One quality that I like about myself is my comfort with a high level of mystery in the universe. When my kids ask questions such as, “What happens to people when we die?” I don’t mind answering that I don’t know. I can’t say that I’ve ever been troubled by the theodicy issue; bad things happening to good people is just a part of the mystery of life. I embrace teachings of our faith that don’t make any sense—the virgin birth and the resurrection, for instance—without feeling as if I need to understand them, and, indeed, I have somewhat of an allergy to attempts to explain cosmic events with human logic.
It’s not just that I am at peace with the fact that I don’t have answers to life’s big questions. I love that I don’t have answers. For me, not knowing is akin to wonder and awe, or the “numinous,” as the German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto termed it. To Otto, the numinous is the sort of mystical experience that is unlike anything else we encounter in ordinary life and that, in his view, underlies all religion. It involves a sense of fearful and fascinating mystery, a kind of blank wonder verging on terror—involving distraction despite the fear—at the realization of one’s own nothingness in contrast to power.
I’m not afraid to admit that I am a numinous junkie. It’s what keeps me sticking around organized religion at large, and Catholicism in particular, despite all my gripes about institutional injustice and my proclivity to skepticism. Even if I’m raging at the patriarchy or doubting the existence of God 99 percent of the time, that 1 percent sensation of submergence into totality, when I’m graced with a feeling of connection to the generator of all life, keeps me coming back. The context of Catholicism—the sacraments, the music, the sacred writings, the smells and bells, as some say—is fertile ground for the lifting of the veil, at least for me.
Given my appreciation for mystery and my usual lack of desire to make sense of the great beyond, it comes as a surprise, even to me, that one of my favorite scripture verses is Job 1:21: “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.” On the face of it, these words—uttered by Job after his 10 children are killed in a collapsed home, his oxen and donkeys are stolen, and his sheep and servants are burnt to their deaths in a fire—seem to be trying to provide a metaphysical explanation for the recent tragic events. The Lord bestowed great blessing on Job, and then the Lord decided to take it all away. The verse succinctly summarizes and explains Job’s lot: Blessing and burden both befell because God deemed them so.
This is the sort of explanation that I usually rankle at, the attempt to tidily package life-defining events with a sweeping and final dictum: It was God’s plan. But Job 1:21 speaks to me, and it’s because I read the verse metaphorically. Instead of interpreting Job 1:21 as “God has a plan,” I hear, “Good stuff happens. Bad stuff happens. That’s life.”
There’s an old Chinese parable about a farmer and his fate that my dad used to tell me as a child. In the story, the horse the farmer relies on to plow his fields runs away, instigating the man’s friends and neighbors to comment on the farmer’s bad fortune. Unbothered, the farmer replies, “Bad luck, good luck, who knows?” When the horse returns with two wild horses, and the neighbors exclaim at the farmer’s positive happenstance, the farmer once again replies, “Bad luck, good luck, who knows?” The cycle repeats throughout the tale: The farmer’s friends are quick to explain the enviable happenings of the farmer’s life as good fortune until something negative occurs, and they reverse their decree. Throughout it, the farmer remains constant: “Good luck, bad luck, who knows?”
The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. Who knows?
Job 1:21 puts me in the mindset embodied by the equanimous farmer and helps me accept that easy and hard, exciting and boring, smooth and jarring, planned and unplanned are all parts of the human experience. This goes for the big stuff of life, of course—falling in love, having babies, and finding meaningful work on the one hand; car accidents, traumatic events, and illness on the other—but it also pertains to the day-to-day, hour-to-hour happenings that make up the bulk of our years.
It’s easy to take setbacks and inconveniences personally, to feel indignant when the struggles of life outweigh the delights. But hardship isn’t personal, and mistaking it as so is a pathway to discontent. Indignance often morphs into complaining, bitterness, and entitlement—a trifecta of intolerability if I’ve ever seen one. The kids won’t stop fighting! My neighbors are driving me nuts! The house is always a mess! I deserve better. I’m due more. Things should be different. Maybe all these things are true, but so what? The sun still shines, the first gulp of cold water on a sweaty day still refreshes, a musical key change still delights.
Good things just happen. Bad things just happen. We don’t deserve or not deserve any of it. In normalizing the ups and the downs of life, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away” is a mental reset that combats the temptation to complain and the potentiality for entitlement. It helps me stay unbothered by all the inconveniences of life as it cultivates a fundamental way of looking at the world that supports an attitude of humility and gratitude as opposed to one of bitterness. When things are easy, we can be grateful, and when they aren’t, we can know that nothing lasts forever. The bad things don’t have to bother us, or at the very least, we don’t have to complain about them.
“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away” does more than dispose me to gratitude and acceptance, though; it also keeps me open to the numinous. Usually when we ask questions, it’s because we’re looking for an answer, and in the absence of actual answers, we create ones that are likely false and incomplete and lacking in creativity and majesty. These sorts of answers—ones that tell us that we’ve got everything figured out, because we know everything about God—rob us of the opportunity to feel small in the presence of the divine radiance.
That’s the last thing I want. For me to feel a connection with the deeper reality that is both beyond and within me, I need a framework that emphasizes that life contains both good and bad, that supports acceptance and gratitude in all the things, and that embraces the here and now. My understanding of Job 1:21 does just that.
This article also appears in the August 2024 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 89, No. 8, pages 43-44). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Luca Giordano, Job and His Comforters, Smithsonian American Art Museum
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