I Curse The Day I Was Born

We can get angry to the point where we want to curse the day we were born, but being held in our anger allows us to go through and not around the pain.

It was about time they got angry.

As the words vomited at me, through me, and around me, I thanked God. Finally, they were letting some of their real self be seen. No more holding back emotions for appearance’s sake. Now it was raw, unfettered, and verbally violent.

It wasn’t just the irritation of the current painful situation. It was the culmination of stuffing down the resentments of a lifetime. It was anger at me, anger at God, and anger at everyone in between.

And I encouraged the outflow. They needed to express themselves and get it out.

Afterward, they would be tired, perhaps ashamed they had been so angry, but they needed to know that it was safe and that even God, full of love, mercy, and grace, can be angry like this yet not lose the mark of love.

Sometimes I am angry like this. I want to throw rocks, punch the wall, and smash things. It’s ok.

Life doesn’t run the way I think it should, so I lose it inside. I rage with a smile on the outside but boiling on the inside. Not good, not healthy when I religiously repress.

What do you do with the pain of being human?

What do you do with emotional pain that entombs you in a dark hole?

I curse the day I was born.

The biblical character of Job is a model of humanness for me. (read more of the Job series here)

He has pain, deep pain. The pain of grief, sadness, illness, mystery – where is God?

This is no prosperity gospel claptrap of ‘every day is sweeter than the day before.’

This is the ‘every day feels darker than the day before.’

The fragile human container vomits out in anger.

Then Job broke the silence. He spoke up and cursed his fate:

Obliterate the day I was born.
Blank out the night I was conceived!
Let it be a black hole in space.

May God above forget it ever happened.
Erase it from the books!

May the day of my birth be buried in deep darkness,
shrouded by the fog,
swallowed by the night.

And the night of my conception—the devil take it!
Rip the date off the calendar,
delete it from the almanac.

Oh, turn that night into pure nothingness—
no sounds of pleasure from that night, ever!

May those who are good at cursing curse that day.

Unleash the sea beast, Leviathan, on it.

May its morning stars turn to black cinders,
waiting for a daylight that never comes,
never once seeing the first light of dawn.

And why? Because it released me from my mother’s womb
into a life with so much trouble. Job 3:1-10 The Message

Breaking the silence

I like how the passage starts with the declaration of Job’ breaking the silence.’

For the previous seven days, he had been sitting shiva. He had been silent with his friends. They had grieved the loss, threw dust in the air, and ripped their clothes.

They had followed the cultural protocol.

It was now time to ‘move on’, supposedly.

But there were still so many unanswered questions—still darkness without light.

Job explodes out of the blocks of the seven-day shiva.

We don’t know if his ‘friends’ were spectators when the firing gun went off, but we know they got involved with his despair.

Most of the book describes their uncomfortableness with the mystery of what was happening to Job. They break the silence, too, whereas they could have kept silent and let God and Job wrestle it out.

Uncreate the day

I think Job wanted a time machine. Don’t we all, at times? We want to go back to a previous moment and alter, adjust, fix, change, and tinker with decisions made by ourselves and others?

Essentially I think Job is saying this.

‘You’ve made a big mistake God. Can you please rewind the clock? Go back and eliminate that day when I was born. Perhaps even further back to when I was conceived? The love from which I was formed was in error. They got it wrong. You got it wrong. You were in error when knitting me together in my mother’s womb. I’m not wonderfully and fearfully made. I’m wonderfully and fearfully flawed.’

Its pain. Deep raw emotional pain spilling out through the lips.

It’s also beautiful, poetic imagery, not to be read with logical theoretical interpretations but with the compassionate solidarity of shared humanity.

I don’t want the pain of the now, so uncreate the journey that brought me here.

Being human can be hard. But bottling it up can make our humanness intolerable.

How do we curse the day – safely?

I often want to say these words to others and perhaps hear the exact words echo back.

I won’t think less of you if you let the verbal vomit flow.

There is compassion for your humanness because, at last, I have found a fellow brother or sister to share the bread of a broken world.

You have found a safe place for the pain and anger to flow.

Non-judgmental people are hard to find.

People who will not be like Jobs’ friends’ but ones who will be able to hold the rawness and allow it to take shape, whatever shape it is meant to be.

