My aim consists in this: I smell something real, something like a philosophical therapy at the center of that phrase “my world is falling apart.” That is: there is a dark, illusory world my mind tends to frantically fabricate in moments of terror or sorrow (or perhaps by the terror and sorrow it is revealed to have always/already been there?).

What I want to know is if there is a kind of philosophical therapy implicated by this sickness of the soul’s fabrication.

My initial intuition is to pay attention to a certain longing inherent in the kind of despair I’m calling ‘worldlessness,’ a longing to simply find myself planted in a world beyond my own imagining, a world that is beyond my control but also big enough to house me, not so small that it could crumble if something in my own life crumbles, and therefore a stability-granting force even amid sorrow and fear. The idea would be, I am falling, but there is something big enough to catch me, to catch all of us, really.

Here’s a bit from Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese:”

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains, and the rivers.

Here’s Oliver’s point. Name your despair, friend. Do not hide it, not from me, not from yourself. Face it, too. Do not shove it layers deep in clothes, never to heal, never to breathe. But when you have said what needs saying, and when your laments for the day have been sung, do not forget to come back to this one wild world of ours, of yours. For in this world, the world, there is a life and energy surging beneath even the darkest shades of sorrow. It makes the lily fields quick and feeds the old and fortified trees. And there is a light and a vigor overhead, which summons winds and waves and lets the sun’s rays trace the length of the skies and flank every being with its light. The world, the one that truly houses you, even in moments of deep suffering and loss, is always also the temple of life. The world of your abiding is as alive as it has ever been. Let your spirit stretch its legs in its vastness. Let your imagination exit your cramped mind and feel the beat of the world’s life.

Now I’m thinking of Job. He has felt the sting of every loss, each of them like a vanishing landmark of his place in the family of creaturely life (that relational ecosystem of reality… that is reality). After all the torment and questioning, Job turns to the kind of self-consoling and self-justifying work of recounting his own goodness. He demands God give an answer for why such a just man should suffer the loss of his whole world. Note: I am not saying that he is sinning or speaking out of hand in saying any of that. Only, he has resorted to asserting the meaning and value and worthiness of his own life. Self-assertion.

The point, I think, is that God knows that kind of self-assertion isn’t worth a cent. Job has become like that anxious, fringe friend; tragically trying to re-establish his place in the world in ways that run wholly counter to the reality of creaturely existence. The friend who tries and tries, by joke and over-extended gestures of connection, to prove they are a part of the group actually ends up falling further and further away from real connection to that community. Much like that ‘friend,’ the fact of being a creature (someone who does not make themselves, but is given into existence, every day!) runs counter to the self-assertion of meaning. One cannot make themselves a friend. It takes two. One cannot define their creatureliness, they must receive it.

When God finally comes to speak to Job—to this tattered man whose world has vanished, whose physical pain is totalizing, whose terror grips his gut and scrapes at his bones, and whose friends have morphed into nightmarish accusers in the hellscape his life has become—he does so from the eye of a storm. It’s a strange tactic. The barrage of questions, thundering even as they sit on the page, seem strong enough to throw a crumpled body like Job’s well off the cliff of despair.

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?

            “Who shut up the sea behind doors
    when it burst forth from the womb

            Have you ever given orders to the morning,
    or shown the dawn its place?

Can you raise your voice to the clouds

Who provides food for the raven
    when its young cry out to God?

It’s easy to run the transition between the end of Job’s words in Job 31 (“Oh, that I had someone to hear me! I sign now my defense—let the Almighty answer me; let my accuser put his indictment in writing.”) and the beginning of God’s speech in 38-41 (“Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.”) through the lens of a hurt child crying out in order to be seen and a misunderstanding parent saying, “don’t talk to me in that self-righteous tone!”

 But I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. I think God is writing a poem really similar to Oliver’s. In fact, God doesn’t seem angry, but serious. He gives no indication that he means to slap Job’s wrist for being silly, or foolish, or self-righteous. I think God sees the frantic, self-protective, ever-shrinking world of fear that has become Job’s mind, and much like Oliver’s poem, he means to rip the walls off Job’s coffin of fear and show him that he does not need to offer justification for the ground of his being, or search for some way to assert the value of his own existence, not to the heavens, himself, or his friends. The world of ever-shrinking reality his soul has (justifiably) construed, is not the real world. It is merely a self-at-the-center kind of illusion. There is a bigger world of belonging into which Job must be re-established. Me too. Whether by divine intervention, or poetry, I think this re-establishment is a key part of the therapy we’re seeking.

Called back into the world beyond our minds. More Job and Oliver next time.