Look in the Mirror

I am full of shame, and conscious of my misery.  Job 10:15b  NASB

Conscious – There are a few universal languages.  Mathematics is one.  Any person regardless of ethnicity or native tongue can understand the mathematical language of numbers and relationships.  This is, however, a created language.  Artificial but incredibly useful.  Is there an uncreated, natural language common to all humanity?  Yes, I think so.  It’s the language of pain.  Perhaps it falls within the greater human form of life expressed in emotions, but certainly everyone knows pain.  What we do with it is another story.

Some important consequences of this universal language have been articulated.

“Pain travels through families until someone is ready to feel it.” – Stephi Wagner, Healing the Mother Wound

“For many of us, our generational ‘curse’ is avoidance. We come from people who just act like ‘it’ didn’t / doesn’t happen. But pain demands to be felt. And somewhere along the line, a child will be born whose charge it is to feel it all. These are your shamans, your priests and priestesses, your healers.  You call them mental health patients and label their power as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and the like. But these are the ones who are born with the gift of feeling. And as we all know, you can’t heal the pain that you refuse to feel.” – Dionne Shannette Wood

“These messages are deeply rooted in our history.  We’re kept in check by fear of authenticity and failure.  Our parents want us to be pragmatic and stay safe and they pass these inane messages onto us meaning well.  We so quickly forget that we owe our existences to innovators and creators who stepped out of their boxes and found a new way to do everything.” – Stephi Wagner[1]

It seems to me that the universal appeal of Job’s story is this shared language.  We may not be able to articulate the theological consequences or the arguments, but we know what he feels like.  We feel it too.  The mysterious agony of living.  The unanswered moral dilemma.  The paradox of good and evil.  And most importantly, the trauma of consciousness.  Just being alive hurts.  Not always, of course, but often enough and deep enough that we question if its worth it.  While there are term limits to joy, there do not seem to be any borderlines for tragedy.  Job is but one example of pain’s ubiquity, its disregard for anything decent, its sovereignty over life.  Someone may attempt to deflect its power, to deny its grip, to pretend it doesn’t matter.  But it does.  And a few of us—very few it seems—are willing to embrace it for the sake of redeeming the rest of us from our self-inflicted stupor.  Dealing with the tragedy of existence requires a willingness to feel it.  Modern society would rather medicate.

Perhaps we can’t quite explain the necessity of the cross.  Is it substitutionary, atoning, expiating—all religious terms?  Or should be look at it another way: an awakening to the consciousness of suffering that calls each of us to look in the mirror and ask that reflected face what we are doing to unravel the generational curse?

It’s interesting, perhaps prophetic, that Job uses the Hebrew rāʾeh to describe “conscious.”  It’s a hapax legomenon, used only this one time in Scripture.  It comes from the verb rāʾâ, meaning “to see, look at, inspect.”  To be conscious is to seereality.  Not to dream.  Not to pretend.  Not to defer.  No, rather to examine, clear-eyed, confrontationally, without placebos.  To know myself as I am.  And when I look deeply enough, I discover that I am not enough.  Not in some demeaning way but rather in an exalted way that asks me to be more than me—to be the one who bears life for another—to recognize that there must be a Messiah, a bearer for many, if any of us wishes to be truly human.

Topical Index:  rāʾeh, conscious, pain, generational curse, Job 10:15b

[1] http://shalavee.com/tag/stephi-wagner/