"I hid my face from the saints and the angels..."

So, have your Lenten disciplines survived contact with your day-to-day life? I hope so. If not, don't be discouraged. Maybe it would help you to know that Ash Wednesday to the Saturday after is kind of like Lenten prep. time. Maybe you took on too much? Maybe you didn't take on enough. Perhaps you need to make a little adjustment. I did just that this morning. I jettisoned something good but something that would've constituted too much for me.

I am on day three of reading the Book of Job. Job is one of the most fascinating books in the Hebrew Scriptures. As Robert Alter, whose translation and commentary I am using, repeatedly points out, Job is not an Israelite. Alter, by contrast, is Jewish.

Job is most certainly not and has never been considered a historical book. Catholic scholars group it among the Wisdom books. For Jews, it is grouped among the Ketuvim, "The Writings." Chapters 1-2, along with chapter 42, serve as the framing story in the canonical text. Many, not all, especially not the interpolations of Elihu, which are likely interpolations (i.e., later additions to the text), which make up six chapters, are very impressive poetically.

The Book of Job is about the age-old problem of evil, or, using the fancy philosophical/theological term- theodicy. What's refreshing is that it offers no real answer to the problem of evil-induced suffering. Why? Because it's honest about the fact that there is no satisfactory answer. The first two chapters are about God allowing the satan (i.e., Adversary) to afflict Job in such a way that he curses God. Indeed, the third chapter begins after all Job's children are killed and after all his wealth is taken away and after he is afflicted with a pernicious skin disease from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. Alter calls the third chapter of the book "Job's harrowing death-wish poem." It is a breathtaking piece of ancient poetry.

Re-reading Job's death wish poem reminded me of something I noted in a doctoral term paper I wrote on Samuel Beckett:

It seems that as he grew older, Beckett grew increasingly fond of Job 3:3: “Let the day perish in which I was born and the night in which it was said, there is a man child conceived.” In addition to four Bibles, each one in a different language (English, French, the Old Testament in Italian, and Luther’s German Bible), and a concordance, he kept a copy of the Book of Common Prayer in his working library

What really struck me today was the penultimate verss of the death wish poem:

For I feared a thing- it befell me,
   what I dreaded came upon me (Job 3:25)

For day three in his book Pauses for Lent, writing about the ancient Israelites in the desert (one of the guiding images of Lent, along with Jesus' forty days of fasting and praying in the desert), Trevor Hudson writes:

While they are not in control of what happens to them, they do have control of how they will respond to the events of their lives

This is true, no doubt. But there's suffering and then there's suffering the likes of which Job was subjected, likes of which the people of Ukraine and Yemen are being subjected (the former far longer than the latter at the hands of Saudi Arabia, aided and abetted by...).

So, I might get a little hangry while fasting. How I deal with that is part of my purpose for fasting in the first place. But the other part of fasting, which is to be in solidarity with those who suffer involuntarily and to pray for their deliverance and give alms for their relief, is just as important. While praying and giving alms are necessary, the suffering is so great that fasting and other penitential actions take on more the shade what is found in the final verse of Job's death wish poem:

I was not quiet, I was not still,
   I had no repose, and trouble came

Kyrie eleison/Christi eleison/Kyrie eleison.

Our Friday traditio for this First Friday of Lent is Jennifer Knapp's "A Little More." It's been our traditio before, but not for a long time. I listened to this song several times over on Ash Wednesday. It spoke deeply to me. In light of the suffering from which I am spared and quite different, it turns out to be infinitely more than I can give, especially as I realize nobody deserves to suffer in those ways.