Awe, Instead

Job and Learning to Look Around | The Word in the Wild, Proper 24, Year B

Job 38:1-7, (34-41)

Photo by Ivan Maljarenko on Unsplash

Our hatchback was open as we gathered our varied gear and pushed it into our packs; exchanging the comfortable shoes of a road trip for the durable ones of the trail. Our plan was to backpack a few miles in the Ozark highlands, our first family camping trip of the season. Mid-October would be safe enough, we thought, with the cool days of fall upon us and cold blooded parasites in retreat. But as we unloaded, the temperatures were grasping at 90 even beneath the trees. The sweat beading on our bodies didn’t help ease the discomfort of wooly hiking socks that just wouldn’t conform to Lucia’s feet or the day pack that wouldn’t fit to Lily’s slender shoulders.

The mood went from bad to worse as we left the parking lot and headed uphill, the overgrown trail drenching us in the oils of poison ivy and hundreds of nymph ticks crawling across our legs despite our bug spray. The DEET was effective enough to keep the gnats and mosquitos away, so instead of biting us they hovered around our heads, humming at high pitch in our ears as hiked. There were several moments that Emily and I looked at each other with the knowing question: should we just turn around and go home? But we persisted, plodding on to our campsite along a creek bed, overshadowed by sandstone bluffs.

The trail proved to be a chance to try out some new parenting skills I’d been working on. While crying about socks and the buzz of bugs would have once made me respond with commands to just suck it up, I’d been learning a gentler approach from NPR journalist Michaeleen Doucleff’s book Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans. Doucleff, a scientist by training, traveled to places like a Mayan village in Mexico and an Inuit community in the Arctic to learn how traditional societies have practiced the art of parenting. Drawing on her own experience and the studies of anthropologists, she found time-tested ways of raising children that are as fascinating as they are practical.

In one of the most interesting sections, Doucleff, who was raised in a home filled with yelling, explores how Inuit cultures live remarkably free of anger. Doucleff was intrigued when she read the accounts of the anthropologist Jean Briggs who witnessed the remarkable emotional calm of the Inuits. To name one instance, Briggs was present when a member of a fishing party was careless with a hand woven fishing line and broke it, setting the day’s fishing back by hours. No one raised their voice or even expressed the slightest anger. They simply took the line and started repairing it. Doucleff herself experienced this lack of reactionary rage when her three-year-old daughter carelessly knocked a mug of coffee from a table, breaking it and staining a white carpet—the Inuit adults around her showed no signs of anger, they simply picked up the pieces and commented that the adult who had placed it there should have been more careful around children.

In an NPR story Doucleff recorded about this phenomenon, one Inuit elder explained that in the harsh conditions of the arctic they understand anger to be a waste of time and energy. It’s a profound statement, but how does a culture quell what seems to be an innate human emotion? It is something the culture works to instill in children early on, and they do it by reorienting the child’s feelings. When anger arises in a child an adult tries to help her gain a wider perspective. The adult removes the child from the situation, showing her something beautiful and amazing in the natural world—the radiance of a flower, caribou grazing on the tundra, or the vast array of a starry night. This puts the anger inducing episode into the wider context of life. As Doucleff puts it, the Inuits reorient a child’s emotions by replacing “anger with awe.”

This wisdom of the Inuits is ancient, developed over millennia by people living at the edge of the habitable earth. But in that extreme they have learned something about the human person that goes to our depths, getting at our place in the cosmos. Its a lesson that the ancient story of Job also tells: in the midst of our suffering, the trials of any human life, the answer is not found in the giving of reasons and reactions but by being overwhelmed by the profound beauty of the world beyond us; the comfort of our smallness in the vast cosmos of God’s concern. After all of Job’s suffering and his cry for answers, God doesn’t give Job a reply to his questions, but offers something far better: a reorientation.

The passage from Job assigned for this Sunday is only a fraction of God’s response. Verse after verse, God recounts the wild wonders of the world that are beyond Job’s knowledge, control, and benefit. From rain in the deserts where no people live to the speed of an Ostrich, cliff dwelling vultures to clods of clay, or my personal favorite, the wild donkey who “laughs at the clamor of the town”—we witness a montage of the created order from the celestial to the mundane, the animal to the atmospheric—all of it a manifestation of God’s creative and loving power. Like an Inuit elder quelling the anger of a child, God reorients Job’s sense of his place in the world with a vision of awe. And though the book of Job is considered by many to be among the most ancient literature in our scriptures, a work perhaps first performed as a drama, few books are as relevant to our time or as contemporary in their wisdom.

Ours is a world full of troubles—personal, political, and planetary. We encounter the suffering of loss and illness. We feel the pains of injustice and worry about the future of our common life. We witness the violence in our cities and don’t know what to do. Our bodies and the bodies of those we love carry with them the diseases that could turn us toward grief and despair in a moment. We are finite and vulnerable, creatures of ash and dust. We are tempted to reactions of anger and cries of anguish with no vision for how to get beyond our troubles.

Like Job we need awe to draw us out, beyond the circles of human concern. We need a sense of wonder that will quiet our anxieties; humbling us and opening us to the world beyond—charged with God’s care and the chaos of creative life. We will not overcome the frustrations of finitude, the anguish and anxieties of our limits. But we can look around and marvel at the world, finding comfort in the reality that God cares for us and created us; we can live in awe that God even came among us to suffer in solidarity with all the chaos of human life. In awe we can find our place in the vastness of all creation, returning to the world and each other in the blessed comfort of our smallness.

On our hike, after we had claimed our campsite and dropped our packs, the girls ditched their shoes and waded along the mountain stream. Searching the waters of a small pool, they called us to come and see the life teaming in the cool waters. There were crawfish by the dozens, putting on shows with claw fights as their young scurried among the settled leaves. Hidden across the rocks were fat tadpoles, the late season offspring of the frogs we heard singing from the trees. And here and there salamanders swam, their gills flared like ruffled collars in the clear water.

After dinner and s’mores roasted over the fire, we listened to the night—insects everywhere buzzing, the eyes of spiders reflecting like gem stones on the forest floor in the light of our headlamps. I made the call of a Screech Owl and one then two then three called in succession, echoing back and forth, circling our campsite to investigate the odd bird that had settled in their valley.

When morning came we broke camp, put on our shoes and pulled on our packs. As we walked back along the trail, retracing the way we had come, the bugs and heat were mostly the same and our packs were just as heavy. Yet somehow, we felt unburdened. Overwhelmed by the creation in which we found ourselves to be only a finite and fragile part, the concerns of the human centered world had been diminished and disrupted. We had been reoriented and reminded of our place in the creation and of the God who made it; caring enough to even become the servant of all in order to save it. We could not help but be awed.