Anything I thought I knew

I've always loved the Book of Job, even though it's a deeply unsatisfying (maybe even dissatisfying) book. It deals with perhaps the hardest of life's questions - why good people suffer - only to give no answer whatsoever. People tend to find that annoying. It's a long book, and they endure every beautiful but tortured word of it to find that the answer, when God does finally answer, is more or less, "So you think you know better than me?" It's a rhetorical question in the truest form. The answer is obvious; so obvious that it will never be required. All Job can really say at the end of it all is, "Sorry...", only to have wealth and prosperity restored to him. The meaning of all this? Who knows.

The way most people talk about Job, you wonder if they think the Bible-compilers overlooked the fact that, oops, there's no clear answer at the end. "Bugger," they're probably thinking (or "Ugger-bay", because, given the time period, they no doubt spoke (Pig) Latin), "we didn't notice that. Oops. Should've put in that other book about suffering that gives a clear-cut, completely satisfying answer." Yeah, someone really stuffed up there, eh?

My favourite album of the moment (note, Esther, that I've said "of the moment") is mewithoutYou's 2006 effort, "Brother Sister", and it's an absolute masterpiece, but a lot of it makes little sense (interpretations of "Orange/Yellow/Brownish Spider", anyone?). Part of that, I suspect, comes from an admirable willingness to accept, even embrace, uncertainty. In "Wolf Am I!", for example, there's a wonderful, Plato-esque, notion of the world as we know it being fairly pale and insignificant in the light of eternity. We're shadows, the song suggests, and so is the world around us - so who can really comprehend what we can barely see, what may not even be all that real?:

So SHADOW AM I!
The material world seems to me like a newspaper headline -
it explicitly demands your attention
and it may even contain some truth,
but what's really going on here?

"Who knows?" seems to be an apt answer, although mewithoutYou are happy enough to not even say that much.

In another terrific song, "The Sun and the Moon", Job's name is evoked in the line, "There was hope for Job like a cut down tree/I hope that there's such hope for me". Where did Job's hope lie? In God, apparently, in the roots of the tree which remain after it's been cut down. No-one looks at a cut down tree and sees it as being especially hopeful, but this band aren't particularly interested in how things appear. After all, the following line declares that "Dust be on my mind's conceptions/and anything I thought I knew". Thought I knew - there's the key phrase, I think. What do we really know? Here we are asking the "big" questions, angry when there's no clear cut answer. But what hope do we really have to understand the answers when we get them?

mewithoutYou's label friends, As Cities Burn, say it all in their song, "Clouds", with the line, "I think our god isn't God/if he fits inside our heads". It's a fair point, really. No wonder Job could only say, "Sorry." There will always be an answer to every question, but that answer will rarely be simple. I don't agree with many things that H.L. Mencken said, but there is one famous quote of his that I think is apt to finish with: "There is always an easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong."