Thursday, October 1, 2020Â Â Â Â
Memorial of St. Therese of Lisieux, Virgin and Doctor of the Church
      (today’s lectionary)
From my suffered flesh
Now she’s 68. But back when she was 12, at piano lessons her teacher stood her up and said, smiling, she had not missed a note. She played the notes perfectly, the teacher said. But she did not play the music.
“I think you’ll have to suffer some before you’ll be able to play the music,” she told my friend. My friend thought then her teacher was just a little crazy. But not now. Not now that she’s 68. Now she knows exactly what her teacher meant.
Pity me, pity me, my friends
For the hand of God has struck me!
Stop hounding me, you are not God,
Stop preying on me. Let me speak!
What does my friend say now? She has fewer words than she did as a 20-plus-year old, roaring through that decade dancing, jumping out of planes, belly dancing after working all day every day as a social worker. Nearly engaged many times, she struggled to send her southern Baptist childhood packing and listened with skeptical interest to earnest voices inside her, like Job, wondering where God was, just what had He been doing when things went wrong at home?
Job had three fine friends, who did not help when everything fell apart. They listened awhile, then thought, well, we’ve listened long enough, it’s time to set things right, and in that decision made a mess of things. At last Job spoke up. “Can’t you just shut up?”
Why do you hound me as though you were divine?
Can you not be still?
This summer I read the journal of an Irish farmer who left his journalism at The Guardian behind for peasant, pleasant silence. Leaving the city, he searched the countryside for a place to live.
I long for the freedom not to have to speak. Aldo Leopold summed up my morning’s sentiments when he said, “Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?” I take out my Ordnance Survey map, number fifty-two, in the hope of such a spot. But there is nothing resembling wilderness.
Of course he found a place to lay his head, but he couldn’t quite leave his words behind. He had too much to say, speaking even of silence.
Will you give me space to speak?
Would that my words would be written down
Inscribed on a rock forever with iron chisel and with lead.
Job knew only one thing for sure, and that’s one more than most of us. That one thing was a big one. His wife did not know it. He wasn’t sure if any of his three friends knew it. And time and time again, he must have wondered if he even knew it himself.
I know that my Redeemer liveth
And he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.
He will at last stand forth upon the dust
And I shall see him for myself,
My own eyes, and not another’s.
These might be, too, the words of my friend at 68. They resemble the words I seek to say at 70. Just a few words to replace so many, so many from so many years before I had either a real question or an answer. Before the suffering.
Richard Rohr says that at last Job asks a real question and demands a real answer. Most of us are told answers to questions we haven’t asked, and only through great suffering do the real questions come.
The dying one who shouldn’t be dying is always the acid test: What happens when life doesn’t work? What happens when it’s not enough to wave our hands at a prayer meeting or kneel at Mass? How do we believe then? That is the question of the Book of Job.
The Little Flower St. Therese of Lisieux, she died in pain, age 24, her lungs collapsing in tubercular spasms, gone so soon. With her quiet, profound claim on “little” and “simple,” she joined Jerome as a doctor of the church. Both great saints concluded their quests with one real question, “Where are you, God?” And one answer.
I know that my Redeemer liveth.
From my flesh I shall see God.
And as David said later, recalling the sufferings of Job in his own dark days,
I am still confident of this
I will see the goodness of the Lord
In the land of the living.
Be strong, take heart
And wait for the Lord.
       (Job 19, Psalm 27, Mark 1, Luke 10)
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