Instead, they seem to want to defend God, their beliefs, or their religious upbringing.

Pain holders don’t F.A.S.S. – Fix, Advise, Save, or Set straight.

They hold it and you. They know compassion because they are as lost to knowing what to do as you are. You are held in the mystery because they have walked in dark valleys too.

Yes, do these physical things.

Journal out the words you want to speak. Vomit the verbs onto the page.
Paint and draw your emotions.
Smash glass Smash therapy
Hit golf balls at the driving range
Punch a punching bag

But I pray you will find at least one person that can hold you physically and emotionally because tears may well flow on the other side of rage.

You are still contained within God’s love, mercy and grace even though you may rage at the seeming injustice of the life you are experiencing. This is Job’s human story. In the final chapters of his book, we find him coming out to the other side of this mystery.

Being with someone is highly dangerous. It might just change you.

In our broken world life we can get angry to the point where we want to curse the day we were born. But being held in our anger allows us to go through and not around the pain.

Questions?
Comments?
Email me 🙂📨
barry@turningthepage.co.nz

Quotes to consider

Have You Anything to Say in Your Defense?

Well, on the day I was born,
God was sick.

They all know that I’m alive,
that I’m vicious; and they don’t know
the December that follows from that January.
Well, on the day I was born,
God was sick.

There is an empty place
in my metaphysical shape
that no one can reach:
a cloister of silence
that spoke with the fire of its voice muffled.

On the day I was born,
God was sick.

Brother, listen to me, Listen . . .
oh, all right. Don’t worry, I won’t leave
without taking my Decembers along,
without leaving my Januaries behind.
Well, on the day I was born,
God was sick.

They all know that I’m alive,
that I chew my food . . . and they don’t know
why harsh winds whistle in my poems,
the narrow uneasiness of a coffin,
winds untangled from the Sphinx
who holds the desert for routine questioning.

Yes, they all know . . . Well, they don’t know
that the light gets skinny
and the darkness gets bloated . . .
And they don’t know that the Mystery joins things together . . .
that he is the hunchback
musical and sad who stands a little way off and foretells
the dazzling progression from the limits to the Limits.

On the day I was born,
God was sick,
gravely.

César Vallejo (1892-1938) (tr. James Wright, 1971)

It’s obvious Job is not an Anglo-Saxon. He’s not afraid to feel his feelings. He acts and speaks them out. So Job may have all kinds of ulcers on the outside, but he’s not likely to get them on the inside, as we tend to do. Emotions ought to be allowed to run their course. Emotions are not right or wrong; they have no moral meaning. One does not go to confession to confess having emotions, no matter how negative they are. They are merely indicators of what is happening. People who do not feel deeply finally do not know deeply either. Richard Rohr
Job curses the day of his birth. He does not curse God, but he does complain about God. He experiences his suffering as an abandonment by God. Gustavo Gutierrez. On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent
The fact is, there is a point at which any man simply throws in the towel. He does not abandon his faith, necessarily; he just gets thoroughly sick and tired of trying to put a good face on things, when the things he is facing do not have anything good about them at all. This is not sin; it is just plain honesty. It is calling a spade a spade. Mike Mason. The Gospel According to Job: An Honest Look at Pain and Doubt from the Life of One Who Lost Everything
An embrace involves always a double movement of opening and closing. I open my arms to create space in myself for the other. The open arms are a sign of discontent at being myself only and of desire to include the other. They are an invitation to the others to come in and feel at home with me, to belong to me. In an embrace, I also close my arms around the others – not tightly, so as to crush and assimilate them forcefully into myself, for that would not be an embrace but a concealed power-act of exclusion; but gently, so as to tell them that I do not want to be without them in their otherness. I want them in their openness. I want them to remain independent and true to their genuine selves, to maintain their identity and as such become part of me so that they can enrich me with what they have and I do not’ Judith M Gundry-Volf, Miroslav Volf
He’s saying: Uncreate that day. Make it not a day of light, but darkness. Let clouds hang over it, eclipse swoop down on it.
Where God in Genesis says, “Let there be light,” Job now says, “Let there be darkness.” The day of uncreation, of anticreation.
You probably have to have experienced true depression or betrayal to understand such a feeling. Richard Rohr Job and the Mystery of Suffering.