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Morning Devotion for the Season after Pentecost
August 26, 2024
Reading: Job 5:17-20, 26-27
“How happy is the one whom God reproves;
therefore do not despise the discipline of the Almighty.
For he wounds, but he binds up;
he strikes, but his hands heal.
He will deliver you from six troubles;
in seven no harm shall touch you.
In famine he will redeem you from death
and in war from the power of the sword.
You shall be hidden from the scourge of the tongue
and shall not fear destruction when it comes.
You shall come to your grave in ripe old age,
as a shock of grain comes up to the threshing floor in its season.
See, we have searched this out; it is true.
Hear, and know it for yourself.”
“The sight of an afflicted person frightens away every kind of attention. It is only God who can pay attention to someone afflicted.”
Simone Weil
Meditation - Peter Vanderveen
For many years I served as an on-call chaplain at Yale New Haven hospital. I usually worked the night shift, from 4:00 PM until 8:00 AM. It was there that I learned the origin of the phrase “the dead of night.” Many patients very quietly slip away in the early morning hours when the darkness seems most intense and the sunrise feels beyond reach. And that also seemed the space that the chaplain was uniquely asked to occupy. Chaplains are often called when there is nothing that anyone else can do for a patient or for their family: when doctors have no remedies to offer and no procedures to order; when nurses have provided all the physical comfort they can. Doctors and nurses have defined roles determined by things that need to be done. Chaplains, very differently, are those who preside over that long, hanging time between the busyness of all the efforts to save someone and, when these have ended, his or her eventual and inevitable death.
We have become used to solutions, for almost any problem we might have. The world is now full of experts on whom we rely. And we’ve come to expect that they’ll – of course – be able to provide whatever is needed, most often within a very short time, before additional loss is realized. Every time a doctor or a nurse enters a hospital room that hope is kindled. And I could feel that same hope directed toward me as a chaplain: I was supposed to come with an answer. When all else failed, I’d still have something to offer. It might be mysterious and intangible – many looked for something admittedly supernatural. But I’d have – in some religious form – a solution.
This proved never to be the case. I never worked a miracle; I can’t say that I ever witnessed one either. God, the expert of last resort, never walked into the room with me. That absence of a solution could be palpably difficult. People are supposed to do things, and I frequently knew that there was nothing I could do. What good then was I?
What I slowly learned – though it was never easy – was that my role wasn’t to fix anything. It was rather to be someone who didn’t turn away from someone else’s affliction. This was never enough, but I came to the realization that it could be a gift.
In the reading above from Job, Job’s friend Eliphaz the Temanite, tries to offer Job an answer to his suffering. In effect, he simply states that this too will pass. It is, in God’s name, a form of avoidance. Eliphaz’s response, where all will come ‘round right, reflects his unwillingness to see Job himself. And Job has no time for such pious blindness. God is not simply the last one who guarantees a solution; as Simone Weil noted, more importantly, God is the one who has an infinite capacity to be with us in all our affliction – as we recite every week, even in death. There’s no place where we’re abandoned. That’s a divine gift.
Prayer
Our Father, who is there, wherever it may be – who is really there,
hallowed be thy name,
thy kingdom come, thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, and the power,
and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen
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