St.
Patrick had a rough go of it in fifth century Ireland. The snakes were the
least of it.
Details remain sketchy
but it appears that he lived without legal or cultural protection because he
refused to accept gifts from local kings, the only way to gain patronage. He
writes of being beaten, robbed, and shackled. If the pagans were hard on him,
the Christians may have been worse. In what appears to be a court brief he denies
charges of taking bribes for baptisms and ordinations or accepting money from
wealthy female converts.
Small wonder then that in
his famous “Breastplate” prayer he cries out for for a full-on roll cage of the
Lord’s protecting presence:
Christ be
with me, Christ within me,
Christ
behind me, Christ before me,
Christ
beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to
comfort and restore me.
Christ
beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in
quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in
hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of
friend and stranger.
Job
had a tough time of things as well, managing to draw the unwelcome attention of
the devil, who persecuted him, and of the saints, who threatened to theologize
him to death. Like Patrick, Job prayed a prayer concerning the presence of the
Lord in time of struggle, but his poem seldom gets stitched into samplers:
Behold, I go forward but He is not there,
And
backward, but I cannot perceive Him;
When
He acts on the left, I cannot behold Him;
He
turns on the right, I cannot see Him.
Like an NFL replacement referee, Job
senses the action all around him but can make sense of none of it. He hunkers
armorless on the ash heap and gropes and grasps for a God who has gone AWOL.
But God is right there all along.
God’s voice chuckles in the lightest winds of that Cat-Five hurricane building
just off the coast. Those winds will shout the Almighty’s words in just a few
more chapters. If Job can’t find God, he doesn’t despair: God can always find
him. “But He knows the way I take. . . .My foot has kept His way and not turned
aside.”
In the depth of the soul’s dark night
the saint sometimes cries a desperate “Marco!” to a Deus absconditus who
refuses to respond with a single “Polo.” We hear the enemy’s arrows whine
through the gloom and it seems our hearts have no protection. When we don’t
know where to find God, the best strategy is to sit down in the middle of the
Almighty’s will and refuse to budge. If we feel like abandoned baggage, let us
at least remember that we bear a label which reads, “To be left until called
for.”
In
the Middle of Nowhere,
Doug
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