, as equally inexplicable, mysterious, and refusing to be shut up just because it doesn’t explain itself.
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