- Trauma and Wisdom Therapy- A Commentary on Job, Norman Habel
God trauma is a horrific thing, Habel has written a book, superficial on the whole, but spotted with a few interesting thoughts throughout, that uses Job to illustrate both the experience, and one possible, almost Taoist, way through it, although I would point to many ways.
I'll mention this is not just a theoretical book, such as that of the much better thinker Marcus Pound, who has a view of Christianity not as something which heals the sense of alienation or split that accompanies us in so many ways; rather, Pound claims, it posits the split as such, only now from the perspective of excess.
I ought to also mention, this isn’t a Christian interpretation of Job, but a strait reading. For most ancient peoples, including Christians up until the 1500’s, if a text was deemed “scripture” it was used to commune with a god, it was thought to be this god speaking in the here and now, it always needed to be interpreted, (contra Luther’s rule of reading the plain sense) hence in Gregory the Great’s 4 volumes on Job he constantly plea’s with the reader not to read with fleshly eyes. I’ve written on how traditional Christians read the Bible HERE
Psychologically, Job is often seen as man beginning to have a new vision of God.
In any case, there are many ways to read the text, this is but one, which I think sheds light upon the experience of God trauma. I’ll simply quote large chunks and occasionally comment in blue.
In Trauma and Wisdom Therapy- A Commentary on Job -- Norman C_ Habel he remarks that the first thing Job is forced to confront is the “Eternal Why” as he explores the misery of meaningless existence.
For Job and the Wisdom community that Job represents, the hedge Job experiences is the opposite of what it’s supposed to be, a barrier to misfortune, and now acts as a boundary of inescapable misery created by God, here identified as the ancient Eloah.
His friends appear, accuse Job, give their own version of God and His ways, and Job tells them their words are all hot air and obvious untruths.
Job then moves to accuse God as his very enemy.
Habel writes,
“The narrater shows how a human being experiencing extreme trauma can come to the frightening conclusion that misery, servitude, and suffering are inevitable consequences of being a human being living on Earth.
He even goes so far as to laugh at the tradition that human beings are created in the image of God. They are not created to rule on Earth but to be slaves and hirelings.
Job does not experience his identity as being imago Dei (in the image of God), but as imago servi (a slave of God).
"Despite the devastating trauma of his community, the narrator reflects a wild hope embedded among expressions of deep despair and a sense of hopelessness. The narrator refuses to succumb to total despair; he dreams of a new day for his people, even if it is portrayed as a bizarre return from Sheol.
Yet, beyond the Covenant God and the God of unwarranted disasters, the narrator has Job expecting an unidentified power to intervene that will enable Job to “see” a different God, face to face. The way in which that hope is finally fulfilled for the traumatized Wisdom community is a consummate leap of faith by the Wisdom-oriented narrator.
Suddenly, amid his trauma, his agony, his isolation, and his hope of litigation, he has a wild dream of a Redeemer rising to be his advocate!
The trauma portrayal of Job is designed to undermine the concept of retributive justice as pivotal for divine human relations and to explore a new paradigm for understanding the role of divine justice in the world of a community suffering trauma.
The Covenant God of reward and retribution deserves to be exposed as a false god.
The pain, it would seem, is not so much due to the sickening impact of the colorful portrayal of the worlds of the wicked but rather the harsh reality that retributive justice is understood to be at the center of God’s relationship with humans.
Job, however, is willing to expose the Covenant God of Israel as a futile source of support for his traumatized companions.
Job is not willing to concede that ultimately God may be in the right. Nor is Job willing to forgive God.”
Habel then speaks of the next few stages on the way to wisdom :
“Job asks why he was born and forced to live in miseryAbove all, he asks why a hedge has been planted around him so that he sees no “way”—no meaning, purpose, or direction in life.
To ask “the eternal why” activates the spirit of the trauma sufferer to take even bolder steps— in contemporary terms activates the stress hormones in the mind, or in Wisdom School terms awakens the incarnate Wisdom in the heart.
