These last lines of Oliver’s poem are meant to awaken the sorrow-stricken soul to a broader view of the world, a view that does not allow one’s despair to become ultimate. Rather, in the rush and whir of a bigger and wilder vitality, we are meant to be drawn out of ourselves and into the world where life happens, even our own. This is the crux of the therapy.

“You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak;
    I will question you,
    and you shall answer me.’
My ears had heard of you
    but now my eyes have seen you.
Therefore I despise myself
    and repent in dust and ashes.” (42:4-6)

Again, one could see this as an indictment against Job’s god. That he requires a strange repentance wherein the downtrodden are meant to be cast down again. Read alongside Oliver’s poem, however, it seems to me that Job has just received a really similar announcement. “Hey, get out of that ever-constricting head of yours. Your sorrow is real, but your dogged attention upon it is making it bigger than anything else in the world. There’s no room to breathe in that place you’ve gone. Look up. Peak your head out. You are one little part of a big world. Learn how to live in that reality.” In other words, both poems are meant to teach us how to be sad and yet live, how to suffer loss and yet stay alive and awake to the world and to god, the latter being the possibility of life and freedom beyond our finitude.  

The world of Job 38-41 is shot through with a God beyond our imagining. Yet it is exactly our imaginations the poem strains to heal. Imagine it. God is the tamer of Leviathan, the waker of the dawn, the keeper of clouds, the mother of all lion cubs, and the feeder of every raven. And in this world, Job cannot wish to assert his own reality or value. For all things in this world from the lily to Job to Leviathan are God-asserted and God-established. And for Job to hold his tongue and be silent in the flood of God’s Being; for Job to repent and rest in the dust before this God is not punishment or degradation, but grace! For there in the dust he is a verifiable, legitimate, God-asserted creature, resting right where he is in a living and wild world. The doors of his yarn-spun world have been thrown off. None of this, of course, is easy to think clearly about. But I have no other way to explain why God’s only words to Job here seem not to comfort the broken, nor punish the self-righteous, but to beckon our imaginations out of our illusions of fatalism, scarcity, and determinism and lead us back into the world searching for sights of the world-maker, monster-tamer, and life-giver. Searching, that is, for a life outside of our tired, sick minds. God gives the cramped, anxious mind air to breathe. That’s not nothing (in fact, it’s something like life).

Look up. Whether wild geese or a poem or a prayer, there’s something beyond the ever-constricting anxiety of your isolation.