Out of Hell's Frying Pan & Into God's Fire

Re-Introducing Myself

When I was twenty-four, I met the author Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down). I had just given up my wealth and left everything and everyone I knew behind (I thought forever). I had gone to live in Tangier as a pauper, a beggar, a destitute soul. It was just something I had to do, man, after having been “left for dead on the road of love” (cf. Don McLean).

I said to Paul Bowles, by way of introduction: “I went looking for adversity, before adversity came looking for me.”

He nodded his head sagely. “Oh,” he said, “if adversity comes looking for you, you’re sunk!”

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Who are the children of Job? We all are.

The book of Job is a book of anomalies, which is why I was drawn to it. This is what one commentator said about it:

“The book of Job as we know it today seems to speak out of both sides of its mouth. Job helps God win a wager by not cursing him, and then comes very close to cursing God. After being challenged by God for speaking without knowledge, Job is vindicated by God for having spoken rightly. To confuse things further, the final outcome of Job’s story looks a lot like that which the friends (condemned for not having spoken rightly) predicted: recant and you will be restored. In the middle of it all, Job speaks with great wisdom about the unattainability of wisdom, a wisdom he otherwise complains of not finding” (The Book of Job: A Biography, by Mark Larrimore, p. 40).

Job’s problem was the problem of suffering without wisdom or understanding, the burning need to identify the source of his pain, to look it in the face and cry: “Why me?!” Non-rhetorically.

The source of Job’s suffering, for those who haven’t read the book, is twofold: the Satan (hassatan, the accuser), behind and before whom, as always, is God.

Job’s children didn’t have Job’s problem, however, not for long. They were sacrificed—murdered—by the Accuser, with God’s approval, as a way to test Job’s faith.

This is a bit like Abraham, told to kill his son, Isaac, as a way to test his faith. (Spoiler: it didn’t happen.) Only in Job’s case, he was neither asked to destroy his children nor consulted about it, so he didn’t even know it was all just God’s way of testing his loyalty.

Initially, he held out. It wasn’t until Hassatan was allowed to get under Job’s skin, literally, and blight him with boils from head to toe, that Job began to question his faith in an all-good God, and cursed the day he was born.

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Thirty-two years after launching into the abyss to seek adversity, my work mapping Hell is finally at an end. Big Mother launches next month (with a dialogue with Nina Power in London, scheduled for Oct 13th), and a post-apocalyptic future of grape-harvesting, bramble-killing, and goat-herding extends ominously before me, even as Satan’s Solid Super-State collapses and/or contracts inexorably around us.

You may ask, since I already have two websites where nothing much happens, why in the name of Heaven start a third? The answer is that, suddenly (after thirty years), there is a change: a new focus and direction, now on what is on the outside of Hell, besides goats and grapes, that is.

You know, God.

I have been questioning why I have needed to seek adversity, one way another, so it didn’t come seeking me; why faith in God (which generally means faith in the Bible, and in words) has never been enough; why, like Job, I need an encounter with God’s dark side to find out what true faith is made of.

More specifically, why were Job’s friends, with their pious platitudes, rejected by God? Why, for all his anger, bitterness, and defiance—and for his willingness to question God’s ways and demand an explanation of them (one he never got)—did Job find favor in God’s sight?

And why, after over ten years’ loyal participation with the spiritual teacher Dave Oshana, did I get kicked out without a graduation ceremony from “the Teachings”? And how come I feel weirdly good about it?[1]

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For Job, to stay loyal to God meant defying all the accepted ideas about “God”—the ones handed down to him by others—and demanding, and finally getting, a direct audience with the Man Himself.[2] By that point, Job had nothing left to lose. And because he stood his ground, his health and his wealth (but not his children, this was before the doctrine of resurrection) were restored to him, twofold.

You could say that Job, like myself, had a dark encounter with enlightenment. And that his piety, his eschewing of evil, meant that evil came looking for him, and that it almost sunk him in the process.

In a counterfeit world, we cannot follow the money to find the truth. All roads built by Rome lead to ruin. But nor can we follow leaders, teachers, or gurus, scripture or substacks.

What if to serve God requires turning away from “God”—from any second-hand testimonials sourced or perceived outside of us? Or perceived at all, perhaps, save through our own felt sense and actions…?

Eschewing evil (or the Satan) is risky business. At best, it presumes a god-like ability to tell good from evil at all times. Can we do that? Or are we only pursuing a personal preference for a particular idea of God and of goodness, allowing only some sides of God, which is to say of Reality, into our awareness, at the exclusion of other, darker but also richer sides?

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What happens to Job (I am going to say) is what happens when we assert an idea of reality over Reality itself. Reality does not like this. In Reality, evil exists; if God isn’t behind it, then where exactly is God when evil happens to us? What is the source of evil, if it is not the same as the source of everything else?

If God is the source of our suffering, do we reject God? Or do we accept suffering?

Job has to face reality. That’s his crisis and opportunity. The rubber of Job’s beliefs about “God” hits the road of the reality of God, and he encounters, darkly, the God of Reality. He might want to say “No way!” But reality says, “Ya, way.”

Job undergoes an objective lesson in the subjectivity of his suffering. How do you like them apples, Job? It is not that Yahweh doesn’t care about his suffering. It is only that Yahweh has a bigger fish on His hook to fry. Our suffering is only a means to God’s ends.

If we aren’t willing to suffer for our good as well as our evil, how can we expect to encounter Reality—much less speak about it?

To be continued. Maybe.

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[1] A teaser, I know. I wasn’t going to mention it, but it slipped out. There’s no need to go into details. This is a new age. Keep in mind that the Dave that can be named isn’t the true Dave.

[2] Jack Miles, in God: A Biography, points out that Yahweh speaking from the whirlwind never identifies himself, and suggests that, with all His bluster, He sounds rather like Satan, as if still acting as a proxy. According to the book of Job, there isn’t much difference anyway.

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