Stage 2
Scream Bloody Murder
Job moves beyond questions of why or calls for compassion to screams and violent outbursts of anger in the face of the Covenant God whose harsh ways the community has been expected to endorse.
Stage 3
Test Your Old Beliefs
Job challenges the very idea that God is a constant compassionate and caring companion. In particular, he challenges the reality of a righteous God who is renowned for his fair administration of reward and retribution. He even accuses his God of being a Seeing Eye who relishes the sight of Job’s trauma.
Stage 4
Take a Leap of Faith
When the God of traditional values seems to be nothing short of an adversary or even an enemy, the trauma sufferer may contemplate suicide. Alternatively, he or she may dare to take a bold leap of faith and confront that God with a barrage of accusations or an attempt to take that God to court to reveal that God’s guilt.
Job contemplates that leap of faith and faces endless frustration until the healing process begins and he formulates in writing his declaration of innocence.
The decision of Job to record his experiences in writing is a precedent that the Wisdom narrator introduces to a traumatized community reluctant to make their faltering faith public.
The stage of challenging prior traditional understandings of God prepares the way for the introduction of existential Wisdom and Wisdom therapy to guide Job and the traumatized Wisdom community on a journey toward healing.
Interactive Stages
Stage 1
Go Back to Wisdom School
That mystery is encompassed in an ancient poem that may well be designated a Wisdom Manifesto (ch. 28). In that declaration, we are confronted not only with the science of how to find existential Wisdom but also with a God whom the wise recognize as the original Wisdom Scientist. This God is a far cry from the perception of the Covenant God found in part I of this volume.
The healing journey begins when the trauma sufferer goes back to Wisdom School, meets the original Wisdom Scientist, and discovers the way to find Wisdom in a world of searching and suffering.
Stage 2
Tell Your Trauma Story
By making their trauma experiences public, the traumatized Wisdom community, whom the narrator is challenging, has opened the way to discern a solution to understanding the nature of their plight and their God.
Stage 3
Recognize the Option of a Would-Be Arbiter
Unfortunately Job had none, but someone may function as this.
Stage 4
Explore the Locus of Wisdom with the Wisdom Therapist
God, the Wisdom Therapist, poses insightful questions that challenge Job to leave the dust and ashes of his trauma location and explore locations where the healing presence of innate Wisdom may be discerned in the complex design of the cosmos.
The Wisdom therapy of the book of Job involves experiencing provocative questions that challenge previous understandings of God and reality, questions that guide the trauma sufferer into amazing new levels of consciousness that overwhelm the cruel world of trauma.
The narrator has opened the doubting minds and the traumatized spirits of his Wisdom community to an amazing cosmos where mystery and meaning are embedded in the “ways” of Wisdom that function as healing pulses for all who are conscious of their spiritual presence in the cosmos.
Stage 5
Celebrate Healing
Job is ready to withdraw his court case against God, leave his trauma location identified with dust and ashes, and explore.
Job has gained a deep Wisdom consciousness about the presence of Wisdom active in the world that surrounds him. Job has discerned God as the Presence of Cosmic Wisdom.
The Wisdom therapy Job experiences also has the potential for the traumatized community whom Job represents to dismiss their Covenant God and be free to experience the Wisdom that the Wisdom God identifies operating in every component of the cosmos that surrounds them, a freedom that is worth celebrating.
Wisdom was not first and foremost something humans “acquired” (qana), but A driving force in nature, a dynamic dimension of the universe discerned by ancient scientists of the Wisdom School, a force that warrants investigation even today.
Wisdom in this school of thought was not primarily a depth of knowledge acquired by the wise, but a vibrant innate force dimension in the domains of nature, and ultimately in the cosmos.
Ironically, the God who finds Wisdom does finally speak, but his therapy does not focus directly on the personal guilt or trauma of Job but beyond Job on the Wisdom design of the cosmos.”
Thus, it doesn’t focus on answers, but rather on being present and open to a force, a Tao, a way. I've written on Ritual Knowing being a direction, not an explanation HERE.
