This means--I have been going through lots of personal stuff, collected or created over many years in California. I ran across a couple of pre-blog pieces related to chapter, in my life that were so urgent then, but now, seven or more months into a new and very different one, almost seem to have involved someone other than me.
This one I titled, originally, "Job Vs. Me", a tad of a grandiose title. Ah, well, I was young, under 50. It was all so long ago. I wonder if I imagined the fear I felt. It was a hard period. But then, we all have them, I have finally come to realize. And the difficulties comes in cycles. They came again this year. I still struggle with my faith, but I hope now, I am listening more closely. Time will tell. Anyway, here it is, my rather morose musings of 1998, with nominal editing.
I am afraid that my faith is conditional and with this perspective of God, to the extent I believe, I seem to subscribe in fact, though not in theory, to the angry God of the Old Testament rather than the saving and forgiving God of the New. I have always been entranced, though not comforted by, that stern Protestant Jonathan Edwards" view. We are sinners in the hand of an angry God. The picture: humans held by the Hand of God by string over the fiery pit. I hope Edwards is wrong and Mother Mary Ursula, my first grade teacher, was right, but I am not taking any bets.
I have been in therapy for some time and discussion of God or religion hasn't come up as often as I might have anticipated given my predilection to think about it and journal about it. But today, it did come up, when my therapist, raised a Catholic but struggling against its organized form, compared the events of my life in the last six months to the "trials of Job."
My Job was a little rusty. But I recalled that he was a good man who was the subject of a bet between God and Satan. God pointed out just how good Job was. Satan said, something like, "Well sure, but it's easy to be good when you are protected and safe, living fat and happy off the land with your family and resources." God said, "Hey, look it, i know that Job would still be faithful even if he lost everything." Satan said, "Ok, God, put your money where your mouth is" and God let the worst be thrown at Job. Job argued and lamented, and others argued around him, and insisted that he MUST have done something to cause it, but Job kept faith with God. At the end of the torment, he did ask for an explanation, to which God said, "My Ways are not your ways". Job accepted that. After all God is Omniscient. God is, well, God.
The proud part of me would like to think that I have something in common with Job, but that proves the point that I don't, because the one thing Job was not, was proud. He was humble as heck. Secondly, I have since taken a look at the Book of Job and Chapter I says he was a "blameless and upright man who feared God and avoided evil." I surely fear God (though I think the Biblical meaning of "fear" is different from mine--the respect of HIS power and yielding to it--mine is outright terror), but I am neither blamless nor upright. To the extent I avoid evil it is less likely because of purity of heart than fear of punishment. Then there are the trials themselves. Job lost his land. His house fell on his wife and children and killed them when a strong wind blew. He was beset by physically tormenting boils and still, he did not blaspheme or lose faith. He always trusted in God.
Me and my "trials" of six months? I had been a volunteer trainee therapist at a clinic as part of my psychology studies, when, in April, I declined what I thought was an improper request of the administration in a fit of what I also thought was morally sound justification. In June, the clinic decided that they no longer required my services as a trainee with added remonstrations the gist of which were that I was reprehensible. So much for my perception of principle. Between May and June, before the unilateral parting of the ways between me and the clinic, I was assigned a client who was severely depressed and posed a real danger of suicide. Though I had some supervision throughout from a senior licensed therapist, I felt and was well over my head with a life on the precipice. He returned to a former therapist, physically intact. I will probably never know if he stayed that way. In June, 500 of my lawyer and non-lawyer colleagues were laid off from the State Bar where I work as a prosecutor, leaving in my department a total staff of 20, including me, to blow on the embers, and we are still in danger of termination in a few months. On October 30, a man backed into my less than a month old car while I was at a complete standstill and claimed that I ran into him. Naturally, he also claimed that he, and his car, were damaged. That same day I received a call from the police that one of the lawyers I was prosecuting wanted "something done" to me. During the last week I was told that he "wants me dead." Real termination.
These trials may not be commensurate with the ones of Job, but they are sufficient for me. I know I am no Job.
Job came to know that God was testing him. I have been vouchsafed no such explicit knowledge. Since, from my grammar school days at the Mount I was taught that God does ask things of us, I suppose, implicitly there is evidence that He might be testing me. Still, I cannot imagine why in that surely He knows that I am marginal in faith and that a test is something I shall surely fail. And prideful ego centric "glass half empty" girl that I am, I am not likely to view the whole affair as a test, but as punishment. Punishment for what? for not valuing what I have, talent, education, health, for starters. For daring to feel suicidal these last months, though coward that I am, fearful of anything that would be painful and of God's wrath, I would likely never act on such a feeling however deep.
I hear God saying, "Hey, girl, you think you know pain, but you don't, so I want to give you a small taste, to remind you of your hubris, and exhort you to be grateful for how little has beset you." Unfortunately, Lord, I am very very weak, and though I know how blessed I am I still feel forsaken more often than not.
So, you see, Job and I ultimately have little in common. He went back to his life trusting in God. I fight trust in God and everyone else all the way. And thus, I am alone.
These events, these tests, they are prods to life or they are reasons to stop living. I have been standing on my own precipice for a long time. Will I retreat into some hermetic existence? Or will I venture forth in spite of the seeming warnings against it? Here's the thing. I don't know.
I just looked. After his trials, God blessed Job's later life more than He had his earlier one. Job died full of years. It sounds as though he was very happy. I hope that in this, at least, I somehow manage to be like Job. But, I am not sure.
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