Nothing is Nailed Down

“Pain makes theologians of us all.”

--Barbara Brown Taylor

An Altar in the World, page 157

Suddenly, for Job, life itself is no longer safe.  Nothing is nailed down.  Everything is up for grabs.  This is what trauma does to a person.  

Mark Umbreit offers a helpful description of this as he discusses the trauma which crime victims experience.  We tend to live in a state of normal, safe, predictable equilibrium.  We may drift to the edges of that equilibrium and even fall completely out of whack under stress.  Then we return to our more familiar and balanced state of being.  Trauma attacks that equilibrium at its roots and unhinges our safe existence.  

Umbreit notes, “Trauma throws people so far out of that range [of the normal equilibrium] that it is difficult for them to restore a sense of balance in life” (Victim Sensitive Victim offender Mediation Training Manual, page 43).  I think Job experiences the utter disorientation that trauma produces.  At the end of his first poem (Job 3:25-26), Job says these words: 

“Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me,

and what I dread befalls me.

I am not at ease, not am I quiet;

I have not rest; but trouble comes.

The fear that Job claims here is that of trembling terror, not mere anxiety.  It is the fear one experiences when coming face to face with a deadly enemy.  The opposite of this is “ease”—the tranquility of peace.  What comes to Job is “trouble.”  The Hebrew word is “rogez”—turmoil, chaos and uncertainty.  His experience of radical loss will now re-frame how he sees the world and experiences reality.  Now Job will see threats and dangers at every turn.  

We carry certain assumptions about the orderly nature of normal existence.  James Gleick suggests that these assumptions guided western science until the onset of what he calls “the chaos revolution.”  Those assumptions were that simple systems behave in simple ways, that complex behavior implies complex causes, and that different systems behave differently.  

There is, however, a dimension of chaos that underlies the apparent reliability and order.  With a minimum shift in energy or structure, orderly systems can erupt into non-repeating, non-predictable events that will not yield to simple analysis.  Underneath it all, there is turmoil, chaos and uncertainty.

Life has ceased to be safe.  Anita Barrows describes depression in such terms.  “Suddenly in depression you are ripped from what felt like your life, from what felt right and familiar and balanced and ordinary and ordered.  You’re thrown into this place where you’re ravaged, where the wind rips the leaves from the trees, there you are.  Very, very much the soul in depression” (Einstein’s God, page 245).

Perhaps up to this point, Job had lived with what Robert Solomons and Fernando Flores describe as “simple trust.”  This is

"…trust that is taken for granted, that has gone unchallenged and untested, trust that is undisturbed.  It is an attitude of assumption, trust by default, not a decision by way of deliberation and ethical and evidential considerations.  One trusts unthinkingly. (Solomons and Flores, Building Trust, page 61).

Once such simple trust has been damaged, it cannot be repaired or renewed.  Simple trust will be replaced either by radical mistrust or by some deeper kind of trust.  Will Job find his way to that deeper kind of trust?  Will you and I find our way as well?