The educated reader will notice this corresponds to calvinistic and modern conceptions of God, departing from classical theism, that privilege His will above His nature, as Love, making God something like a really powerful person, a being in this universe existing more or less as everything else exists and acts, whose will is then in contest with ours, approached with a discourse of information rather than transformation, as I wrote about HERE.
“Wisdom is not to be discerned by trying to understand the mind of God but by recognizing that Wisdom is a cosmic reality.
The outcome of this form of Wisdom therapy is for Job to gain an amazing cosmic consciousness, a profound Wisdom consciousness, and a challenging primordial consciousness—a new relationship with the Wisdom presence in the cosmos that surrounds him and the enigma of a God, the Wisdom Scientist who discerned Wisdom in creation.”
This reminds me of the venerable way of unknowing, privileged in eastern Orthodox Christian apophaticism, or negative theology, and spoken about in works like the medieval mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing teaches that you can only experience God by forgetting and unknowing what you are most certain about.
Or St. Gregory of Nyssa’s way of constantly purging yourself of concepts viewing the journey towards God as a progression from light to a "dazzling darkness," where true knowledge is found in unknowing, Nicholas of Cusa’a Learned Ignorance, or in eastern ways, such as Ramana Maharshi’s way questioning just who is doing the questioning until one realizes one is not one’s mind, and even in modern therapy modalities such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy where you create space between your thoughts and your observer self.
Wisdom therapy involves responding to a range of insightful questions that enable you to leap from the misery of the moment into the mysteries of the cosmos, from the turmoil of trauma into the unknown of the universe, where Wisdom is a pervasive, positive presence and its role a therapeutic force that binds and guides the realms of creation.
The God YHWH that the Wisdom narrator claims is the voice from the whirlwind is clearly not the divine caricature called YHWH found in the prologue NOR the Covenant God of the friends OR the storm God El that Elihu claims to defend.
While the voice from the whirlwind may appear to reflect a common theophanic tradition, the process is one of discerning interrogation, not revelation of divine truths or messages. The image of the Wisdom Therapist is radically different from the images of the Covenant God in the discourses of the friends.
The task of Job is to explore mysteries in a complex cosmos, not to heed a revelation from the traditional God of Israel. The challenge to this “hero” is not one of strength but of knowledge, Wisdom, and discernment.
Significantly, the realms where Job is expected to discover the “answers” to the profound questions posed by the whirlwind therapist are in nature not society, in the domains of the cosmos and world of the wild, not the human communities where Job experienced his traumatic disasters.
The God whom Job encounters in the wild is far from the wild God that Job believed was harassing him in society, or the storm God El that Elihu claims to defend.
Job comes to know a God of cosmic Wisdom that transforms the trauma sufferer into a human being with a rich cosmic consciousness, an acute awareness of the domains of the cosmos to which he is connected by a common force called Wisdom.
Job’s response is not a confession of sin but a recognition of his limited knowledge about the God who has led him to discover Wisdom in the world at large.
Job does not confess; he concedes he has done no wrong but that his knowledge of God is limited!
By exploring the operation of Wisdom among the creatures of the wild, the person experiencing trauma in society may experience a liberating vision in nature:
'The ibex “know” their time of delivery. The hawk and the eagle have “the discernment” needed to soar over rocky crags. Every creature is expected to possess innate Wisdom, which is why the ostrich episode is so provocative. Innate Wisdom is tantamount o incarnate know-how!'
By posing questions about the creatures of the wild, the therapist leads Job to move beyond his victim mentality as a traumatized human being to discern his “place” is the wider community of the wild where innate Wisdom guides all living creatures, even those in the wild, to celebrate life.
God acknowledges that Job is the one seeking to bring God to court, but God responds by challenging Job to prove his capacity to comprehend the ways of Wisdom in the cosmos rather than face him in court.
In this response, Job recognizes he is “small,” especially in the context of the cosmic design. He does not confess “I have sinned” or “I have done wrong.”
