A Hard-Fought Hope contains eleven chapters, as well as a concluding section of Aphorisms and Questions that summarizes some of my insights as well as probes remaining uncertainties I had after writing the book. The book is divided into three parts: Three Probes into the Book of Job; Job's Loss; and Reconstructing Hope. The "Three Probes" are the Nature of Job's Complaint, where I actually draft a legal document (A Complaint) that captures Job's distress, the issue of Trust, and the Book of Job as Mystery. Part Two looks at Job's Torrent of Emotions (Job 3), the Grace of Job's Anger, the Music of Job's Grief and the Power of a Question (Job 14). Finally, Part Three considers The Turning Point, Wisdom Seeking (Job 28), Listening Differently (Job 32-41) and Living Differently (Job 42).
A Hard-Fought Hope: Journeying with Job through Mystery (Nashville, TN: Upper Room Books, 2004).
The excerpt below is from chapter 6: "The Music of Job's Grief."
"According to one researcher, 'Grief is....the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment.' Though anger brings in its wake an array of dangers and emotions, these are nothing like the perils attendant upon grief. Grief is our most challenging opponent, the foe that threatens most to immobilize and paralyze us. Whereas anger gives us further energy by heightening our sense of injustice, grief saps that same energy, reducing us to hollow shells of once-lively persons. Like Echo in the ancient Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus, the pain of unrequited love or the grief at loss eats at us, causing us to waste away until all that is left is our name, an echo. In the plaintive words of the psalmist, 'For my life is spent with grief, and my years with sighing: my strength faileth because of mine iniquity, and my bones are consumed (Ps. 31:10, KJV, emphasis added).
"One indication of our awareness of grief's peril is our desire to control or limit grief once it is expressed. The language of grief in our culture is not the language of expression but of control. We are interested in the 'process of closure' rather than the naked shrieks of uncontrolled anguish. Within two days of the devastating gun violence at Columbine High School in Colorado on April 20, 1999, reporters were already talking about how to achieve 'closure' after the event. we talk the language of closure because we are afraid that if we do not put a cap on grief, it may destroy us. In Job's words, the friends are so unmerciful to him because 'you see my calamity, and are afraid (6:21).' The language of closure is our present rhetorical means for distancing ourselves from the contagion of grief.
"And grief is like a plague, spreading invisibly from person to person, working its venom into the very capillaries of the soul, reducing us to forsaken hulks of tormented humanity. Grief is cruel, unrelenting, deadening, enervating, paralyzing, numbing. It respects neither great nor small, taking up residence in the central rooms of our lives without even having the courtesy to ask permission. Grief is like a ghost, a wraithlike presence suffusing the inner life, spreading its odor of death from one room to the next."
[Return to Home]