Job Revisited

There is some unclarity about my post on Job, so I hope to clarify:  "faith" has come to mean today the phenomenon of "believing in" - I believe that God exists - or "believing that" - I believe in Jesus as my personal saviour. Then there is the meaning of "steadfast" in "fides" and "fidelitas", the basis of our "fidelity". This is Job's faith, a remaining unflinching and unquestioning under adversity.

If your belief in God is based on a childish belief that all is Good in God's world, then you will have a severe jolt under the onset of suffering and trials. If you believe that God's world is just, you will have trouble with injustice being rampant. God's character is not paralleled in minute detail in the Creation; if it were, all living things would be Gods.

The knowledge of the Holy is inherent in life and in mankind. It is part of the vast unconscious sea on which we sail, and in which we periodically dip our net of consciousness, trying to extricate some new and unseen denizens of the deep.
Faith is already established in us when we draw our very first breath. Faith need not wait for the onset of language skills. Local language, limited synods, and parochial training of cathechumens lead to the Babel of division in the prospect of the Holy, and destroy the aboriginal unity of sight, the Eos or Dawn State of consciousness that precedes the splitting of the day of Mind into the sunrise, the sunset, and all the individual states between.

Job's Faith remains unchanged. Job expects God, and he does not expect trinkets to be rained down on him from heaven as proof of God's existence. Job expects God every day and every night. When Job sits in his miserable state, he does not believe that somehow some moral law has been transgressed, some ancient covenant has been broken: Job knows life has joy and suffering; steadfast he remains expecting God; the sun of the Holy is not eclipsed forever... if at all by any of this. Job remains in his state of Dawn consciousness, for he never allows his thinking nor his speaking to do what thinking and speaking are prone to do: to make division! to make separation! to detail and specify to an infinite extent, so much so that all the time in the universe is not sufficient to compute an understanding of creation and beyond!
Think of it: the story shows him thinking and speaking rationally, yet truly he appeared as stubborn as a mule and as stupid as a dunce to his fellow men. Job seemed to them to  be anything but rational. Perhaps he deserved his fate, the fate of the lowly and poor who cannot express themselves in their speech, in their erudition, in their pursuit of wealth; his friends in the essence of their speech to him were defining the moral nature of the world as "the successful pursuit of riches" (the unsuccessful are ignored by all!) and "the exercise of power to get one's way" (the powerless do not write history!). In all such speech, we define the Moral and Ethical nature of ourselves and the world we create by our consciousness: a survival of the fittest world which survives... until the bubble breaks, as it did in 2008.

No, Job was simple and steadfast, for he knew the world is suffering as well as joy. Job was somewhere beyond the division between Suffering and Joy, for he did not subscribe to the version that life must be one or the other. In a sense, Job was in the Middle Way - or, better, had stepped outside the face-off between the two concepts:  Job was in the Detour Way...  and avoided the hassle altogether.

Faith, then, is not believing this nor that; it is fidelity to one's original community with the Holy in the universitas of all creation.