In this text, God declares that dominion over creatures such as the wild ass and the wild ox is not possible for humans. The wild ass defies the world of humans and refuses to obey a human taskmaster.
In this discourse, the therapist who has awakened Job’s cosmic consciousness (ch. 38) and Job’s Wisdom consciousness (ch. 39) now awakens Job’s primordial consciousness. Job is also connected to the domains of chaos that are part of God’s cosmic design. To discern innate Wisdom active in all the domains of the universe is to “see” the dynamic Presence of Wisdom permeating the cosmos, and in the process to “see” God.
I would say, and have written HERE we must be shaped a certain way to perceive the world. As Charles Taylor has shown, rather than the enlightenment subtracting various belief structure to show us the “real world” it simply replaced them, which we take for granted.
"It is now possible for Job to respond to this presence, not as an angry adversary, but as a humble human ready to answer his Wisdom Therapist and enunciate the radical change that has occurred in his understanding of reality.
In a roundabout way, Job has achieved his goal to meet God, not as his adversary in court but as the Wisdom Presence in the design of the cosmos. To see God as Wisdom Presence in the cosmos overcomes his sense of God as the Seeing Eye observing him down on Earth. God can be “seen” in the domains and design of the cosmos, not necessarily as a discrete celestial being but as a Wisdom force that integrates, permeates, and activates the Universe.”
I’ll mention this is a all a new way to imagine God, Newsom, in her book Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations, writes of a “Bakhtinian loophole” left in its various understandings and notes that Job’s response reserves “the possibility of a word yet to be spoken.” In Job we see several conceptions of God as well as reactions to our human experience.
Habel, in contrast to theological attempts to understand (the God of) the Book of Job, analyzes its subject; and, yet in contrast to accounts primarily based on psychodynamic models of personhood, it does not solely focus on the subjective experience of Job, but rather attempts to reconnect the self and the world.
Rudolf Allers, the famous existentialist Therapist defined as the ultimate goal of all psychotherapy: To reconcile man and the world by looking not only at what is (conditions), but also at that which could (freedom) and should (meaning) be.”
As such, Marshall H. Lewis, a logo therapist commenting on Job, will say,
“….the problem is perhaps not so much the unfound answer as it is the question. For inasmuch as impersonal meaning would be the designator of something so remote from everyday human existence that it would have little, if any, actual existential relevance, an impersonal, generic answer to the problem of suffering would also be far too removed from actual human experience to be of solace, or perhaps even understandable (which, by the way, also portrays Frankl’s position on the theodicy problem: He held that there is indeed an answer, but one that we would not be able to understand intellectually). But…it is possible to address the problem of evil and suffering without fully understanding it; and the answer is not merely cognitive or affective, but existential.”
Another Logotherapist commenting on Job, Dr Atlas, states, “Like Job, the logotherapeutic patients are educated to realize that their problem may not be answered, and perhaps, need not be answered. Frankl and Job teach the patient and the student respectively to have unconditional trust in a very conditional life.”
Of course, only when a person is in contact with the world, somatically, fully being in the world, so that the logos, or spirit, or Tao, governing the cosmos is at one with the the inner impulses of the nous, yielding a real felt connection, can anything like secure trust in life occur…but…trust for what? Safety? Love? Protection?….
This largely depends upon the person, as I've written HERE, as the phenomena of life is projected upon a specific map of consciousness, often inherited, and then, even when contested, simply swapped for another available framework defined within that particular culture, often believed by the person to be some pure objective stance.
Even if such a thing existed, if you've got a torn, twisted movie screen, the picture is gonna look awfully warped.
Or, from a Catholic perspective, as the theologian Herbert McCabe puts it,
"The story of Jesus...is the projection of the Trinitarian life of God on the rubbish dump that we have made of the world….
That the Trinity looks like a story of (is a story of ) rejection, torture and murder, but also of reconciliation is because it is being projected on, lived out on, our rubbish tip; it is because of the brokenness of the world."