“You cannot solve the problem; you can only live the mystery.”

June 21, 2010

Richard Rohr in his book Job and the Mystery of Suffering writes:

“Job’s three friends, practical, righteous, and religious, appear as God’s self-appointed messengers with what they are sure is God’s answer.  They offer the glib, pious platitudes of stereotypical clergymen.  They’re all theologically correct, yet entirely inadequate. 

What they do, in effect, is try to take away the mystery.  They try to solve the problem, whereas Yahweh says you cannot solve the problem; you can only live the mystery.  The only response to God’s faithfulness is to be faithful ourselves.

Theology does not provide the answer to this dilemma, only spirituality does.  It’s disappointing that we Christians have emphasized theology so much more than spirituality.  We have emphasized catechism and religious education much more than prayer.  But for the predicament we have here, there is no answer, only a prayer response, only the willingness to remain in communion, to hang in there, to keep talking.

We see in the dialogues of Eliphaz of Teman, Bildad of Shuah, and Zophar of Naamath that they constantly talk about God.  They’re good men and their answers are, to a great extent, correct.  But the only one who talks to God is Job.  Out of his intense pain and depression – he is on the edge of despair, if not actually in despair, throughout the entire book – Job breaks through to address God.

This is probably one of the greatest books on prayer that has ever been written.  It breaks our stereotypes of prayer.  Certainly, most of the things Job says to God are not what we Christians have been trained to say to God.  The pretty words are mostly gone.  There’s no ‘beseech’ and ‘vouchsafe’ and ‘deign’ and ‘thou’, the stuff Christians love to put in their formal prayers.  Instead he dares to confront God, the very thing we were trained never to do.  In fact, we called it blasphemy.”